Israel and 'Apartheid': A Guest Post by Peter Ryley

A South African MP who personally experienced apartheid speaks about the charge against Israel

George Szirtes
Introduction

There are various accusations thrown around in criticisms of Israel - including that it is in some ways a Nazi state behaving towards Palestinians just as Hitler behaved to Jews. That charge is intended to achieve two aims: first, to demonise Israel by association, to isolate and delegitimise it and, eventually, to eradicate it; second, to relieve any lingering sense of guilt, even by complicity, for the Holocaust since if its victims have turned out the same as its perpetrators, the one cancels the other. This is a natural conclusion to draw since Israel is the only Jewish state in the world and some parts of it are made up of post-Holocaust Jewish refugees and their descendants. The country was in fact intended as a place of refuge and a homeland where Jews for the first time would not be in a vulnerable minority.

Once the Nazi equivalence has been recognised as a smear the next move is to declare Israel an apartheid state, one that should therefore be treated exactly as South Africa was, and thus to bring it down another way thorugh boycotts and disinvestments.

Some people think any defence of Israel is an attack on Palestinians and that the writer must in some way hate Arabs. I do not. I believe Palestinians have the right to live lives as normal as anyone else's. Furthermore I believe that is possible.

The background to this guest post by Peter Ryley is that I had put up a post on Facebook in response to a plea to deplore another Facebook page where Israel was depicted as a rat spreading a plague. The iconography was a direct echo of Nazi propaganda before and during WW2. These things naturally concern me, especially since I think the powers of the far right are on the rise again. In the comments below my post Israel came to dominate and the apartheid charge came up again. I suggested various ways in which the charge was false but was particularly grateful to Peter for his more detailed and knowledgeable responses. I asked him if I might blog his responses as a single post with any editions that he wished to make and he kindly gave me that permission. Here is his own editing of the material.

Peter Ryley

Apartheid and Israel

Apartheid [in South Africa] was constructed through a cluster of legislation mainly in the early 1950s. The main ones were:

• The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) 
• The Population Registration Act of (1950)
• The Group Areas Act (1950)
• The Immorality Act (1950)
• The Suppression of Communism Act (1950)
• The Bantu Authorities Act (1951)
• The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953)
• The Bantu Education Act (1953)
• The Separate Representation of Voters Act (1956)

If anyone can point to a similar legislative framework in Israel then the analogy can be made. If not, they are playing the game of guilt by association.

Let’s work through some of the list. 

• Is it illegal for Palestinians to marry Israelis? - NO 
• Is it illegal for Palestinians to have sex with Israelis? - NO
• Are Palestinians denied the right to vote? - NO 
• Do Palestinians have to live in designated areas and carry internal passports? - NO 
• Are Palestinians divided into different racial categories on the basis of skin colour? - NO 
• Are they registered under those categories with the state? - NO 
• Are Palestinians forbidden to attend Israeli educational establishments? - NO
• Do they by law have to follow a separate and limited curriculum? - NO … etc etc 

Beyond that, some people argue that a majority of Palestinians do not vote in Israeli elections.  The reason for that is because they are not citizens of Israel. They live in the territories and so vote in elections to the PA, or live in the diaspora. 

• Palestinians are members of the Knesset,
• have been cabinet ministers,
• generals in the armed forces,
• serve on the boards of major corporations,
• hold senior university posts,
• work in the civil service etc. 

They are not barred by law from doing any of these things.

We need to distinguish between a state that has a declaratory policy of equal rights with one that had a legal enforcement of unequal rights.

We should not confuse legal segregation with discrimination and prejudice. The first is absent, the latter is widespread.

Analogies and propaganda go hand-in-hand. The Apartheid analogy is a tool for mobilisation and a handy device to prevent the need for thought. 

The history is complex and the current debate is being shaped, not so much by history, as by mythologies. These mythologies are ubiquitous and are part of a process of delegitimisation. Both sides practice them. 

To be pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian at the same time is not a contradiction: it is a necessity.

