[Note: It may be useful to note that I have a bit of a grievance in this subject area. I have wrestled with it for nearly a quarter of a century and I am not sure whether I am more flummoxed that "my side" of the argument is under-reported or that my own contribution has been.]  

The poverty of our national climate debate has always been striking. It is mostly stuck in a sterile discussion about science and refuses seriously to engage in morality or policy. It is also hung-up on starkly opposed “camps”, rather than about insights.

As Roger Harrabin’s work suggests, and this show emphasised, the problem does indeed involve scientific uncertainty. But he – typically of most environment specialists - has never been very good at discussing the problem of discerning the real-world impacts of whatever changes to the climate mankind is assumed to be making. And, much worse, he and they have never been awfully good at discussing the huge problem of responding politically and economically to these multiple uncertainties. 

Mr Harrabin says that he agonised over the journalistic proprieties of reporting the scientifc uncertainties surrounding climate change. He realised that it was problematic to accord as much “weight” to climate change science “deniers” as to mainstream climate change “alarmists”, though the BBC, like all media outlets found the confrontations attractive and even dialectically useful.

However, in everything he said until a year or so ago, I took it that he was in the mainstream camp in thinking that climate change was likely to be disastrous and that it was obvious any progress toward international treaties to reduce mankind’s carbon footprint was morally good and any impediments were bad.

This latest programme sounded to me like a formal statement of a slight but significant retrenchment by Mr Harrabin. In it, he noted that it was less certain now in what degree climate change would be disastrous. He noted a stand-up row he had with Al Gore when as a diligent reporter he challenged the ex-vice president and alarmist cheerleader over some assertions in the latter’s An Inconvenient Truth.

In short, this programme seemed like a careful statement of Mr Harrabin’s having become more sceptical than he once was, but without admitting any major change of position. It’s as though he can now put a little distance between himself and the mainstream scientists. Not as to their science, but as to their naive enthusiasm not to undersell their anxiety that the world was going to hell in a handcart, and their willingness to assume that it was obvious what to do next.

He did not discuss his seeming acceptance of the view that almost any steps to make the rise less likely made obvious sense and would be acceptable to the world’s publics if only politicians would make it so; and – crucially – that any voices to the contrary were nefarious and industry-funded.

It is indeed problematic for journalists that there are few people who clearly state that (a) that climate change may be quite bad or worse and that (b) it may not be worth trying to stop and/or (c) that even if we ought to respond mightily we will probably respond weakly (at least for now). Bjorn Lomborg comes the nearest to articulating the point, and is usually misrepresented as not accepting the mainstream alarmism. Yet this is I think the tacit and unspoken real view of very many serious people. It is mine.

Even Mike Hulme on the Today programme this morning seemed to stick to the weaker of the positions I think he holds. He usefully remarked that more or less scientific certainty was no longer the point. Political will is. This matters because almost everyone still frames the debate as one about scientific uncertainty. (But Mike Hulme spoke as though useful action against climate change was morally desirable and even politically feasible, though I have read him elsewhere saying that it might not be. [See here and here.)

Mainstream broadcasters like Mr Harrabin have always been next to useless about the human, economic, political and sociological outcomes which flow from the belief that mankind is warming the world with consequences which are extraordinarily hard to predict. I think that is why they shelter in the endless and sterile “deniers vs alarmist” debate.  

We’ll see what happens next week, as Roger Harrabin discusses the vastly over-blown Climategate and its supposed consequences. So far, Mr Harrabin has been at pains to display his credentials as a non-partisan, intelligent and diligent reporter of the state of the scientific debate. He has shaded in a slight sense of his increasing deployment of a pinch of salt. He has given us no sense that he thinks he was ever wrong about the terms in which he and his organisation discussed the climate change policy dilemmas.

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An Ordinary Soldier
Doug Beattie
Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books
2008

Doug Beattie’s An Ordinary Soldier is a very satisfactory book. It’ll hold its own as an account of British soldiery, or of the present Afghan war, or as a thriller, or a war novel. It’s on a par with James Newton’s Armed Action (about Iraq), Frederick Forsyth’s The Afghan, or even Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards. It is also a good working class Ulster memoir, including the way Beattie becomes an officer in the Royal Irish Regiment.  Indeed, everything in the book is a precursor to his exploits as a Captain leading Afghans (dozens) and Brits (a handful) in Helmand in 2006. And even that is a precursor to an unspoken sequel: we are left looking forward to his next book, if it ever comes. [It did come, in the form of  Task Force Helmand.] I don’t know how much the writing owes to Beattie’s ghost, Philip Gomm. It doesn’t matter, since (though it’s impossible to be sure) I don’t think there’s an inauthentic breath in the book.

