My Log 415 March 15 2014: Tony Benn dies in England: brilliant orator, firebrand radical, true heart of the original British Labour Party

English: Meeting in London against identification cards in the UK, on 2 July 2005. From left to right Tony Benn, Shami Chakrabarti, ?, George Galloway (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

James Keir Hardie was an early democratic socialist, who founded the Independent Labour Party in Great Britain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Plaque recording the location of the formation of the British Labour Party in 1900. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Portrait Picture of Tony Benn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The British left-wing leader Tony Benn who began life as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, then was elevated to become Viscount Wedgwood when he inherited a peerage granted to his father, and who renounced the peerage and actually changed these matters for ever in Britain by successfully arguing his right to renounce his peerage through a complex and somewhat antiquated legal system, has died at the age of 88.

His death has evoked an outpouring of tributes to a man whom many regarded as the last of a dying breed, a man who knew what he stood for, and who had mastered brilliantly the art of telling people exactly what it was.

I spent eight years of my life writing about politics in Britain, and at one point in the 1960s I was commissioned by The Sunday Times --- at that time one of the best newspapers in the English-speaking world --- to write a profile of this controversial politician.

So I met him several times, interviewed him at some length, and talked to others who were friends and political enemies, and from it all I developed an intense admiration for a man who always stood on the side of the poor and disadvantaged and who was so positive in nature that he instilled hope in hundreds of thousands of people --- as is evident from the many ordinary people who have written to newspapers expressing their admiration for him over this weekend.

When I wrote my profile he was already being treated by the right-wing as a leader of what they called “the loony left” --- a habit that grew in succeeding generations, as he watched his beloved Labour Party basically turned into something else, a different party espousing different, more right-wing ideas, when it was taken over by Tony Blair, a man whom he along with many others never considered to be a left-wing leader.

At the time he was just approaching a peak  in the role consigned to him by the establishment, that of a half crazy believer in the outmoded --- as they saw it --- doctrine of socialism, the very doctrines that had stimulated the formation of the Labour Party by the British trades union movement at the beginning of the last century.

On the right there was a similar bogeyman, Enoch Powell, whose warnings against the impact of colored immigration into Britain were already resounding among people of that ilk. But Powell was a considerable man, an intellectual not to be brushed aside lightly, and he had been a friend of Benn when they were both members of the House of Commons.

Enoch Powell told me: “He is the greatest master in Britain of the ethical sermon” --- a verdict so demonstrably right on the mark as to be almost astonishing.

Benn told me: “I have always thought that the accession to power of a Labour government in Britain should be as much as possible like Castro marching into Havana”. A quote that encapsulates his enthusiastic radicalism, his slightly naïve optimism, and his determination to be to the left of everyone else.

As part of my research for the piece I read most of the transcripts of he case he argued in court for the renunciation of his peerage  He and others told me he had an unusual method: he seldom read books, and depended on people in his support team to read them and tell him the salient points. Thus, he had not read the actual ancient legal rulings relevant to the cause he was defending; but his supporters in a neighbouring room were keeping up with the argument, and were feeding him information that was likely to be of use to him as the argument unfolded. So, when one of the ancient judges would interrupt him, as they did on an average every ten minutes or so over several days asking him about all sorts of abstruse legal points --- for example, if the point he was making was not superceded by some ruling from, say, 1642, Benn would be able to come back by saying, “That may be very true My Lord, but was not that judgment itself modified by a later ruling delivered in 1723 (or thereabouts.)”  This extraordinary mental agility was at once his greatest strength, and possibly one of his major weaknesses, My theory was that it meant for example, that newspapermen of Fleet Street as it was then, found Benn hard to warm to simply because he was demonstrably cleverer than they were, quicker on his feet as it were, and ready always with a devastating rebuttal to any of their criticisms.  One thing I learned about journalists during my life among them was that they can be quite resentful of people who are cleverer than they are, and I believed that explained a good deal of the bad press that Benn normally attracted

He really believed, when he was elevated to a minor position in the first Wilson government --- it was Postmaster general --- that Labour should be carrying through a veritable revolution in thinking about government and how it related to the people of Britain. He told me, for example, that when the government declared a boycott of the white-supremacist, illegal government of Southern Rhodesia headed by Ian Smith, that really meant they should have no official dealings with that government, Yet one day, across his desk came some document proposing business-as-usual between the two governments. He stopped it right there. He could not approve it because it violated the declared objective of the government of which he was a member.