*Peter Ryley is a reluctant retiree from adult and higher education. He spent fourteen years working at the University of Hull's now defunct Centre for Lifelong Learning before returning to Manchester. He continues to work as an independent scholar and author, writing mainly on the history of anarchist ideas. His book, Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-capitalism and Ecology in Late 19th and Early Twentieth Century Britain, was published by Bloomsbury in 2013. He also blogs intermittently at Fat Man on a Keyboard.

Back Late

Gardening and pet shop window, Wymondham

So, let me recount, as if for myself alone.

Last Sunday I went to Peripatetics, a Norwich group I joined a few years now, comprising professors, professionals and politicians (and the odd poet) who regularly give papers on a subject of their choice at a round of houses. I hadn't been for months, maybe more than a year, for various work-pressure or absence reasons, so felt I had almost fallen through the floor, but this time I could go and was particularly pleased because the paper was being given by Abby Innes of the LSE who specialises in Central European matters. This time though she talked about corruption in Britain, specifically through privatisation and politicans' connections with various large companies that could not be allowed to fail. Not being allowed to fail  meant they had to be propped up with public money so a move that was ostensibly designed to save the state (us) money was, in the end costing us much more and the money was landing up in the pockets of investors, directors and the politicans themselves many of whom sat on the boards of the same private companies that could not be allowed to fail. Figures were produced, chief among them that Britain, now number 17 on the list had fallen precipitously down the corruption index from number 12 and was in fact the fastest falling nation.

It was fine and passionate paper with very well informed discussion afterwards, rambling occasionally, but that is the way things work in any discussion.

Back very late.

The next day to Senate House, London for the board of Poetry London, my first meeting as a member. That's obviously board business, so no discussion here.

Back very late.

On Wednesday I woke late and had to dash to Cambridge for Debating Matters, the debating competition for schools organised by the redoubtable Institute of Ideas. I had agreed to be a judge - one of three on a panel - on one of the dates, having done so once before. This is an non-paying gig and it is fascinating. The debate I was given to judge was about smacking and whether it should be banned. You'd think the banners would win easily on emotion alone but the smackers had a more solid argument and kept their statistical powder dry so finished up winners. I like these counter-intuitive arguments where everyone is assumed to feel one way without discussion, but then people begin to doubt their own certainty because the issue has been intelligently argued from an unexpected yet obvious angle. Nothing is changed by the debate, of course, but the wit is sharpened and you can defend your corner better next time.  Great fun. The lesson is that too great a confidence in your rightness and moral superiority is a recipe for failure. Outside of the debate I would prefer not smacking, though I don't know whether I would go down the legal route to enforce it.

Back middling late.

On Thursday back down to London for a PBS board meeting. Again, this is confidential stuff.

Back very late again.

By Friday I am just about on my feet. Have books to review, another to read, arrangements to fix. I am off to India for a few days on 19 March. Possible trip to USA now postponed to next year. Various invitations to various places. I am reading in Peterborough on Wednesday night.

No doubt back late.

Holding notice: travels

Just a short notice to say the hiatus in posting is because since Sunday I have been to one concentrated meeting per day, travelling there, getting in late and out early. One more day of this then life should get back to normal. Some notes on aspects of those days might follow.

Poetry and Jokes 2: So where's the joke?

A ginnel

(I am writing this as a continuation of my last post because it was there to be written. It is also a distraction. I was given news of two deaths today, both of poets. Michael Baldwin was 83 and died suddenly at the top of the stairs. He was the first poet whose book I took off the school library shelf when I was seventeen. I should have been doing Physics. I met him only once some six or so years ago. Szilárd Borbély was just forty nine, an important, indeed vital, Hungarian poet, whose first novel (excerpt translated by Ottilia Mulzet in The White Review) created a sensation in Hungary last year.  He too died suddenly. Some of his work is in English. The Dispossessed might be. I never met him but I felt him as a writer. Two deaths in a day is hard, especially of one as young as Borbély.) 


1.
Not all jokes have to have punch lines but they have to have appropriate form and an ending that provokes laughter usually with a surprise or category confusion.

In telling the Jamaica joke in my previous post  I used this version.

- I say, I say, I say, my wife's gone to the West Indies. - Jamaica?- No, she went by herself.

