A nation that kills children, tortures anyone, blows up private houses and assassinates oppositionists with rocket fire is a terrorist nation, discuss. Yet Israel does all of these things, calls itself a democracy and, as in this documentary, The Law In These Parts, parades its liberal conscience while revealing a sanguinary hypocrisy reminiscent of John Howard’s, or Phillip Ruddock’s.
Actual judges who sentenced stone-throwers and pamphleteers in the past are interrogated in a stage set and shown awful back-projected newsreels by the Brechtian documentarist Shilton Ha Chok who, like them, sneeringly forbodes that he, and he alone, will choose what is to be emphasised in their testimony and who is to be condemned; and, as in Judgment At Nuremberg, the crumbling conscience of one of them — yes, he cries, I did know that torture was going on, but what could I do, they were the enemy — is no less interesting than the unsurrendering rectitude of the others.
Their views, and the righteousness with which they hold them, are unchanged. The citizens of ‘Occupied Territories’ do not have the same rights as Jews, in their judgment, and that is that; and Jews who ‘settle’ these Occupied Territories and then do wrong, do criminal things, are not to be judged as their neighbours are but as Jews are, and must be: fairly.
And so it is, and so it goes, that breadwinners are imprisoned and beaten, their houses demolished, their land thieved and their families ruined, for trivialities. It could be Fascist Italy in the nineteen thirties but no, it is the conquered parts of modern Israel in the forty-third year of their occupation, legalistically, almost jesuitically downloaded and explicated. As the secular anti-Zionist son of a Jew I find this extraordinary cold self-loathing Israeli film very, very upsetting, and well worth gloomily pondering and getting drunk on Maccabees Pale Ale after. We, and the world, should be ashamed.
Goodbye, the story of a woman seeking, for complex reasons to do with her need to leave Iran and then her decision to stay there, a legal abortion in Teheran, I and my wife Annie walked out of. Though greatly admiring (of course) of its auteur Asghar Farhadi who made A Separation, one of the world’s great films, and went to gaol for it, we’d endured too many unsought miscarriages of our own to undergo all that apprehension again, however well it was dramatised. So we had yum cha with our infant grandson and his parents instead, the way you do.
I, Anna, by the disarming Barnaby Southcombe, a nice Englishman who introduced it, was for a long time very good: the melancholy horniness of solitary people speed-dating in modern London, with new fine soft-spoken pop songs on the sound track, had a T.S. Eliot feel to it, and we went along for a while with its mixture of police-procedural and Alan Bennettish self-distaste in sumptuous apartments and ominous hotel foyers. And Gabriel Byrne as the pained and questing Irish copper, and Charlotte Rampling as the soiled forlorn edgy grandmother, and the poisonous-titmouse Eddie Marsan as the police interrogator and the melting time-shifts between murder and cover-up kept us going for a while, and the unpleasantness of administering, at 65, a blow-job with his hand on your head to a man you’ve just met and don’t like too much, and the leaving while preoccupied of a baby in a stroller he gets out of and crawls determinedly towards traffic away from …
But…it seemed in the end very like an episode of, oh, Midsomer Murders inflated, upgraded and, well, poeticised to give the undyingly sexy Rampling, forty-seven years after Georgie Girl and still borderline-anorexic, something better than a mother-in-law to do, and it didn’t quite commingle with its cast-list, or affirm it, or excuse it, and it’s a pity.
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They’re fighting a war against people with no interest in negotiation or compromise. The Israelis at different times have been prepared to negotiate any compromise including abandoning the new settlements.
These ‘people’ you speak of are from what country? With what voting rights? What legal rights? What ‘compromises’ did they reject?
Be specific.
Blame cannot be attributed to either side, save equally. Their story is one of tragic circumstance, of guilt, good intentions and xenophobia in its basic form. Perhaps if Winston had not given the Jews their land none of this would have happened. But that scenario would not have happened given the collective guilt every country felt about the blind eye they turned when the writing was clearly on the wall. Maybe the Palestinians would not be so marginalised if they had not given in to the indulgences and plans of the Arab nations and Kingdom that surround the tiny country by the water. But they did as they felt maligned. Guilt, in every form, is a blockage to overcoming injustices of the past. Evil deeds must be acknowledged but not dwelt on, and those at the table must be come open minded. They cannot come without authority and with the bigotry of others sitting on their shoulders as they look East across the land.
Winston did not give the Jews a homeland, Attlee, Truman, Evatt and Stalin did. They punished Arabs for what Germans did, on the wild rumour that God had given certain acreage to a schizophrenic, Abraham, who proposed at one point to cut the throat of his little son, in a dream.