At the heart of the story is Doug Beattie MC aiming to take Garmsir from the Taliban in 2006. More than can be quite true he presents himself as an awkward-squad character, devoted to action, not obviously a person to fit in, fond of his wife and family, at 40 beginning to get on a bit, hugely experienced. He affects to be a blunderer and rather thick. He does indeed cock-up a fair bit, and is unsparing about it. I imagine he’s daft like a fox. Even on one of his bad days you’d be glad to see him coming over the hill to sort things out, provided he’d decided he was on your side.

Indeed, Doug Beattie seems to have a modern version of an old ambivalence.  Here’s an important passage:

“In Afghanistan I wasn’t really fighting for Queen and country. I was there for my regiment, for my colleagues, for my friends. And increasingly, despite the difficulties and general wariness, some of the Afghans had become my friends.”

He goes on to argue that it would not be good to leave the country until the allies have fulfilled their obligation to settle what they’d started. My impression is that now we have thoughtful and argumentative soldiers, commanding their loyalty will become much more complicated. Not least, we are going get stroppier soldiers who speak their mind, as Beattie says he did to a TV reporter in Helmand. It perhaps goes without saying, however, that Beattie is bowled over when it’s his turn to face the Queen in Buckingham Palace.

He comes from doughty, but ordinarily troubled, Protestant stock who are given to occasional explosions but not much emoting. His father and two brothers joined the Army, and he signs up for their regiment as an acknowledged family member. We are given snapshots or vignettes. He has a brutal training period (away from the Irish), which probably helped him become a more sensitive leader (not that he bangs on about girlie stuff). He has time in Germany (guarding Rudolph Hess is a weird highlight) and the Balkans. There is little sign of a remarkable career in the making.

Almost without warning, we find he has risen to the heights of Company Sergeant Major and then Regimental Sergeant Major. These were always curious roles, though Beattie is reticent about it. My understanding of an RSM is that he is the bosses’ bailiff and enforcer but also the men’s representative. Any RSM is definitely very senior, and hovers in a peculiar social dimension, defiantly neither fish nor fowl but definitely red meat. Anyway, this is in Iraq. His colonel (we suddenly find) is Tim Collins, and it is RSM Beattie who has to try and get the blokes back on their feet after Collins delivers perhaps the best military speech since one of Churchill’s. It’s a wonderful piece of oratory, and ideal for Radio 4 and The Times. One has the impression that Beattie adores Collins, but thinks the regiment was rather floored by these ambiguous and indeed frightening strictures.

And then we’re in Afghanistan and the kernel of the book. Captain Beattie is working as an adviser to the Afghanistan police. He has a handful of close British army comrades (not often known to him days before), and they are essentially on their own in a peculiar environment, with Beattie having a peculiar command role, often miles from British military support of any kind. Or rather, out in the sticks with air support as the cavalry. One way or another, Beattie’s role is amazingly freelance, lonely, and bloody. I imagine a lot of modern warfare is like this. People who never thought it likely, are asked to behave as elite troops with an extraordinary degree of independence, ambiguity, and close-quarter fighting followed by weird negotiations, sometimes with (say) Afghans and sometimes with one’s own superiors.

Beattie rises to these extraordinary challenges but never shakes off his constant companion: guilt that he has failed people.

Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King comes close.  And maybe even the 1999 movie, Three Kings.

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The Real Inspector Hound and The Criticwere marvellously-matched (plays-within-plays mocking critics, who blundered into the action). They are very lovable pieces: affectionate toward all parties, even the critics, but especially the showfolk. They were also wonderfully done. You expect Nicholas Le Provost to have got his chops round high-speed language, but plenty of the others had too. Joe Dixon and Sean Foley might have been in a contest for the country’s best physical comic, each as spectacular in both plays as you could possibly hope for.

It is late in the run, and we saw the pieces on the evening of a matinee day. Perhaps that excuses the way some of the actors had slightly lost their grip on the awesome feats of memory required. Richard McCabe never lost his words, and was powerful and compelling as the neglected critic Moon in the Stoppard, but in the Sheridan, his Puff sometimes slightly ran out of it.

