Martin Amis and Israel

 

A friend called me from New York this week. An old friend, a Jewish friend. A close friend, a guy I shared meals with as bullets whistled over our heads.

He wanted to know, would I go to Israel and tell the Israelis to stop blowing things up, stop killing people.

He was joking – he didn’t really want me to go to Israel and talk to the Israelis. It would be futile.

He wasn’t joking – he wants them to stop blowing things up, stop killing people. Like so many Jews, he’s trapped between the extremes of an Israel he feels some allegiance to and the growing weight of humanity asking ‘why’ – to which there is increasingly no justifiable answer.

The Israelis won’t desist for several reasons, two of which are discussed here. One applies generally, perhaps increasingly as time passes. The second more specifically to the current regime.

 

I spent five years in Jerusalem, off and on, between 2004 and 2012. My observations are coloured by that experience. To illustrate:

After a week’s holiday in 2005, where I took my wife’s advice and put the situation in Jerusalem out of my mind, I began the drive from home in one indigenous enclave, to work in another. Turning onto the main road, two Arab high school students were pinned to a wall as Israeli paramilitary police descended from an armoured vehicle and tossed the contents of their schoolbags into and along the road. I waited an age at the intersection that is green five minutes for the foreigners (called ‘settlers’) driving from their homes in the West Bank to work in the factories of the elites on the coastal plain, and then five seconds green for the locals. The lights behave this way even on the Sabbath. On the highway into town, I passed a kilometres-long line of ‘green’ buses (ie. colour-coded for indigenes) – all subject to emissions tests at a single Israeli testing station. Passengers were not permitted to descend and all would be very late for work. Turning into the suburb where I worked, an older Palestinian woman, hands spread against a wall, was being frisked by an Israeli policewoman. 8.40am as I drove through the office gate, and in tears again.

 

Israel won’t desist from its ‘wars’ with the indigenous population of Palestine – the population directly descended from the ancient Jews (and if you don’t believe that, go stick it in your DNA sampler).

It won’t desist because it depends on prolonging the ‘security situation’ to maintain, above all else, its economy.

-          The USD3b (all my figures are rubbery and approx. 2012) it receives from the US each year in security aid. Much of which funds the development of new weapons (tested on the indigenous population as Lowenstein asserts) and new technologies, then spun out to fire up the ‘start-up nation’ (as Senor and Singer make palpably clear in their book). Start-ups so often owned and run by the (retired and current) military elite, their families and descendants.

-          The soft loans the US makes available to support Israel – with a balance of USD5b and another USD4b available, again in 2012.

-          The generous donations (approx. USD2.5b in 2012) to health/welfare/education programs from donors who ‘understand’ those programs are underfunded as the government prioritises security.

-          The USD8b (2012) in humanitarian aid going to the indigenous population, 80% of which, because of Israel’s stranglehold on goods entering the West Bank and Gaza from outside, passes directly into Israel’s economy (World Bank, 2012).

-          That’s around USD12b a year in 2012 dollars, not counting soft loans nor the income generated by spin-outs from the military and the international sales of both the military and non-military technology they enable. Over USD1500 per citizen – in 2012 terms more than most Israeli workers earned in a month.

That’s big business. Turning that around will take a lot of work. Not that it’s anything Israel’s aging and extremist regime will consider. Their preference is to exploit the model even further by growing the threat perception, given the wealth and prestige it has brought them to date.

 

The regime won’t desist with its belligerence because it’s dug itself into an economic and ideological hole. Instead it keeps on digging. To diverge briefly.

Martin Amis’ ‘Zone of Interest’, a darkly satirical novel set in Auschwitz, explores the banality of evil and the human capacity for both cruelty and love in the most horrific circumstances. Amis creates an unsettling portrait of the Holocaust that avoids typical representations while still conveying its horrors. He highlights the cognitive dissonance and moral bankruptcy of the Nazis. Characters go about their daily lives and petty concerns while participating in genocide, revealing how people can compartmentalize and normalize even the most abhorrent acts. (Drawn from a summary of multiple reviews and critiques.)

Discussing the context, Amis says the German high command (and Hitler) knew the war was lost by November 1941. Why then persist? He suggests it was Hitler’s revenge on the Germans for having failed him. That the objective of completing an unfathomable genocide, the process of which accelerated rapidly from around that date, is a convenient justification for prolonging the suffering of all. Hitler’s perverse gift to the future: a Europe without Jews (and without a Germany either).

I hope it’s not too late for Israel to back out of its hole and change direction. To divest itself of its mission to clear the world of every last militant indigene within its sphere of influence. By, it does increasingly seem to the world at large, if necessary then killing every last indigene.

As Hamas re-organised in the northern areas of Gaza last week, one of its leaders observed: ‘we have a whole new generation of fighters now’. Consequent to the Israeli regime’s bloody and persistent single-mindedness.

Will the Israelis figure it out before too late? Perhaps. I have vivid memories of Israelis occasionally confessing, unprompted, that ‘it wasn’t meant to be like this’. But perhaps not. My closest Israeli friend, a celebrated academic from a founding family, emigrated (as most Israelis unfortunately cannot afford to do). Because she didn’t want her children “growing up Israeli”.

 

That’s about the best I can do today old friend. May it give you hope.