It was this aspect of the man,  that he meant what he said, that is the characteristic most commented upon by people who have written to the newspapers since his death.

The other admirable thing about him was the clarity and forcefulness with which he expressed himself: as one might gather from Enoch Powell’s description, he was a wonderful speaker, and it is this, again, that hundreds of people have paid tribute to this weekend: he could express himself with such clarity, his oratory was so persuasive that it is clear from the hundreds of letters I have read that ordinary people felt inspired by him, by the strength of his convictions, and the hopefulness with which he always left his audiences.

Although when his political career began 60 years ago he was an ordinary, moderate MP, as he developed his oratorical skills and began to understand his place in British politics, he became more and more radical.

Several people have recalled that he had offered five questions he said should be asked of any person of great power, whether /\Stalin,  Rupert Murdoch, Margaret Thatcher or anyone else.

1. What power have you got?

2. Where did you get it from?

3. In whose interest do you exercise it?

4. To whom are you accountable?

 5. How can we get rid of you?

Anyone who could not answer the last of these questions, he said, could lay no claim to being a democrat.

My Log 414 March 11 2014: Am I a drunk monkey? The problem in Israel is almost unrelievedly depressing

Boycott Israel-poster (Photo credit: Creap)

Palestine Cemetery (Photo credit: NatalieMaynor)

Open-air market in city being patrolled by Israeli troops (2004). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Juliano Mer Khamis, executed head of Jenin theatre school (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Talk about sad! And depressing!  I had scarcely stopped reflecting on the sad spectacle I wrote about yesterday of watching a former Israeli foreign minister, who seemed to be a reasonable and decent man,  painfully trying to reconcile the Zionism of which he said he is an “ardent” defender, with the liberal political principles he also espouses, before I was again plunged into the maelstrom of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio, thanks to a screening last night of an excellent film called Fragments of Palestine  by Cinema Politica Concordia.

Ezra Winton, who moderated the screening, said in introduction that they tried to screen a film every year about Palestine, and this one was slightly more hopeful than the earlier ones.

If this is hopeful, I am a drunk monkey. Of course, if you are a glass-half-full kind of guy, there were some hopeful things to be taken out of the film.  But the previous night I had heard Avi Shlaim, an Oxford historian who once served in the Israeli Defence Force, memorably describe the present Israeli Prime Minister as a man who is negotiating the division of a pizza but who keeps eating it. And this film is about what is happening on the ground  while this farcical negotiation is proceeding as it has done for decades, and Netanyahu keeps eating the land without anyone in the international community --- read, especially the United States --- ever trying to stop him in mid-bite, as it were.

Even the former Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, had to admit that the  state of Israel, which still claims to be a democracy within its original borders, lost its international credibility after the 1967 war when “it became a colonial power ruling over a captive population.”

This is the elephant in the room in all discussions about Israel and its neighbours, and last night’s film, beautifully shot and edited by a young German woman named Marie Caspari and her crew, is a detailed description of this colonial situation (to use the word used by Ben Ami).

The film is based mostly on a small town of 1800 inhabitants on the West Bank, Bil’in. It tells the story of three people either directly or peripherally engaged in the countless demonstrations of resident protest  against the Israeli separation wall, which ran through Bil’in’s lands, and against the route of which the residents won court victories first at the International Court of Justice, and then at the Israeli Supreme Court. In this latter judgment, the Israeli government was ordered to move the wall off the Bil’in lands --- a judgment made in 2007, but not executed until 2011. Ms. Caspari’s film was made during that interregnum.

