French and British diseases

Somewhere between a million and two and a half million French people took to the streets across the country today to protest their government’s handling of the economy, bringing much of the country shuddering to a halt. From Britain, a country where Thatcher broke the backs of the unions twenty five years ago and presided over a decade of public rioting in the process, the French tendency to protest, riot and strike at the slightest encouragement can sometimes seem ridiculous, sometimes perplexing, sometimes inspiring and sometimes worrisome. Two years ago, most Brits would probably have looked with some condescension at the “French disease”. A year ago the French would have responded by looking back with equal condescension at the collapse of the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist model. Now, perhaps, the signs finally are indisputable that we’re all on the same side in this crisis.

Of course, each country’s vulnerabilities are different. The French are benefiting from a stronger currency than the nose-diving pound, though this naturally has an attendant impact on export competitiveness. Unemployment in France is likely to reach ten percent pretty soon. The country remains dominated by a system of education and high office-holding that is even more elitist than the Oxbridge model in Britain or the Ivy League in the US. Tight employment regulations mean that job creation has been and remains a problem. Yet these latest anti-Sarkozy protests are just the most recent indication that a generations-long hostility to attempts to open the market shows no sign of disappearing soon. As far as I can tell, employment deregulation is considered by most French people to be nothing more than an a cynical excuse to pay people less, employ them in worse jobs, and fire them sooner. Personally, this argument would make more sense to me if France – hit far less directly than Britain by the housing market or the financial crash – were not already haemorrhaging jobs.

In Britain, unemployment is lower – just over six percent – though it’s climbing fast, and to be honest it’s hard to trust the figures as so many people are reclassified by the government in different ways so as to get them down. And rising unemployment in Britain, as the eighties showed, brings its own forms of conflict and hostility over here. Whilst the French were indulging their national pastime today, the darker face of Britain showed itself too, as hundreds of workers at oil refineries in the North of England walked out after a construction contract was awarded to an Italian firm employing foreign workers.

It’s hard not to sympathise with workers who watch jobs get handed to outsiders instead of their own communities. Just as it’s hard not to sympathise with workers in France who are looking at redundancies, or deflationary pay settlements, or hours and benefits cuts. But we’re in a global economy now, and that means free movement of capital and labour, people creating jobs in other places if your country isn’t competitive, and bringing workers from other places to your country if it makes sense to do so.

Whatever the way out of this crisis turns out to be – and, as I say, it seems pretty certain that the path will be a little different in each country – there’s no doubt that we won’t find our way out unless we all start to realise we’re all in this together.

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Reason and conflict

A week in office, and Obama has already achieved some miraculous things. He’s reversed Bush’s ban on funding family planning institutions that practice abortions, loosened FOIA rules, instructed the joint chiefs to begin plans for a rapid draw-down of troops in Iraq, suspended the military tribunal system of terror suspects pending a full review, and insisted that Guantánamo will be closed within a year. Each of these decisions suggests that the promises he made in his campaign are not going to be backed away from, and that he’s not afraid to start with the big, tough things: which in truth is the only way to proceed (since political capital naturally declines over the course of a presidency).

Like most people, I am confident that we have a man in charge of the United States who knows what he’s doing, whose instincts are sound, and who has a much deeper affinity for different races, creeds and cultures than the vast majority of historical occupants of that esteemed office. I am confident that we may be witnessing the emergence of a truly first rate president.

However, in my last post I talked about a potential political challenge to Obamamania on the ‘culture wars’ front, and referenced Barney Frank’s criticism that Obama was too reluctant to face down ideological opposition. I suggested that the decision to invite Rick Warren might indicate he might “try and duck these issues”, though other comments – especially in his acceptance speech on election night – suggested the opposite.

I was then taken to task (thanks guys!) for implying that Warren’s invitation might be cynical, rather than a sincere attempt by Obama to respect his opponents and persuade them of the rightness of his ideas. (Though I hasten to add that I only said might...!) Very wisely, Peter said that we should assume Obama “believes he can persuade people such as Warren to his views through rational argument and civilized discourse.” And DB thinks that “that he isn't necessarily ‘pandering’ to social conservatives, rather opening their eyes to his point of view and perhaps seeking a concrete middle ground that we can all build on.”