The oddity, though, is that the very perfectionism – the extraordinary levels of skill of every sort now required of actors and productions – left these shows, and perhaps especially the Sheridan, a little cold. Because they were so canny and deft, they were also a little shy of the imperfections which make theatre human, and which were the subject of the plays. Una Stubbs was a comfort, and so was Derek Griffiths, perhaps precisely because they were more obviously troupers.

A curious sign of this problem might be the last scene of the Sheridan. It became a tour de force of circus instead of a fond reflection on over-ambitious finales. I picked up a copy yesterday in the Petersfield Bookshop after an excellent affordable lunch at La Piazetta. The business required by Sheridan could have been purveyed better by an am-dram group.

I hope you won’t take me wrong. I’d go back and see these shows anytime and know that this was breath-taking stuff.

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I love Bruce Willis, always have, though I am not good at him doing interiority. I prefer the hard-bitten, misunderstood action man. In this extraordinary movie, he’s brilliant as a robot and then as the robot’s human half (they’ve both got hints of chip). Rosamund Pike does what a brilliant blonde Brit actress should do: leaves all pretention at the studio door.

I may come back to it, but for now it’s worth noting all the things this movie has.

(1) Gray and caramel fudginess

(2) Matt Damon’s “Paranoia Aesthetic”

(3) Corporate malfeasance

(4) Emotionally crippled hero

(4) Gross geek who’s really decent

(5) Hippy communities standing up for humanity

(6) Poor little rich boy getting zapped

(7) Crippled entrepreneur megalomaniac

It’s a cliche full-house and not so much redeemed as aced by pace, wit, loveliness and thrills.

I’m inclined to think it’s an all-time great. But is it a cult in the manner of Dark Man (1990)? No. More mainstream surely?

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I go to Shaw knowing that I’ll enjoy it. I’m his target demographic. That’s: intelligent, middle class, mildly well-read, quite snobbish. To be a bit more precise, that’s not so much socially snobbish, as generally superior. Shaw was, of course, stratospheric in that way. He is also a feminist and a socialist, but only of a sort, and not in a way to worry a Tory.

I have seen very few things which went really well in the big theatre at CFT. Musicals can work there, and I wonder if it’s because the performers can be miked. Certainly, Oklahoma was a recent joy, though older members of the audience didn’t respond to its artful minimalism and thought instead that it was a bit dowdy. At first I was inclined to think the theatre in the round needs big productions but that can’t be the whole point since I quite liked the account of Rattigan’s more intimate Separate Tables.  Mind you, by then I’d cottoned onto wearing amplifying headsets, inspite of having perfectly good  hearing. I don’t think it was auditory troubles which stopped me really liking an earlier Arcadia(the Stoppard) which can certainly fill a big space and is by a master of middle class theatrical mores (elsewhere, it has been amongst my favourite pieces). I think the essence of the thing may be that it takes a lot of vim to enliven both that particular theatre and the perma-matinee audience it attracts. 

Anyway, to Pygmalion. I am much more of a fan of Honeysuckle Weeks (Eliza) than most cognoscenti. She has a weird and frightening delivery, like she’s forgotten her lines. But her urgency seems really tough, fresh and compelling and her cool was properly alabaster. She was a bit gabbly and shrieky, and that was perhaps because she wanted to address audibility issues. Phil Davis is a natural Doolittle and we were safe whenever he was on (though he could afford to take the foot off the throttle occasionally). Peter Eyre as Pickering was a proper British theatre actor, with a voice like a Fisherman’s Friend lobbed down a trawler’s hatch. Stephanie Cole as Higgins’s mother was completely reliable, as was Susie Blake’s housekeeper.

I am a huge fan of Rupert Everett, but he is often insufferable. Red Carpet is an exceptional memoir.  In his documentaries he is gripping for about two-thirds of the time and the most frightful baby and bimbo for the rest. His films are a shocking mixed bag, almost all made interesting mostly by his appearance. His Higgins was sort of OK, but it was full of mannerisms which were scattered almost nervously in front of us on the off-chance we’d take to one or other of them. One couldn’t help feeling that he couldn’t take the job seriously: I wondered if we were getting Everett’s own arrogance rather than Higgins’s. However, in the last act, when Liza and Higgins have their showdown, we seemed to hit the real McCoy. It even made sense that we’d had a second chance to have an ice-cream and a stiffener in preparation.