She tells her story through three interlocutors, each of whom has a story of great interest. One, whom she came across by accident, is an 18-year-old English boy, Jody McIntyre, who is wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis, but who has come to Bil’in with the intention of helping the villagers in their struggle for justice from the Israeli occupation.  The film shows that the Israeli troops arrive in the middle of the night, heavily armed, to arrest people, their focus being on young boys who have thrown stones at them. “ I am not here just to observe something like the UN observers or the hundreds of thousands of NGO's that they have in Palestine to observe the situation,” says Jody. “I want to make a difference. If it is a Palestinian boy or me going to jail I would rather I went to jail because I come out in a day. They will go to jail for six months and no one knows where they are and they are just children mainly. It is hard if it is a hundred soldiers and just a couple of activists, but still we have to try."

The on-the-spot footage leaves no doubt at to the nature of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank: it is a fully armed, total military occupation which keeps everyone living there under complete control.

The second story is that of a 27-year-old former fighter, Rabea Turkman, who spent seven years as a member of an armed resistance group. He said, in the film, that it did not matter if the Israelis arrested every villager, the resistance would go on. It would never stop. But when a truce was made by the political leaders, and his group laid down its arms, he was promised amnesty if he would stay for three months in the Israeli Palestinian Security Compound. This promise was betrayed, he said, because he had to stay there for two years. Even when released he was not allowed to travel out of the confines of the security apparatus enforced with Israeli checkpoints, and at that time he joined a theatre group managed by a man called Juliano Mer Khamis, who promised they would give performances not only in Jenin, but abroad in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. Rabea was not permitted to go on these trips, but he had found in Juliano an inspirational leader who gave a new focus to his life.  Just as he had come to accept the theatre group leader as a sort of substitute-father, someone pumped seven bullets into the man, killing him instantly.

These are the brutal facts of life for young people living under this harsh occupation. And the third story is perhaps even more remarkable, that of Maya Yecheli Wind, an Israeli girl of 18 who was born in Jerusalem, and at a conservative Jewish school was brought up to believe all the clichés about the Arabs, how they viscerally hate Jews, want to drive them into the sea, and so on, She lived through the second Palestinian intifada in Jerusalem, so that death became a part of her life. She began to realize she had never met an Arab, had no idea of their reality, and joined a discussion group for Jewish and Arab girls. Meeting Arab girls for the first time turned her world upside down. When she began to argue among her friends from a different point of view, she was called an Arab hugger, and a self-hating Jew. Eventualy she decided she could not join the Israeli army and take part in the occupation, and, when inducted, she refused to follow the first order given her. She served 42 days in jail, and on release went to work as a tour guide for an Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and became a fighter for peaceful co-existence between Jew and Arab.

In the film, in an extensive interview, she tells of how adopting these views had resulted in her losing any position she might have expected within Israeli society: it was hard, she said,“I am nobody I have lost so much.”

Between outlining these three stories, the film shows other dramatic footage of the demolition of Arab homes by bulldozer, while their inhabitants stand by and watch --- a heart-breaking sequence. Every Friday the people of Bil’in go towards the separation wall to protest against its very existence, and they can expect to be repulsed with tear gas and rubber bullets, One of their number was killed by being hit in the chest with a high-velocity tear-gas canister. Over the years 28 of their people have been killed in these skirmishes.

A trailer shown at the end of the film says Maya had moved to New York for further education --- something that of course, Arab counterparts of hers could not do --- and intended to return to continue to take part in the resistance to the brutal occupation.

Though there were positive elements in these stories, the overall impression left with me was of a monolithic, brutal army of occuation that is not interested in making any kind of concession to the people over whom it rules. The parallel that is now more and more often drawn with South Africa during the apartheid days seems more and more relevant.  There, as here, the regime seemed to be in power for ever; but somehow it was undermined, mainly by the international campaign of boycott allied to an internal resistance which finally brought it home to South Africans that they had become the polecat of the modern world.