It’s an interesting question, of course, how far we can be cynical about the politics of rhetoric. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing this post after watching Frost/Nixon last night!) But, certainly, evidence from week one suggests that Obama isn’t afraid of picking fights when he feels he needs to; and more generally there’s nothing to suggest he has misrepresented what he stands for (even if, like all politicians, he stressed different aspects of his character to different groups during the campaign). My critics are probably right, therefore, that we should assume the best of him until he gives us reason not to.

Meanwhile, we see Obama taking the decision to give his first presidential interview to Al-Arabiya. This gives further evidence that Obama is committed to engaging with people of different views and looking for progress through rational discourse; but it also shows he's not afraid of annoying the domestic networks and the American right by appearing at this point to give priority to the Muslim world.

So: don’t get me wrong, rational persuasion and faith in the possibility of reasoned discussion are exciting characteristics, some of the best bits of the Obama package for me. After all, reason’s what my job is all about – at least in theory! And Frank surely can just as easily be criticised for being too eager to turn issues towards conflict as Obama could for looking for compromise. Instinctively, politically, I’m with Obama on this one.

But any virtue taken too far can become a vice. Clearly a politician who puts too much faith in persuasion runs the risk of obscuring realities of antagonism. I offer two examples to mull over, from two former presidents considered of the top grade (where Obama wants to end up): not, I hasten to add, to present any firm or fixed argument or deterministically to suggest that Obama will repeat these mistakes so much as to raise more questions about this complex and intriguing question of the line between persuasion and conflict...

1. President Wilson, certain of the wisdom of his rationality and rightness of his cause – the cause being democracy – took the decision to invade Mexico in 1914, occupy the port of Veracruz, and in so doing help defeat General Victoriano Huerta (the dictator of Mexico who had usurped power in collusion with the US ambassador appointed by the previous, Republican, administration of William Howard Taft). All the anti-Huerta (‘constitutionalist’) leaders in Mexico warned him not to, telling him that an American intervention, even one designed to promote democracy, would be seen as an invasion and would only strengthen Huerta’s image as a defender of the Mexican nation again the imperialist might of the yanquis. But Wilson believed that he could appeal over the heads of the constitutionalist leadership to the Mexican people themselves, and that they would recognise the sincerity of his intentions when they heard his words. What happened? The invasion was resisted by Mexicans from the highest to the lowest level of society. The whole nation of Mexico was outraged. Huerta gained some support; even some constitutionalists considered the possibility of uniting with him in a wider war against the United States; and Wilson was written down permanently in the histories in Mexico as one of the great imperial demons. (A similar pattern was to haunt Wilson’s attempts to go over the heads of the Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia.)

2. In 1933, as one of his first acts in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed in meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov to end the sixteen year American policy of non-recognition towards Soviet Russia. The major stumbling block to recognition was the influence of communists within the United States. Roosevelt persuaded Litvinov to sign an agreement that Soviet Russia would refrain from interfering in American domestic politics. Roosevelt was so confident of his ability to persuade Litvinov to agree with him that even remarked at one point that he thought he had got the Soviet Foreign Minister to doubt his atheism! What happened? The Soviets continued to behave exactly as anyone – supportive or not – would have expected them to behave towards a bourgeois, capitalist government; rightly or wrongly, they continued to use their links to the American Communist Party to benefit themselves if and when they needed to. And over the course of the next decade the American right came to believe that the New Deal had betrayed the country by refusing to stand up to communism. (The same argument was to haunt FDR’s legacy at Yalta.)

Now I don’t mean to imply that either of these situations have direct parallels to today. Neither do I mean to imply that a more confrontational position would necessarily be any better; no-one who's lived through the past eight years can believe that (hence the contrary examples chosen of one intervention and one agreement). And perhaps you can paint both examples as actually being as much about a failure of communication as an excess of faith in it. Wilson’s failure in the first example was a refusal to listen; FDR’s in the second was an unwillingness to tell the truth to the American people (the truth being that the communist party was likely to remain in the orbit of Soviet influence, but that America in the midst of a depression had much bigger fish to fry).