I can easily imagine Everett making a marvellous film Higgins for Emma Thompson’s version. And Carey Mulligan might well bring more edge to its Eliza than Honeysuckle Weeks. I am not looking forward to Thompson turning the story into a silly feminist tract just because it would at a certain level – not Shaw’s – make more sense. (And of course it’s silly of Thompson to diss Audrey Hepburn, but that’s another story about all sorts of things.)

Back at the CFT, the last scene’s row felt like the core of the piece. Higgins can teach Eliza to perform, but her character was waiting for a deeper transformation. I think Shaw is saying that Higgins knows that her transformation has happened and that she, Freddie and Pickering have wrought it. Higgins wasn’t needed for it. He hadn’t noticed that quite a tough bird had been lurking there all along. He thought Eliza had always been and remained deeply common. Actually, she had never really been commonplace and was even less so now.  She had always had problems, and now faced an enlarged ambition. But she would wobble and handle things. For his part, Higgins has, sadly, to admit that there are plenty of transformations he himself needs, but can’t quite be bothered with. Or maybe he’s got even greater weaknesses.

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I never understand why the theatre-going middle class  bother with socialist drama, especially when it is penitentially bad. Is it guilt? Are these East-shoppers keen to beat themselves up and so they tolerate the bum and brain ache required as they endure lashings of propaganda in the cause of which they accept that the evils of capitalism can never be over-dramatised? Is it, in the case of a classic such as RTP that they feel this may be a tolerably amusing way of catching up on something they know, vaguely, they ought to have read?

Come to that, why do Chichester put this stuff on? ENRON, I can understand: it was a cracking production though its thesis was not clever. Bingo, I can understand as a last-minute thing. It is at least possible that the festival’s co-directors want to be cover both the left and right waterfronts, and put on a balanced programme. A little bit of Harewood and Stoppard, a little bit of Brenton and Bond. A nice dollop of Shaw to split the difference. Or should we put it this way: Chichester is famously (it’s true) boringly mainstream, so how about some lefty squibs to shake the place up? And some of the squibs weren’t lefty: I can’t see that Mike Poulton’s striking Wallenstein was detectably propagandist, and nor was an earlier Strindberg. But surely Pygmalian, Bingo, ENRON, and RTP in one season is a bit rich.

Anyway, RTP is a stinker. It may be that the original semi-biographical novel by Robert Tressell (published in 1914 but written at the turn of the century) is warm, witty and insightful. If so, Howard Brenton has preserved little of its tone. It concerns the layers of exploitation as a team of house-painters are made to bodge their way through the decoration of a house for a local vulgarian. It is of course true, as Tresell/Brenton say, that from the capitalists’ point of view, socialism is theft and that from the socialists’ point of view, property is theft. It is also true, as the play ruefully acknowledges, that the working classes have always been surprisingly biddable. Indeed, the only really funny moment in the evening came when the protagonist, Owen (Tressell, pretty clearly), remarked that it was easy to see why. His workmates had been giving us a specially Dogberry example of organisational chaos as they arranged to binge away what presumably should have been spent on their debts.

Here’s the oddity. The play is the most tedious set of show-and-tell tracts on class conflict as seen from really rather cardboard characters. The Masters are masked as befits their venality which was beyond pantomime. There is a small surprise, though, in the weakness and worse of the some of the play’s heroes, the working class. Owen is given some substance. One or two others briefly flicker into life. But for the most part one has the impression that it’s just as well they have the boss class to rule over them.

It is of some interest that the Tressell/Brenton take is not merely that capitalism is bad but that it achieved in the late nineteenth century a particularly bad form. They follow William Morris in celebrating the craftsman of old, and even perhaps the medieval dispensation. In this view, the nineteenth century stripped the workman of pride whilst adding to capitalist profit. But – and we see this in the play – The Masters have now become jumped-up opportunists, who have risen from the lower classes without acquiring classiness. Mr Brenton tops and tails his piece with a parvenu retailer – perhaps a supermarket area manager, perhaps the area manager of a “pound-saver” chain. This modern hate-figure is buying the old house,until his wife unaccountably takes against it.

This device may be a clue to why the middle classes don’t mind the piece. This is romantic socialism which shares their snobbishness about “trade”.

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(1) The caveat.  

The next months of severe weather may produce horrible new auguries. We’ll see. If the Macondo spill is or causes or triggers an unparalleled ecological disaster all bets are off. However, even if the Gulf suffers quite severe effects, there will be a colossal argument as to how much of the damage is from the present spill. It may be that the conclusion settles down to this: the Gulf has needed better care for several decades, and there is a limit to how much BP should made to pay for historic damage which its accident has worsened.