Could something similar happen in Israel?  The chances appear to be slight, although, if one takes a long, long view, Israel obviously cannot continue on its present course indefinitely ---- eventually something has to give.

I am reminded of what Diana Buttu, the Canadian who is now a supporter of opposition to the occupation, speaking on the AlJazeera show I saw on Sunday night.  “The single state already exists.  The problem now is apartheid.” In other words, the unequal treatment accorded Arabs who are under the control of Israel, whether inside the original borders or in the West Bank.

My Log 413 March 9 2014: A decent man struggles to defend the indefensible: a vigorous and enlightening discussion about Israel

David Ben-Gurion (First Prime Minister of Israel) publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the State of Israel, May 14 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel, beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, in the old Tel Aviv Museum of Art building on Rothshild St. The exhibit hall and the scroll, which was not yet finished, were prepared by Otte Wallish. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of Israel, the Palestinian territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip), the Golan Heights, and portions of neighbouring countries. Also United Nations deployment areas in countries adjoining Israel or Israeli-held territory, as of January 2004. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

State Department Telegram to Diplomats and Consulates on the de facto recognition of Israel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Flag of Israel with the Mediterranean sea in the background, in Rishon LeZion.(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Shlomo Ben Ami (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I watched what seemed to me rather a sad event the other night, on AlJazeera TV, when  a former Foreign Minister of Israel, Shlomo Ben Ami, bravely confronted an audience at Oxford University as he tried to reconcile the principles of Zionism, of which he said he was an ardent follower, with the liberal political principles he normally espouses.

I say it was sad because Mr. Ben Ami is to all appearances a reasonable and decent man, and it was almost like blood sports to watch him desperately trying to reconcile himself argumentatively to the reality of Zionism as it is practised in Israel today. To a detached observer, he seemed to be trying to defend an indefensible case: and his problem was that he had to admit the indefensible aspects of his case.

It was part of a programme called Head to Head in which a well-known British journalist  Mehdi Hasan, grills people with usually controversial views for the better part of an hour.  The previous such programme I saw featured the Egyptian-American feminist Mona Eltahawy, who launched into a spirited attack on the position of women in Islamic societies. Great to watch, and certainly unusual, and I found it encouraging and salutary to hear such views being expressed in a field of opinion that normally is somewhat monolithic and beyond discussion.

For his Ben Ami interview Hasan had a back-up panel comprised of Paul Charney, a solicitor who heads the Zionist Federation of Britain and Ireland and who presented himself as an “Israel-right-or-wrong” sort of guy; Avi Shlaim,  Iraqi-born emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford, and one of the  group known as the “new historians” who have broken with the orthodox view of the history of Israel; and the Canadian-born Palestinian lawyer and activist Diana Buttu, formerly an adviser to the PLO, and now a much-sought-after expert on Palestinian affairs by liberal-leaning Western think tanks. I remember with delight an occasion on which Ms.Buttu visited Canada and was granted an interview with Peter Mansbridge. As Mansbridge trotted out all the worn cliches of the Western position on the Palestinians, Ms. Buttu, ever so politely, but firmly, chewed him up and spat him out before our eyes.

Hasan asked Ami right off the top how he could reconcile his liberalism with his advocacy of a doctrine, Zionism, which “at its core fundamentally privileges one ethnic group, presumably at the expense of another ethnic group.”

Ben Ami’s reply was that there were special circumstances in the foundation of Israel that had to be taken into account. But, generally, the nation had great international credibility after its foundation in 1948, and he personally would have preferred if they had made an agreement with the Palestinians at that time so that both sides, living side-by-side could get on with their lives.