But I nevertheless think that both examples also suggest that we have to be careful not to assume that persuasion can cure all ills and end all conflicts. Some clashes are there, and they're real. Some people will always have different values and interests. Not everyone can agree on everything. And sometimes trying to deny this fact can turn out to be more damaging for the cause of progress than a mature recognition of difference.

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Are the culture wars over?

The Republican domination of American politics in the past thirty years was built on three core planks: fiscal conservatism (meaning tight monetary policy, deregulation and privatisation); foreign policy aggression (the party that ‘defends America’); and social conservatism.

The Obama victory occurred because the financial crisis played havoc with this calculation in all manner of ways. First, the Wall Street elites abandoned their commitment to keeping government out of business when they discovered that government was the only thing that could keep them in business. Meanwhile, the public exposure of corporate greed made the public as a whole question its commitment to free markets uber alles. And – in the longer term, over a decade – the Democrats became increasingly dominated by centrists who accepted many of the more sensible principles of fiscal responsibility, or at least appeared more sensible than the Bush Republicans were on the matter.

Not only did the financial crisis mean that the importance of items two and three on the list was sharply reduced, but it also put the failure of eight years of aggressive foreign policy into stark relief. Money that should have been going on constructive growth projects creating jobs and businesses in America was lining the pockets of Bechtel and KBR, or being poured down the sink through the manufacture of self-destroying bombs and bullets; and yet the product of all this ridiculous spending was a world that was more and more suspicious of American power.

This left cultural conservatism as the sole plank on which to build a Republican majority, and it starkly failed to work in the last election. Partly this was because the Obama campaign did a good job of avoiding any number of red flag issues; and partly because in the context of the looming destruction of the economy ‘values’ issues came to be depicted as little more than a cynical attempt by politicians to sucker the electorate: a bait and switch of the worst kind. And once cultural politics started looking like a political tactic, it suddenly became counter-productive ... by definition, since the essence of the argument was that it was a conflict over sincerely held values.

But there might be a deeper trend going on here as well: namely, that it seems that the world has moved on since the splits of the 1960s. Andrew Sullivan was on the television the other day over here in the UK, and argued that people just don’t care about these issues as much as the activists – that there was a basic consensus emerging in America on cultural issues. Namely, most people don’t like abortion but they don’t want people going to prison for it; and most people aren’t gay but don’t really care if other people are. To some extent the role of activists in the structure of primary voting had disguised how far the public as a whole had moved on on this issue.

So here’s my question: is it really true that the culture wars are dying out? In Europe, so many of these things are such non-issues that it’s hard to credit their persistence in the US. But they've lasted a hundred years already. And given that culture wars remain – for the next four or more years at least – the one part of the Republican triumvirate of power that may still hold traction with some voters, it’s an important question whether the consensus has genuinely shifted toward social liberalism or whether social conservatism is just in hiding whilst the maelstrom of economic crisis and foreign policy failure drowns it out…

What makes me wonder was a recent feature in the New Yorker on congressman Barney Frank – a figure heavily involved in the horse-trading over the financial bailout but known to many Americans simply as the openly gay congressman. Frank complained that Obama’s decision to place Rick Warren on the inaugural programme reflected a real problem: the new president's reluctance to admit that ideological differences can’t always be negotiated away, that sometimes they need to be confronted. He also laid out his legislative agenda for the forthcoming year: “We’re going to do three things in Congress,” he told me. “First, a hate-crimes bill—that shouldn’t be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”

Obama’s reference in his acceptance speech to tolerance for straights and gays suggests he may support this agenda; but his invitation to Rick Warren suggests that he might try and duck these issues, since they offer an opportunity to revive cultural conservatism. What he decides, and how the public reacts, therefore, could turn out to be a critical underlying issue of his administration. Compare FDR, for instance: the first term was so dominated by economics that the old fashioned version of the culture wars (anti-communism) took a back seat. But it came back resurgent by 1938. And on the even bigger issue - an anti-lynching law - FDR ducked the question entirely, knowing that it held the potential to split his party.