(2) It is likely that BP was in the process of becoming, under Tony Hayward, more of an engineering company. The next few months will reveal the degree to which this was true, and if, and then why, this message failed to reach the Macondo operation. It doesn’t seem very likely that BP was very far from being as technically competent and as safety-conscious as other majors. 

(3) It is likely that all oil companies will have to prove themselves increasingly safety-aware, just as all regulators will have to show themselves cleverer at their work. This will impose new costs on exploration and much else. But these won’t be transformative, surely?

(4) If BP loses its current CEO and Chairman, or either one, as sacrifical lambs, that may slightly effect the company for better or worse, but in itself wouldn’t be a transformation.

(5) As BP cashes in some assets to fund its liabilities in the Macondo aftermath, that may improve rather than damage its financial prospects (make it a more coherent or profitable firm, for instance). It may not amount to a transformation so much as a valuable readjustment.   

(6) In the bigger picture I can’t see how the Macondo spill will hugely change the logic of the USA’s desire to shift from a 60-odd percent oil import dependency and back to the historic 30 percent dependency. The foreign sources of oil and gas are not getting notably more secure or agreeable as the years pass. The spill won’t much dent the US’s appetite for home-sourced oil.

(7) People who want the US to embrace high-cost fossil fuels as a response to climate change have latched onto the Macondo spill though damage to the Gulf Coast is not related to climate change (or not much, yet). Even if the link was made, and the US citizen accepted a tax-hike to European levels (none of which is immediately probable), demand for oil would be high, and demand for Gulf oil (including deep-sea Gulf oil) would surely be barely dented.

(8) Taxing fuel is a tense political business. The UK adds about 70 percent in taxes to oil prices and the US about 25 percent. So notionally there’s room for manoeuvre in the US. But politicians usually set taxes at levels which maximise revenue, or at least optimise it. Very few dare set taxes at levels which change behaviour, not least because such levels would be punitively high in political terms. And there is a further dimension: if “carbon” taxes were very high, income and employment taxes would have to be reduced, so people would feel rich and maybe rich enough to pay quite a lot of carbon tax.

(9) All in all, it isn’t clear that the Macondo spill will bring about or even much encourage the political drivers for radical transformation in the US or global oil business. BP may change hugely, but that’s far from ceratin. The accident will encourage better safety measures, maybe produce a leaner and cleverer BP, maybe spur a new health regime for the Gulf coast, maybe promote more discussion and awareness of the wider risks of the oil economy, including climate change.

(10) Meanwhile, it’s important remember the men who died in the initial explosion. More generally, I should say that I write all the above with the feeling that I hate scapegoating and grandstanding, and have a strongly believe that things do getter better almost all the time, especially in the West, and especially because we take risks and learn from our mistakes.

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Isabelle Huppert makes us thoroughly believe in Marie, a driven coffee farmer who refuses to recognise that it’s time to leave her unspecified African country, which has fallen into the hands of rebels and child soldiers. The French Army, her erstwhile protectors, are on their way out. A funky DJ on FM is playing right-on reggae and reading the runes, too stoned to know he’s actually on the losing side. Her ex-husband (nicely raddled or dubious in the hands of Christopher Lambert) is tired of hanging round and sells her out by cutting a deal with the knowing local mayor and his mini-army. As the film flashes to and fro through time (you have to watch the colour coding in Marie’s frocks), one realises that the terrifying rebels are going to lose, but the new powers-that-be may hardly be better for a white farmer. They bowl up to the farm and slaughter the child rebels who have occupied it but are sleeping off a massive drug overload. Oh, and her son has turned into a lunatic. In the last moments of the movie it seems that she has flipped. That leaves one sympathetic character, a rebel leader who seeks sanctuary in the farm and dies. One suspects he’s only makes a nice impression because he’s gorgeous and says very little.

This is all wonderfully executed, so to speak. But its message seems pretty anti-African. It seems pro-white and pro-capitalist and to that extent you’d have thought it might appeal to a right-winger such as me, even if as a corrective to the standard Noble Savage anti-colonialist norm of film-making.  

