The Comment Factory

My position on Israel-Palestine, if I were forced to take one, is of a sort of neutral hopelessness. Such is the extent of my existentialism, I am tempted not to write anything at all. Fuck it, I should probably say.

But, finally, having to-d and fro-d several times, it was yet another visit to Facebook that persuaded me that to the spitting, screaming outrage on both sides, the oft overlooked attitude of the shrugged shoulders, up-turned palms and raised eyebrows should be added.

The formation of states is a messy, brutal business. Always has been, always will be. The progression from hunter-gatherers to tribe to chiefdom to state involves violence and, to keep this relevant, ethnic cleansing. For 471 pages on this please turn to “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. It’s a best seller so many of you may already have done.

We don’t have to dig too deeply into history to illustrate the gruesome process of state establishment ourselves, and let us start, because they are the lands of my birth and my current residence, with Britain and the United States of America.

England, as nationalists and schoolboy textbooks proudly point out, has not been invaded successfully since 1066. And, for that invasion, the French, as they eventually became known, paid dearly. The Hundred Years War (how long has this one been going on for?), beginning in 1337, saw incursion after incursion of English armies into France. Some of the nation’s most famous and celebrated victories – Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt – took place on French soil. There were atrocities aplenty! I can just imagine John Pilger’s glee had he been alive at the time and able to chronicle his complaints against the official tactics of the English: steal all they could from the land and then burn the ground they left behind. This scorched earth policy worked very well against the petrified peasants of Brittany and Aquitaine, and of course there was the sort of murder, butchery, raping and pillaging that would make a Baathist blush. Incidentally it was Edward III, England’s King at the start of the war, who was keen to introduce a cult of “Chivalry.”

Eventually, after what turned out to be 116 years, and after Joan of Arc had been burnt at the stake for all her troubles (not that I want to give Hamas any ideas), the English and French borders settled into roughly the position they occupy now and, incidentally, a remarkably similar one to that in 1336. Israel was founded in 1948, so let’s see what things look like in 2064. If I were George Orwell, I’d write a book about it.

To England’s north were the fiercely independent Scots, who hated their oppressive neighbors and deeply resented any attempt at feudality. To demonstrate their anger they put on skirts (I don’t think Hamas will get any ideas) and raided the northern towns of England such as (old) York. As a punishment — and how’s this for disproportionate? — Edward I sent in an army of 28,700 to crush poor William Wallace and 6,000 others. Cue murder, butchery etc, we’ve all seen the film. Nothing was really achieved by either side and Scottish resentment lasts until this day when at least the power struggle is fought by politicians (the Scots take English taxpayers’ money, so perhaps the resistance was worth it.)

Now on to America, about which I know less. What I do know is that the “civilized” white man wiped out almost entirely the Native Indians using Guns, Germs and Steel. Call it ethnic cleansing, call it a Holocaust, call it what you want, but there certainly aren’t many of them left. This part of history is all but erased from the glory that creeps on to the faces of Americans when they talk about the foundation of their Land of the Brave (did someone say Braves?) and they prefer to focus, as I well know, on the expulsion of the British (without the French this would not have happened). The Red Coats were fair game but the Indians with their bows and arrows? Hell, it’s like using a force of F-16 fighter jets against a rabble of bazooka-wielding adolescents without so much as a tea towel to hide behind.

History has a funny way of burying the worst of things, perhaps because it is largely written by the victors. In essence, this is what Zionism is about and what many Israelis are afraid of: that the Holocaust, having been revised and re-revised, will eventually be forgotten. Over 10,000 Frenchmen died at Agincourt — hundreds and thousands of others as a direct result of combat in those 116 years (the plague killed just about everyone else) — yet that battle is remembered for a line that some bald man wrote about tennis balls.

Please forgive my flippancy. I know that I can only write this article from the position of privileged comfort within which I live and have always lived. This is not my fault, of course, although I certainly have no desire to smuggle myself into Gaza and record the actual events in my bullet-riddled notepad. If I had lived 700 years ago I would be in a better position to empathise with the Palestinians and the Israelis, but, as it is, I just hope that things settle down sooner rather than later.

Bonne chance.