So, two questions:

• Are the culture wars really dead? Has America moved on about this stuff?
• Will the desire of the Democratic left to win these victories for personal rights provide a stick with which to beat Obama in the way that gays in the military was used against Clinton?

These two questions might prove to be very important indeed…

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How not to conduct an interview about Gaza

I have just seen a quite astonishing interview on the Channel 4 news with Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government (I don’t know what his precise office is). It followed a long report on weaponry used by the IDF during the Gazan war, which alleged that the Israelis had been using:

• White Phosphorous bombs, which disperse this highly flammable substance that sticks to buildings and people and burns in contact with oxygen. It is primarily a tool for creating smoke screens, but is highly dangerous when dispersed in areas with high densities of human beings. Burns from white phosphorous can continue to smoke for hours, apparently. This substance was used by the US military in Iraq, though they originally denied it.
• DIME bombs, which are designed for highly focused small scale explosions. Dense Inert Metal Explosive bombs have extremely small blast radii and are therefore useful for targeting specific individuals without causing widespread destruction to buildings, and so on. There are allegations they have long term carcinogenic effects.
• Flechette bombs, which include hundreds of small, anti-personnel arrows – similar in principle, though far less damaging than the cluster bombs that have recently been banned by most civilized countries (though not the US).

You can read the accompanying internet material to the report here.

The reporter took great care to state that none of these weapons are themselves illegal under the Geneva Convention, though it is possible that their use in civilian areas could constitute a war crime. To substantiate the allegations that these bombs had been used, the reporter included: footage of white phosphorous burning on a block of cement, footage of flechettes stuck in walls, interviews with UN and Amnesty officials, testimony from a number of local people – including a woman who had burns pretty much from head to foot, and told how a bomb had killed her husband and five children – and comments made by a weapons specialist who formerly used to work for the US military.

So, cue the interview. The Israeli spokesman begins by stating that the IDF takes all such allegations seriously and is conducting its own internal investigations of these incidents. So far, so good: though, being clearly not a denial and being a cynic, I naturally to take this as an admission of guilt. That is, that the IDF was using such weapons.

When asked to comment on the appropriateness of using such weapons in civilian areas – something that would constitute a war crime – Regev began to get angry. I’m afraid I don’t have a verbatim account, but he argued two main points:

1. These were not civilian areas, since Hamas had occupied them and was conducting its war from them. Civilians were unfortunate casualties of Hamas’ willingness to put them in harm’s way and therefore not the responsibility of the IDF.
   
2. You cannot trust the testimony of Palestinians making these allegations, since they are living in an authoritarian/totalitarian (he used both words fairly interchangeably) state in Gaza, analogous to North Korea. If they speak the truth to reporters, they will be shot by Hamas for doing so, so the stuff you are getting in your reports are lies.

It really doesn’t take a genius to pick holes in this. The two arguments completely contradict each other. If the first is true, then the bombs were dropped, so the second one isn’t; and vice versa. The interview then responded by pointing to the fact that the testimony from the Palestinians was only a minor part of the report, and that there was clear video and expert evidence as well. At this point, Regev began to argue that the reporter had failed to correctly report these matters and again that it was impossible to uncover the truth whilst the authoritarian hand of Hamas was in control, and that actually the bombs could have been dropped by Hamas.

The interviewer then asked if this meant that he was saying that these attacks were perpetrated by Hamas. Regev got angrier, said that the interviewer was putting words into his mouth and demanded that he admit that Gaza under Hamas was an authoritarian regime about three or four times. He was so aggressive that the interviewer simply called off the interview and moved on to the next item.

I don’t think that it’s particularly necessary for me to make much comment about this. I suppose it’s a testament to the power of warfare to make people irrational that an official spokesman can (a) lose his cool so destructively; and (b) present such obviously counter-productive arguments. But no-one watching it can have reached any conclusions but that the IDF has committed war crimes and that they know it.