Correspondent Gwilym remarked that the punchline in the version he knows goes: "No, she went of her own accord". 

There are reasons we might prefer Gwilym's version if only because my version, while revealing that the point of the joke is not her destination but her will still leaves open the possibility that the woman is travelling alone because she prefers to be without his company and that he has no say in it (a potentially melancholy situation for him), whereas Gwilym's version not only makes it clear that her destination was not the issue but that the woman has relieved her husband of the necessity of making her go by doing it herself (a happy resolution for him). You want something to happen then it happens of its own accord.

There would be other ways of bringing the joke to that same point, Here are three:

1. No, it was her decision.
2. No, she just did it.
3. As if she would listen to me!

Those, and many other  variations in the same spectrum would each have a slightly different value - some would be funnier than others - but the mechanism of the joke would remain the same. We are led up to the point Jamaica, then, using the pun we give the answer to the wrong question. The word Jamaica remains the vehicle of the joke.

There is, however, a different version waiting in the wings, in which the answer is No, Trinidad which may be funnier still because by offering a straight answer, it already assumes the joke and passes beyond it to a further and potentially superior kind of surprise by performing a kind of feint.

The feint as an act of grace. It's still just a joke but now we are getting somewhere. 


2
Yesterday I was writing a series of 15 plotlines for non-existent films and added a coda of plot lines - or rather scenes from - five more grounded, socially conscious films under the heading of Realismus. The last of was:

The door to a terraced house stands open. A hallway smelling of booze gives you a cheery thumbs up. A dog in clogs disappears down a ginnel.

The mechanism here is pretty clear. It consists of three parts. 

The first is a neutral but evocative statement (think Distant Voices, Still Lives) that could lead anywhere but faintly suggests something about poverty and the melancholy and tragedy associated with it. 

The second statement holds open that possibility with the boozy hallway (the drunken father returning from the pub) but proposes something absurd or possibly metaphorical as a development of it (the cheery thumbs up).  Halls don't have thumbs. The word cheery is a bit plonking, a touch ridiculous. However ridiculous the image there remains nevertheless the possibility that what we are reading is a kind of metaphor, the memory trace of a drunken character giving us the thumbs up. (It could have happened in Distant Voices, Still Lives). The potential for a tragic reading remains hanging by a thread but it hasn't vanished. 

Then a third image appears in the last statement that presents us with a plausible scene from a documentary about the condition of the North in which a dog (possibly a lurcher or a scruffy mongrel) vanishes down a passage between two houses. That might be straight enough as a comment but the dog in this case is supplied with clogs. Clogs too are associated with the subject area but are ridiculous when worn by dogs.

There is one more element here: the ginnel. The word means a passage between houses, and again is plausible given the context (the poet Matt Simpson introduced me to it in one of his poems set in Bootle). But there is something more than plausible in fact quite beautiful about it. It is beautiful because it allows the text a form of intimacy in terms of language, and not only because it has a soft choking sound but because its deep choking 'g' harmonises with the sounds, and rhymes, of dog and clog.

The result is complex. The text is not a joke though it has absurd, joky aspects. Nor is it a straight if minimalist prose poem about the social and emotional values of (beautiful) films like Distant Voices, Still Lives. If anything it mocks them while presenting them with funny yet, to my ears, lovely lines such as the one that ends, in this case, with a ginnel.

Beauty. Beauty is what I really want, and this is one way it may be possible to seek it. Beauty is this ambivalence: this teetering. It presents the imagination with an act of grace whose voids and horrors are real but deferred by familiar detail. I want to laugh but not at a joke, I want the kind of laughter elicited by beauty because there are odd places where grace might be found. And if I don't quite locate the beauty there is still the laughter and some of the grace.

I don't intend analysing, and certainly not praising, my own work. I write fast and by instinct but that doesn't mean I stop thinking about what might have happened and what might happen again. Writing such texts is, I find, exactly like writing poems - and beyond a joke. We are, I think, somewhere beyond Trinidad.

Poetry and jokes 1: I laughed so much at the beauty of it

- You know what a joke is? 
- Something that makes you laugh.
- Why does it make you laugh?
- Now you're getting serious.
- That's funny.