It is as crazy a basis for aquiring real estate as me asserting that I am descended from Mordred, Arthur’s miscreant bastard son, and therefore, legally, own Tintagel. Or Britain.
Or am I wrong?
I think it would have been a fairer thing to give them Germany.
Well, the Sudetenland perhaps.
Or Berchtesgarten.
Or Berlin.
After World War II I suspect that the remaining Jews decided that they would do whatever it takes. Not that they got together and decided that, but in largely independent ways came to that conclusion. The Arabs and Palestinians were merely in the way. As the Great Powers carved up the world – bits of Germany to Poland, bits of eastern Europe to various Soviet satellites, spheres of influence and the likes of NATO, a bit of Palestine for the Jews did not seem like a big stretch. With millions displaced, an Israeli state seemed like a good idea at the time; a sop to the victims of holocaust, if you will.
From the likes of Rabin, Sharon and Ben Gurion’s point of view, whatever it takes; get the Palestinians to move aside (or die) the British to get out (or die) and the new homeland to be carved out of what they saw and their successors still see today as their ancient lands.
Here is truth : Israel will never willingly surrender any of the lands they occupy today. Never.
Whatever it takes.
You are plainly wrong. Attlee did attend the Postdam Conference after his election, but to suggest the Churchill did not have a significant part in the creation of Israel is historical inaccurate. Attlee took over from Churchill during the negotiations, at which stages plans were well advanced.
You deride the Israeli’s connection to that parcel of land as wild rumours and the like. Based on this I can only assume you have a similar view to Aboriginal land rights? Unbecoming Bob.
For the record if you were the descendant of Mordred and Morgan Le Fay, I suspect you would be more like the current Marquess of Bath than the Once and Future King.
“A nation that kills children, tortures anyone, blows up private houses and assassinates oppositionists is a terrorist nation,”
Your opening sentence reminded me of the horrific footage of 32 dead children filmed by villagers in Syria last week at Al-Houlu at Homs. Such is the horror the villagers see, that all they can chant is a relentless “Allahu Akbar!” We are so lucky living here in Australia to be spared such depravity.
WARNING: Terribly disturbing footage.
Four hundred million years.
Anyone can produce footage of corpses and claim that their enemies did it; the Russians blamed the Nazis for the slaughter they themselves carried out in Katyn Forest until long after World War II, though the Nuremberg Trials doubted the provenance.
We need cool heads and solid evidence to sheet home the blame.
“A nation that kills children, tortures anyone, blows up private houses and assassinates oppositionists is a terrorist nation, discuss.”
Syria.
Gaza.
Gaza.
Syria.
Sudan.
Jordan.
Egypt.
Darfur.
Burma.
Russia/Chechnya
Pakistan.
Iran.
Iraq.
Saudi Arabia.
A blowhard misrepresenting a democracy’s legitimate and obligatory defence of itself and its people against deliberate and ongoing attempts to obliterate it is a faker, a poseur and deliberately deceptive.
Discuss.
What was obligatory in the killing of three hundred children, sometimes with phosphorous bombs, in January 2009?
I agree atrocities have occurred elsewhere, throughout world history. But what is your point in raising them? I am reviewing a particular film, as I have in the past films about Ruanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, East Timor, Vietnam, and so on. Are you saying I should not review this particular film? Why do you say that?
Of course this film should be reviewed but it should be reviewed on its merits AS a documentary.
However, in the ongoing propaganda war in the middle east (which also has links to how we watch the unfolding ‘news’ from Syria), there is a thriving film and photographic industry in the middle east, highlighted by the Israel/Palestine conflict which needs watching. It is the prism through which any such claim of 300 dead by phosphorous bombs’ should be seen and judged. Even from a technical viewpoint by film professionals, this is interesting, I suspect, but for the public which is meant to digest the “news’ coming from Israel/Palestine it is vital to be aware of it.
http://www.zombietime.com/fraud/ambulance/
It’s a Freudian nightmare, for sure. All that fine Jewish intelligence embedded within a primal swamp of historical antagonism and lower-brain fear/anger primitivity, sauced up with an endlessly restated paradigm designed to heighten the resolve of the Hebraic herd in defending themselves against the goyim cockroaches who threaten their enclave.
I think you’re right about this. The Zionist nation is historically and currently a terrorist nation. Fact. The historical antecedent was the Zionist group Irgun, (whose leader and later Israeli PM Menachem Begin was to be awarded the Nobel Peace prize). Irgun had exceptionally good form when it came to terrorising Palestinians, depopulating villages and forcing people off their historical lands and eliminating those who articulated opposition to the Zionist occupation.
How many millions of words need to be written and spoken in respect of this tragic Mediterranean landscape with its ever spinning treadmill of provocation and counteraction before enough is enough?
