George Orwell, Jewish people and state of Israel
What would George Orwell make of the inauguration in Britain this winter of an annual George Orwell Day? The author of the celebrated anti-totalitarian novel 1984 is being officially turned into a secular British saint. Perhaps he would be flattered. More likely this sardonic Puritan, who died in 1950, would have greeted the establishment of a day when people are expected to ‘think Orwell’ with hollow laughter. It smacks after all of just the kind of mental regimentation he despised.
Orwell might have had reservations about other recently devised memorial events — not least Holocaust Day, the annual day of remembrance of the Nazi program to exterminate European Jewry. Why, he might have wondered, set aside a day for recalling the barbarities inflicted on Jewish people when the entire history of man’s inhumanity to man ought to be an integral part of general education?
It is true that Orwell might not be deemed best qualified to pronounce on Jewish affairs. In common with other noted writers of his time, he made derogatory remarks about Jews — though this has not deterred Zionist intellectuals from embracing him as an ally, a champion of Western freedom who would now be an ardent supporter of the US and Israel in the “war on terror.”
All the same, it is natural to speculate what a writer venerated for telling inconvenient truths would have made of contemporary Western debate concerning the Jewish people and the state of Israel. In Britain and the US, public discussion about Israel is increasingly constrained by taboos. More than ever, those who speak out against Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people risk being branded as racists, who, albeit unconsciously, regard Jews as less than human.
In recent weeks, the celebrated Sunday Times cartoonist Gerald Scarfe has been reviled for depicting Benjamin Netanyahu in scathing terms. Alluding to the 2013 Israeli elections, Scarfe portrayed the Israeli prime minister as a builder applying mortar mixed with Palestinian blood to Israel’s “security wall.” ‘Will cementing peace continue?’ asked the caption. Published as it happened on Holocaust Memorial Day, the cartoon precipitated vitriolic allegations that its author was invoking the notorious “blood libel” against Jews — the medieval insinuation that Jews cut the throats of Christian children and used their blood for ritual purposes. The implication of Scarfe’s critics was that he was endorsing the kind of anti-Semitism that issued in genocide. The outlandish outrage generated by the cartoon (the philo-Semitic proprietor of the Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch, voiced his extreme distaste for it) guarantees that in many people’s minds Scarfe’s name will henceforth carry a certain stigma.
Such episodes ensure that public debate about the Israel-Palestine conflict seldom advances very far. Anybody who ventures to criticize Israel faces the prospect of being shouted down by Zionists whose barely concealed objective is to stifle, and if possible silence, discussion of matters that reflect badly on Israel’s conduct. The upshot is that much serious comment on the history and current reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict never reaches the attention of the wider public.
It will, in the circumstances, be interesting to see how much mainstream attention is accorded to the eye-opening new book by the heretical Israeli historian Shlomo Sand. In The Invention of the Land of Israel, Sand argues that the Zionist justification for the establishment of Israel is based on a self-serving reading of history, an unsustainable claim that the Jewish people were gratuitously expelled from historic Palestine, their “promised land”, and that they therefore enjoyed an unchallengeable moral right to return to it. Yet the most compelling part of Sand’s book concerns an altogether more recent episode of the Jewish story. In a powerful last chapter, the historian describes how the institution where he teaches, the University of Tel Aviv, was erected on the ruins of a Palestinian village, Al-Sheikh Muwannis, whose inhabitants were summarily displaced by Zionists at the time of Israel’s creation in 1948. It is astonishing to discover that this prestigious Israeli seat of learning goes to the most lavish lengths to memorialize the Jewish past while expunging all record of the Arabs who lived where it stands. Denial of the truth is written into the very fabric of Tel Aviv University.Another ground-breaking new book that ought to be widely discussed, Unfree in Palestine, by Nadia Abu-Zahra and Adah Kay, adds to the sense of the Zionist enterprise as a systematic effort to appropriate not just the land of Palestinian Arabs but their documentation, the vital evidential foundation of their lives. The authors recall how in occupied Europe in the 1940s Nazis compiled black lists on the basis of a population registry, issuing marked identity cards to Jews. Their suggestion is that the way Israel has exploited the land registry of Palestinians evokes disturbing echoes of the totalitarian methods employed by Hitler’s Germany. In Palestine, they write, the census, population registry and residence permits have been used to de-nationalise an entire people, to rob Palestinians of their identities and imprison them in a fiendishly invasive system of surveillance and control. The irony is that this monstrous process was initiated by Israel at precisely moment when, in reaction to the horrors of the Nazi era, international law was setting its face against programmes of de-nationalisation.
With his loathing of propaganda and state coercion, George Orwell would have excoriated Zionist efforts to sanitize Israel’s past. Nor is it hard to imagine how trenchantly he would express himself on the subject of a state that endlessly exhorts the world to remember the sufferings of Jewish people yet whose own memory is so singularly selective.
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