Very well then, a joke has to surprise. No surprise no joke. But it's a mean thing after all. A little break in the serious business of coping, suffering, striving, desiring. It's a distraction, a breather, at best a relief, a reversal, an inversion, a tiny carnival.

- I say, I say, I say, my wife's gone to the West Indies.
- Jamaica?
- No, she went by herself.

Simple stupid puns. Puns are wearisome. We laugh in our tired way. You have told us nothing new. Nothing significant hangs by this. It's harmless. A waste of time. Except, I mean, you gotta laff at something once in a while and it might as well be this.

But there can be something beautiful about a joke. Maybe it's the way the man tells them. Maybe it's his timing, his subtext, his persona, his look. Maybe he looks funny to start with.

On the other hand he may be working too hard. Don't you hate it when they work too hard? When you know they are straining and you feel sorry for them? You can't enjoy a joke by someone who is desperate to make you laugh. If you feel sorry for them they're not funny, just desperate. Maybe even contemptible.

Or he may be trying to ingratiate himself with you. You and I we think the same things, he implies. You can feel comfortable with me, so relax and laugh. My skill, says the man, lies in focusing our mutual feeling. See that dart in my hand? It's our dart. So Ben Elton in the early days of alternative comedy would just have to say the words, Mrs Thatcher, and everybody laughed. Because they were all agreed. Actually there's something pretty contemptible about that too.

How close jokes are to contempt.

*

I am more interested in poems than in jokes but I do think they have something in common. Both poem and joke take place against an unacknowledged but pervasive background of chaos devoid of something we call meaning, in other words a void. Both poem and joke deploy our our greatest, desperately fragile invention: a highly coded language in which it is possible to be graceful.

I don't mean just verbal or written language, but any language - including visual, musical, theatrical, gestural - that involves a coded performance and offers the possibility of synthesising a layered, historicised, related yet apparently incongruous set of significances.

Our performance holds us for a moment. The performance is more satisfying, more heroically graceful than anything in our lives of normal articulacy. The performance is stunning. Yet a void remains. The performance exists at a tension between grace and void.

A perfectly told joke has something of beauty in it. I don't mean only a crafted beauty like a beautiful vase or piece of furniture (although that too), but something more, something aesthetically other, almost naked in its clarity yet appearing as a phantom illuminated by sheet lightning.

A joke, like a poem,  has grace and a sense of the void. I don't mean - not exactly - the theatre of the absurd. Not the full Beckett, not a bucketful of Ionesco. I don't mean something clearly offering itself as an existential gesture. I mean something rather more like an ordinary household joke.

The beautiful is something to do with the balance between form and content at a point when the two become each other. The beautiful is a point  that is just about balancing on the wire of its constituents. It teeters there.

Between content and form, between an apprehension and its language.

This is not a meditation born of hard study. These are stray thoughts arriving as and how they do. They desperately need tidyingup. No time now.

It is the relationship betwen the funny and the graceful that I want to think about next time.

On Responding to Corrected Proofs: The God/Goddess at your Shoulder

Image source

For the last week or so I have been responding to corrections and questions to the first proof copy of a novel I translated and handed in last summer.

The editor is very careful and has marked up various typos and stylistic glitches as well as asking some excellent questions about chronology in the novel and checking whether this or that part of the text was in character for the person thinking or speaking.

My editor's care sometimes angers me, partly because I think she is generally right and I am annoyed with myself, and partly because she treats me as though I were the author of the text. I am not the author. I don't know everything the author knows. Why is this sentence this way? I don't know.

But that's an excuse. Here are some more excuses.

There are difficulties involved in the original because Hungarian has no gendered pronouns. This is always a problem because, as translator, you have to make decisions early, and aspects of the style depend on who seems to be doing the speaking. That difficulty is compounded in this case because the core relationship is between mother and daughter and the writing offers both points of view, occasionally within a single paragraph, so it can take some revision to work out who is speaking or thinking, mother or daughter. The mother is rarely referred to by name in the text.