The film certainly seems to be saying that Africa drives all its inhabitants mad, white or black. For a lot of the time, there’s no-one to admire except Marie. After all, she’s the only productive person around. But, as a black African points out to her, she’s only determined not to lose what’s hers. Her position is not really stated, though, and certainly not by her. She isn’t in Blixen mode (remember Streep’s defence of “My Kikuyu”?). But Marie does strongly believe that when all else is said and done, she has earned her right to call Africa her home, and believes all the Africans who know her will willingly acknowledge the fact. I think the film is saying she hasn’t and they won’t.

If this is a true portrait of Africa, then I’m inclined to think the place is sunk. But I wonder in what sense Denis’s movie has captured more than a concatenation of all that’s dangerous about the Continent? I have too little sense of Francophone Africa to know whether there is any chance that this is a true picture of any plausible ex-colony. It had elements, to be sure, of bits of the Congo, but only the worst. It certainly is no sort of picture of Anglophone Africa, and plenty of bad stuff is happening there, to be sure.

Ah well. This is a compelling story and one can identify up to a point with an awful lot of the characters in it. But the movie itself is strikingly short of heart and – I would say – of meaning.

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Palestine Betrayed
By Efraim Karsh
Yale, 2010

Islamic  Imperialism: A history
By Efraim Karsh
Yale , paperback, 2007 (Updated edition)

Fitting my prejudices
These books deliciously confirm my prejudices about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the middle east in general. Here are some of them. You don’t have to like the Zionists to admire them; you can’t help liking the Arab world, but it’s hard to admire it. The Zionists do sometimes fail our very high expectations of them, but the Arabs very often fail our much lower expectations of them.

It happens that I have never been to Israel or Arab Palestine, but I spent just enough time in Egypt in the mid-1980s to know that even if it has a wicked state, its citizens seem extraordinarily kind. I know: the Egyptians aren’t strictly Arab, but they’ll do for now and in any case this argument is sustained, if a little equivocally, by the weeks I spent in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait just after the first Gulf War in 1991. And in case what you are about to read seems to condemn Arabs as amiable fools, I should stress that I have a fair bit of evidence of the intelligence and professionalism of plenty of Palestinian Arabs.

All in all, it is easier to romanticise the Arabs than the Jews. That may be a surprise to some Jews, who reasonably enough see themselves as having a racial, a religious, a geographic and a historical claim to be victims. The Englishman is conditioned to respond to the underdog, and for some reason in this case that’s not the Jews. By the handy tropes of the Baby-boomer generation liberal, and their reading of Edward Said, Israel is plainly bad by being the heir to The Enlightenment, the tool of America and the standard bearer of the West. The Palestinians, on the contrary, are the heirs and prime examples of the tradition of liberation wars and rhetoric, and in a lineage which runs from Byron to Arafat via Bob Dylan and Gerry Adams. 

So you will perhaps see that when I first set my face against the tyranny of liberalism, in the 1960s, it was in Israel, Vietnam and Northern Ireland where I (metaphorically) found my greatest motivation and met my biggest tests. I’m afraid I didn’t do much historical reading, so the underpinning of my generalised affection for American and British official policy was scanty.

The Karsh enterprise
Efraim Karsh is almost obsessively in love with archive work, but he isn’t afraid of controversy. He has certainly laid into the “New History” by which some Jewish and other historians have aligned themselves with conventional anti-Zionist, pro-Arab narratives. But the most important message of Karsh’s work is not stated as such by him. His enormous quantities of evidence paint (very satisfactorily to my eyes) a picture in which the Palestinian Arabs, and the wider Arab world, threw away chance after chance to thrive alongside their Jewish neighbours. Maybe they didn’t spot that Jews make the best of friends and the worst of enemies.

The story of Arab failure
The Arab failure should not be seen as a case of a small but disastrous unawareness that they should cut their losses or make the best of a bad thing or live with a fait accompli. It was much worse
than that. Karsh cites convincing data that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the luckiest Arab – the Arab with the best deal to be had in the Middle East – was to be found living and trading alongside Jews in Palestine.  This good fortune was not, by the way, the comparative good fortune of the black African living in apartheid South Africa. The black South Africans of the mid-20th century were amongst the most – were perhaps the most – prosperous and educated Africans in the entire continent, but they suffered political indignities. By contrast, the Palestinian Arab had an absolutely solid promise and expectation of western-style, modern civil rights. The Zionists had proved themselves very benign economic neighbours, and were determined to offer Arabs a full share of the rule of law and democracy they wanted for themselves in their National Home. Even in the late 1940s, when war had hardened their hearts, the Jews maintained a large measure of this desire, and it is powerfully vestigal even now.