“I agree there is a fundamental anomaly in the creation of the state of Israel,” Ben Ami said, “but I believe with enlightened leadership it should be possible to square the circle.” He said that before the 1967 war Israel was already a viable state in the Middle East, with international legitimacy, but it lost that legitimacy when it became a colonial power ruling over a captive population. To Hasan’s suggestion that for Israel to claim to be a Jewish state, and a democracy,  was an oxymoron, Ben Ami replied: “No, it is not an oxymoron. It could be a Jewish state in which the majority is fully and unconditionally respectful of the minority.” He said not only Israel, but many nations, in fact, most nations, were born in blood. The difference in the case of Israel is that it took place in the age of mass media.

Shlaim, responding to the same line of questioning, said Zionism and liberalism, per se were not in contradiction, not necessarily. Ami belonged to the most liberal stand of Zionism, a small group. “Zionism has never been liberal, but the gap between the theory of the rule of law, and the way Zionism has treated the Palestinians has always been so huge that it has been filled with hypocrisy and humbug.”

Ben Ami said the Palestinian population of Israel was equal in law to the Jewish population, but “history offered different options.” Challenged to deny that Israel was founded on an act of ethnic cleansing, he said, “there were elements of ethnic cleansing, but I do not believe it was according to a master plan.” When Hasan asked how many Palestinians would be acceptable as citizens of Israel, he reluctantly agreed that 51 per cent might be okay, but added  Israel had to remain the homeland of the Jewish people, and asked if a Palestinian could become Prime Minister of Israel he said, “history will tell.” Diana Buttu nodded a negative to that question.

One can see this is a difficult --- indeed, I would think, impossible --- case to argue convincingly. Shlaim contested Ben Ami’s assertion that Israel was becoming less and less discriminatory. “The present Prime Minister embraces a policy that is right-wing, xenophobic, exclusionary and racist, and it is still called Zionism,” he said.  He added: “He is like a man who wants to negotiate the division of a pizza, but he keeps on eating.”

Buttu, who has Israeli citizenship, as do her parents,  said that her parents had never been allowed to visit their home, just because they are not Jewish.  “Israel’s position is that they take the land, claim it as their own, and then make concessions about the land as if it belonged to them.” Asked by a member of the audience why Palestinians should not call on outsiders to divest themselves of Israeli investments, and impose sanctions on Israel, Buttu said she supports the call for sanctions, because “it is the only way Israel is going to get the message that it is not above the law.”

Ben Ami said that in the negotiations in which he had played a leading part at  Camp David and after, they had come very close to obtaining an agreement. But Arafat was not willing to settle with a government that was heading into an election, and the chance was lost. At one point they had agreed to accept 100,000 returning Palestiians. “Today, that would be like an immense offer,” he said

“I do not see any Israeli government  in the foreseeable future that is likely to meet the requirements of the Palestinians. I am not extremely hopeful of any solution for a two-state solution. Any solution is likely only if there is an element of imposition. Neither side is going to get everything it wants. The present Israeli Prime Minister is obsessed with achieving absolute security, which is a goal impossible to implement, and I am afraid Israel is condemned to perdition if it does no reach a solution of two states living side-by-side.” Shlaim, for his part, said the two-state solution “is as dead as the dodo. And Israeli governments destroyed the two-state solution—systematically destroyed the basis for a viable Palestinian state.”

Part of the sadness of this occasion came not only from watching this decent man struggling to make sense of a senseless situation, but also from one’s own memory of the high hopes held for Israel when it was founded and for many years thereafter, when the Jewish-led state was held up as the place that was making the desert bloom.

This may have been a false image, to a certain extent. The Arab inhabitants had lived there for generations and had worked the land successfully. But that image certainly was a more positive one than the recent images of Israeli bulldozers knocking over ancient olive trees that  provided the livelihood for the Arabs, of the smashing of simple Arab houses to make way for Jewish apartment blocks, and of endless restrictions imposed on Arabs by the Jewish army, including the construction of roads on which only Jews are allowed to travel.

Diana Buttu summed up what does seem to be the situation in Palestine now: “there already is one state,” she said, “it already exists. The problem now is apartheid.”

How sad!