There is a firm historical context but it is rarely given directly and some of the revisions consist of making dates agree and then aligning them with background events. The editor's eagle eye has spotted these and her helpful notes have to be tallied with my own earlier guesses. That takes an infuriating amount of time.

The author has clear ideas about location. She tells us how many rooms a house has but not how they are used or arranged. It has become an obsession of mine to figure out the precise layout. Two rooms are distinctly mentioned and, to some degree, described, but there is also a kitchen, a bathroom, and a hall. Does the kitchen count as the third room? The third room is never mentioned as such. A kitchen is.  What is the point of a third room if no one ever goes into it? There is a vaulted passage at the side of the house. Is the entrance to the house under the passage or at the back? Does it matter? The author knows something she did not feel necessary to reveal. Why do I have to reveal it?

There is a considerable amount of historical and geographical knowledge that I lack and I rely on friends in Hungary to fill me in.

Enough excuses.

It is, in fact, almost like writing the book. Slowly I have been writing the book and now I am correcting it with new perspectives. Some apparently odd things fall into place. A few still hover.

Psychologically I think I have it right. In terms of sensibility I am pretty sure I have it right. Those are my strengths, and I like to think I have a poet's feeling for language too. That should be my trump card. It's what gets the books the good reviews. Which is why the stylistic corrections hurt. Yes, in my hurry to get the book done, I had left some awkward sentences. That annoys me no end. That, at least, I should have nailed.

Then I remember: it has always been like this. I fly for long passages then I crash. Occasionally I lose control altogether.

I sometimes think that translation is a kind of spiritual discipline. You make the rods for your own back. With a little chastisement you are purified and can get back on the trail. You are the servant of the godlike master text.

But I am a writer, not a servant. I rebel, time and again. This is the last, I say. Or the next to the last. Or the next to the next to the last. Maybe just a few poems after this. But someone has to do the work and maybe it's me.

The fact is, like any writer, I need a good editor, a god or goddess substitute. And this one - stand up Ellie Steel at Random House - is the best yet. Thank you.

Two Poems on Weather

Two weather pieces by way of a Valentine's Day blessing. With a red rose, a glass of wine, a candle-lit meal, and darkness heading on its stormy way into the weekend. Hear it howl!


LISTENING TO THE WEATHER

Suddenly words poured
out of drains into gardens
too drenched to hear them.

Trees and bushes were
listening to the ursprache 
of rising thunder.

The lake strained to hear
the utterances of cloud
spreading over it.

The world was all ears,
the fields preparing their notes
for a bright future.

But when the wind spoke
loud and clear to a tumult
of rain, the rain heard.

And when the fields spoke
water and the sky bellowed
air, it was meaning.

People were measuring
the tides, calibrating loss
by the yard and mile.

There were the data
properly laid out and crunched
into neat pie-charts.

Language was effort.
The sky could say what it liked
with its dark grammar

of gesture and shift.
We were at cross-purposes
and longing for sun.

WHAT THE WIND SAID

1
When the wind blows the streets are discomfited, muttered the grass and bent its head. Blow on, dude, screamed the leaves.

2
The wind didn't know what to do with its hands so it stuck them in its pockets which were full of holes. The body is wind, said the wind.

3
The rain couldn't agree with the wind. They spoke different languages. Bring me an intepreter, howled the wind. Now hammer me out a deal.

4
The wind was taking refuge in an open mouth. It met a wind coming up. Human beings are disgusting, it said. I will work my way down deeper.

5
Each raindrop broke up on landing. Their scattered bones will shine, wrote the poet whose own bones did not add up to much.

6
Face it guys, said the wind, it's nature or nothing. It says so on the contract and no amount of rain will wash it away.

7
The wind was furious. There must be a cause, said the man in the wind. It's your flapping coat creating a draught, said his neighbour.

8
Got any wind, the addict asked the dealer. You can't afford it, the dealer replied, but I can get someone to blow in your ear.

9
There were several tribes of rain all claiming the same territory. A war ensued of which we have various disputed historical accounts.

10
This is revolution, screamed the wind. Like last week you mean, said the vagrant. No, the week before, said the wind.