More to the point Canguro, how many people must die before this mess is sorted out? Will it be peace only when the last Palestinian stands over the corpse of the last Israeli, or the last Israeli stands over the corpse of the last Palestinian?
Disillusionment, logically, is a desirable position to reach on one’s life journey, yet it intrigues me that as a species we are so singularly committed to the retention of our delusions and illusions when clearly they so often work against our natural best interests, unlike any other creature on the planet.
It bears being thought about.
Israeli politics is heavily influenced by Orthodox Judaism, which itself views the world through its own unique prism, determined as it is by thousands of years of unbending viewpoint regarding the sanctity of the Talmudic teachings. Juxtaposed against this militant religiosity, and close enough to arouse sufficient friction such that continual discomfort is ensured, sit the Palestinians with their own world view, a set of beliefs that happen to clash with those of their neighbours.
Thus the stage was set for the enaction of the drama, and the gods looked down and wept, or laughed, at the madnesses thus displayed, and good men such as Dawkins (The God Delusion), and Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) took it upon their shoulders to try to bring some semblance of counterpoint to the question of religion and its impact on societies.
I think it takes a lot of wisdom to recognise the unique capacity we have as manipulators of sound and symbol to express complex ideas, wherever we arise on the planet, and with maturity an awareness arises of the need to use language carefully and appropriately, and thus, ideally, one then takes that awareness into one’s daily life and relationships and plays one’s part in the dyadic exchange so eloquently exlored by Martin Buber in Ich und Du.
Will it be a fight to the last man standing? I’ve no idea… , but I suspect it’s possible… the Middle East is a pretty volatile place, and Israel is a very unpopular occupant.
One great problem I see is that men of goodwill may broker a peace deal, which might even work; but many on their own side will see any ground given as a betrayal, and the negotiators as traitors. With the usual result.
On the basis that if you don’t laugh you cry, I suspect that if Jesus Christ or Muhammad or both were to appear and make peace, they would be crucified or ‘translated’ afresh.
It is sad.
You should at least have the honesty and decency to put inverted commas around your comment, to indicate that it is not an original thought TD.
Invisible ink, how novel!
I know you can count Tiny “…..million years”
I know you have the power and authority of elegant commentary Tiny “its about shit”
I now know Tiny you have a wonderful sense of irony.
I just got a glimpse of what you wrote Tiny, before it disappeared. You take this blog seriously, why else the counting, why else keep responding, why else keep coming back, to teach me or us a lesson? A lesson in what?
If you don’t find it serious, make it serious, say something serious, join the fray Tiny.
Take away your pithy commentary eg “its about shit”, (but you lack the courage to say why you think it is about shit) the counting and the unattributed quotes and the personal invective, where is your serious offering?
This is not the sort of blog, where you can just call someone a “leftard” or a “luvvie” and think that substitutes for argument. You have the chance to engage directly with one of the finest and original minds in Australia today, whether you agree with Ellis or not, you should take that opportunity with both hands, take him on, but take him on seriously.
Seriously?
Surely you are not serious?
You have raised some interesting points Bob. Yesterday as I driving through Woollahra I saw a bunch of protesters standing outside a cafe in the main street holding various missives and chanting about Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
It will be known to many of your Sydney readers that Sydney’s jewish community rests principally in the Eastern Suburbs. I think it not a coincidence that this demonstration took place on the main street of Woollahra. Can someone please explain to me how this can be couched as anything other than anti-semitism? There is no place for this type of demonstration in suburban streets. The religion of certain residents of Sydney has nothing to do with a war occuring in the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, the protest appeared to be organised by the grubs at the Socialist Alternative.
Personally I have little sympathy for religious wars and can see the ills of many things that have been done by Israel. However it is also easy for me to see the misgivings of the Palestinians. I dont see how any objective observer couldnt have the same view.
My point is – why do the Left have a fascination with the Palestinian position? What business do a bunch of rent-a-crowd protesters have in Woollahra? It is sickening and is pure anti-semitism.
Could you imagine what would happen if a bunch of Hasidic Jews marched into Lakemba complaining about the brutalities of the Hamas regime? It would incite a riot.
The Left repeateadly take the moral high ground on issues of social importance and claim to be the progressive side of Australian politics. Get real. The Left’s position on the Middle East is so unbelivably biased that it smacks of anti-semitism.
Incredibly the Greens are at the heart of it all. You will recall when Greens Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne was boycotting the state of Israel. Are you people fucking serious?
Can someone please explain to me why the Left are obssessed with Palestine? Other than the kebab shops on King street, what does Newtown have to do with the Inner West Bank other than a bunch of Leftards being predictably “anti-zionist?”