So who’s to blame for the failure of the Palestinian Arabs to throw their lot in with the Jews and thrive alongside them? Roughly speaking, one could say that Karsh’s two books prove that nearly any Arab with a voice has firmly grabbed the wrong end of the stick. Karsh’s Palestine Betrayed  tells us, for instance, that:

“Musa Alami, one of the foremost Palestinian Arab moderates during the mandate era, told David Ben-Gurion, ‘He would prefer the land to remain poor and desolate even for another hundred years’, if the alternative was its rapid development in collaboration with the Zionists.” 

Palestine Betrayed shows that most Arab simply could not imagine that the Zionists were so unlike (so much better than) their own power elites (such as the Arabs could be said to have had any). Arab power-brokers assumed, or pretended to assume, that the Jews would run a state which would exploit and ruin non-Jews. It is remarkable that even the “best” of the leaders of neighbouring states – those most prepared to negotiate with the proto-state of Israel – were either thoroughly anti-Semitic in their hearts, or deployed anti-Semitism whenever it suited them.  (I am using anti-Semitism to denote anti-Jewishness, though of course the Arabs are semites too.)

The only area in which I wonder if Karsh’s account is entirely secure is in his argument that Arab and Jewish communities mostly got along pretty well before 1948 and that therefore it was (he implies) almost always bad leadership which led the locals astray. There does seem to have been a deal of alacrity in the way local Arabs swung into hate mode against Jews. Perhaps there is middle ground to be had: Arab heads were always primed with anti-semitism, ready for the fuse to be lit. 

The big story of Islamic and Arab imperialism
It helps to see the context as Karsh lays it out. His Arab Imperialism shows that Muslim leaders have very often invoked the idea of a millenarian Islamic right to regional and global power, and not often done so because they were devout. In parallel to this line of thought, Arab national leaders (or Arab leaders who aspire to national power) very often invoke a pan-Arab dream, with varying degrees of Islamism, sometimes to mask their designs, and sometimes to elevate them. Certainly that was what went on in the final mid-century tragedy of the failure of Palestine.

The bigger surprise is to hear Karsh revising the usual narrative of European exploitation of the collapsing Ottoman empire. The new middle eastern boundaries and the creation of Iraq, for instance, were:

 “the aggregate outcome of intense pushing and shoving by a multitude of regional and international bidders for the Ottoman war spoils, in which the local actors, despite their marked inferiority to the great powers, often had the upper hand.”

Karsh calls this chapter, “The tail that wags the dog”.

The historiographies of the conflict
It may be useful to pause here and consider where Karsh’s approach, his historiography, differs from the kind of thing read by most students of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The mainstream modern view seems to be, or seeks to be, determinedly non-judgemental. So, for instance, Kirsten E Schultze’s The Arab-Israeli Conflict (1999 and 2008, in the classic Seminar Studies in History series) says that the conflict is of its time; “in simplistic terms, is one of competing nationalisms”.  

It’s a nice move but surely rather odd. Yes, the idea of a Jewish nation state was quite new and fitted a contemporary fashion. Yes, the Arab world was witnessing the birth of various post-colonial states. So we seem to have a nice symmetry between the Jews’ need of a post-Holocaust state and the Arabs’ need of a set of post-Ottoman, post-French, post-British national states. A parity and a moral equivalence is suggested. Also a nice post-modern relativism: Jew and Arab both had a felt need of a nation state and there’s no need to investigate the merits of their case.

Read on, and the Schultze account is similarly sure that Jews and Arabs were about equally capable of atrocity and – if anything – the Jewish role in banishing Arabs from Palestine was the greater. Well, it’s true that some Zionists were capable of atrocities, but the Arabs perpetrated far more of them. What’s more, one has to work rather hard – fly in the face of a good deal of contrary evidence – to believe that the Jews perpetrated the horrors casually ascribed to their villainy. But the infamous tragedy of Deir Yassin, usually characterised as a massacre (including by Schultze), in which Jewish underground forces killed 250 people (100 according to Karsh), was a very rare event. It was immediately denounced by official Jewish authorities and seized on as a propaganda tool by the Arabs. As for the exodus of Palestinian Arabs before, during and after the 1948 war, it was mostly instigated, and sometimes forcibly, by Arab leaders who spread endless scare stories about the likelihood of mass killings by Jews. Karsh concedes that late in the process, the Jews became unwilling to sanction the return of Arabs. But this was a reversal of their earlier policy and could easily be defended as a realistic assessment of the trouble returning Arabs would cause them, granted what 1948 had taught both sides.

