Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

The Fatah-Hamas unity government of Greater Palestine and the undaunted murder each day of heroes in Syria has put America in diplomatic difficulties which the closet pro-Palestinian Barack Obama will not be enjoying, much, in the next few days, I think.

For while his diplomats rail against Russia and China for their green-lighting of the ongoing Assad massacres of protestors — freedom-fighters, we used to call them — he has been green-lighting the Netanyahu ‘incursions’ into Gaza in which, over time, more ‘innocents’ have died, probably, than in Syria in twenty years.

Assad, like Netanyahu, will no doubt assert it is all about noise: if protestors keep us awake, like the impotent, irritant rocket-firers of Gaza (less lethal, mostly, than stone-throwers), why, then, we have the right to mow them down with helicopter-gunships, don’t we, and shoot up their funerals the day after, don’t we, in defence of our sleep? In defence of the sleeping-patterns if the housewives of Ashkelon? And north-west Teheran?

And Obama, who hates Netanyahu these days more than even the jelly-back Boehner, has to grit his teeth and support the one, and curse the other, for shooting freedom-fighters out of hand. Israel murders children in self-defence, he has to say, and Assad murders demonstrators to prop up a tyranny. And there’s a difference. There really is a difference. The children deserve it. The demonstrators do not.

What must irritate him most is that his present reputation as an ineffective first-term President and a diplomatic Paper Tiger dates from those dread dog days before his Inauguration when a full-scale Gaza War was launched by Olmert and Livni to test him in the interim before he had official power to respond to events with enormous armies at his back.

If, instead of doing what he did, which was say he wasn’t President yet and Bush, poor man, had to deal with it, not him, he had simply and confidently asserted, ‘No, I am not President yet, and I won’t be for a fortnight, but I have an opinion on this question presently, I really do, and my sincere advice to Israel is this: Go home; go home now, leave within five hours, go now, do not pass go, go now’ — and if they had done so — he would have loomed as large in world affairs thereafter as he did as candidate for President (in Berlin, in Cairo), and he would as President have carried all, including most of his domestic agenda, before him.

Cringing before Israel, as he did then, and as all Presidents but Carter have been made to do, in the fortnight before his presidency, did for him as a mighty force in the world. It’s a primacy in the Great Game the US will not now recover, not now, not ever. And, in his case, it’s a pity. He’s the best diplomatic thinker of our time, and the best orator (which means the best emotional thinker) of all time. And it’s a pity.

And it’s to be wondered, after this, how long the veto power of the US, the UK, France, Russia and China over UN resolutions of belligerent substance will now continue, and the inevitable big bust-up of the whole shebang be delayed. The dead are being counted in Syria and Tibet as they never were in the Palestinian Territories, and the idea that the KGB tyrant Putin, a fiercer foe of free speech than Assad, will ever vote responsibly on matters of self-determination (after what he did to the Chechnyans) is to be morbidly and gloomily doubted. That UN veto has been the sole guarantee of tyranny in the world these last sixty-seven years. Without it we’d have a planet-wide equivalent of the EU.

And it’s a pity.