The Arabs’ crocodile tears
Karsh stresses, but all historians seem to accept, that no Arab leaders of surrounding countries seem seriously to have been thinking about the well-being of Palestinian Arabs as a cause of merit in itself. What’s more, the neighbouring states often seemed to concede at least privately that it was the Zionists who promised best for the local Arabs. Indeed, it was the Jews who throughout were actually prepared to think of their Arab neighbours as having rights of their own. Non-Palestinian Arab leaders used the Palestinian Arab cause as a chip in their own nation-building, and often in their plans to absorb one bit or another, or all of, Palestine in their burgeoning kingdoms or empires.

And why not, goes the conventional anti-Zionist view? Palestine was and is an Arab, and a Muslim, country. I find Karsh reassuring in his account of Palestine as a territory in which an extraordinary mix of nationalities and faiths have co-habited, with varying degrees of peacefulness, for centuries. Most, including the Arabs, were pretty happy to be a semi-detached part of the Ottoman empire. Even granted the mainstream modern historiography, it seemed reasonable of the British, the League of Nations and the United Nations to have sought in the 1930s and 1940s to design a matching pair of Arab and Jewish states, each according rights to minorities, with Jerusalem as an international city. The British state, in the form of Clement Attlee and Earnest Bevin (Labour politicians, I am pleased to note) ratted on its earlier and honourable view and increasingly sided with the Arabs, not least on account of oil, but also general diplomatic convenience (as it was thought).

The Zionists more than tolerated the two-state solution, but – of course, and typically – the Arabs didn’t fancy an option which took Palestine out of play. Karsh is convincing when he sketches the longevity, continuity, richness and usefulness of the ancient Jewish connection with Palestine. I am trying to get it across that it doesn’t require a specially Jewish perspective to see things from a Zionist point of view. Nor does it require a special sense of Jewish victimhood to think that the Jews have a good claim to a Jewish state in Palestine. An ordinary reading of pre-20th century middle east history might have suggested the Jews deserved a state, and  ordinary pragmatism might have suggested that the region would gain from it.

It is, by the way, at least remarkable that the Arab world and its apologists don’t seem to mind that the Palestinian Arabs’ most senior leaders not only cheered-on Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jewish Problem, but took themselves off to live under the Fuhrer’s special protection for the duration of WW2. You’d have thought the Arab world would cut the Zionist some slack on that account alone.

Karsh doesn’t talk an enormous amount about very recent Palestinian and Israeli history. It goes without saying that the world expects Israel to behave much better than its Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians. As part of that, we expect the Jewish state to bend over backwards to accept any concessions by the Arab side. We expect the Jews to deliver on their promises, and the Arabs to fail to deliver on theirs. At the moment, and it’s a recent development, I’d say that the wider world, even including natural friends of Israel, is feeling that Israel is not being as noble and magnanimous as we expect. Reading Karsh has reassured me that my lifelong assumption was right: the Arabs cocked things up very badly. I have no idea whether enough of their young people will grasp that for history’s vicious circle to be broken.

end

No related posts.

More soon on this, I hope. For now I just wanted to stress that this show entirely overcomes the very reasonable prejudices that one really ought to have about it. You know how it ends. You know it’s littered with really goofy life-coach cliches. You know you’re supposed to cry. This production makes you forget the lurking resentment you feel at being jerked-around.

Howard Goodall’s songs are both lush and subtle. Stephen Clark’s lyrics are sharply witty. They are beautifully sung by people with lovely, sound voices. For such a conversation piece, there is some exhilarating stage business (the stuff in the kitchen scene is a subdued riot). From the moment you walk in, you feel that this is going to be a high-end Minerva show: intimate and energetic. It’s occasionally full-on, but there’s no shrillness.

Emma Williams is outstanding as Jenny Cavilleri, the girl who dies. It’s not a showy performance but she is every inch the vital, stroppy, loving, intelligent young woman. What sticks in the mind was her toughness throughout.

I don’t remember the film, though I must have seen it, and I never read the novel. Anyway, this version rightly concentrates on the suffering of the two fathers. As Jenny herself says, Oliver (the husband and widower) will bounce back. It is one of her excellent unsentimental moments.

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