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People power: Immediate thoughts on the inaugural

Well, all in all a pretty impressive ceremony. I can’t say Rick Warren would be my first choice, but I can see the ‘unity’ logic behind it. Aretha was great (especially the little ‘Georgia’ riff). I’m not sure you could imagine a better quartet (though the annoying commentators on the BBC talked through half of the piece.) And Obama’s speech was strong, sensible, thoughtful.

No-one who’s followed him at all can have been all that surprised by its content, but I was certainly impressed once again by his considered construction and delivery. Sounds silly, but I was struck that this is a man who’s willing to use long sentences... or at least longer ones than the seven-word norm that’s the usual limit in the sound-bite era. Obama expresses his intelligence with an unashamed clarity, doesn’t apologise for being smart, and proceeds from a certain faith that the public will respond to someone who doesn’t assume they’re stupid, rather than hate them for being pretentious or uppity. Hopefully his example will encourage more politicians to have a little faith in people, to stop talking down to them all the time. And the George Washington imagery at the end, I thought, was great. An interesting choice, given that we all expected more Lincoln and FDR than revolutionary war. But it worked well in the context of the central point about national sacrifice, expressed elsewhere in his remarks condemning an era of greedy self-interest by elites, an unwillingness to make tough choices by the public, and of a refusal to compromise principles for expediency. I think this ceremony has, in one shot, put back the ‘Bush legacy’ project at least two years!

All that said, and all praise due President Obama, it was Reverend Lowery who took the biscuit for me. When he took the microphone to talk, the authentic voice of the civil rights movement finally arrived, a voice that guides much of Obama’s politics, but isn’t the quite same as him, and – if truth be told – transcends his experience in its multitudes. A friend of mine said to me that Lowery’s voice was like a gravelly jazz trumpet; his words resonated along the Mall and back through the decades to MLK’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial; he was the one person truly to engage the ceremonialism on the steps of the Capitol with the people who watched all around: through humour, and through the call and response at the end of his benediction.

After all, the marvel of this moment was only partly about the new president, Obama, it was also about the desire of so many people to witness the fulfilment of the promise of the civil rights movement, two million people coming together to share their faith in ideals higher and broader than self-interested money-grabbing, suspicion of difference, or fearfulness of threats. Obama expressed it, but Lowery was the one who put it into practice. Amen!

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Time for the economy to get real

In anticipation of the incoming administration, the long-running TARP debates are building up once again. This first few weeks of Obamaworld are an essential period for the new president to establish his intentions and reputation, so we should expect to see dramatic news and dramatic spending, probably before the end of January. We might perhaps even see something to compare to FDR’s first few weeks of office, when he shut down the banks for four days, recapitalized them, and effectively purged the national economy of much of its lingering panic.

In this context, the pundits are out in force lobbying for their own particular solutions to the problem of credit collapse. Paul Krugman in the New York Times explains how many banks are zombies – walking around like they were alive, but in practice dead already. The only solution, he argues, is effective nationalisation modelled on the Resolution Trust Corporation – which, despite its ability to get people quaking in their boots – means relatively little beyond admitting how things already are: the government is the only thing keeping these businesses afloat, anyway, so why not admit that they belong to the government?

Robert Reich, meanwhile, echoes this point in all but name, though with perhaps a slightly more vengeful tone. Without mentioning nationalisation, he demands that any kind of aggregator bank – that is, a state owned bank taking toxic debt off the balance sheet, as Hank Paulson had said he was going to do months back – issue no dividends, strictly control compensation to executives whilst demanding money back from overcompensated execs from 2005 to 2008, and focus on issuing new bank loans to the exclusion of pretty much any other commercial practice.

Pick your favourite prescription from this and others. But don’t expect any solution to be fun. We can’t get out of this mess by reinflating bubbles, and that means that the consequences of low levels of saving and enormous national indebtedness will ultimately feed through to the real economy in one way or another.

In its latest effort to restore good credit conditions over here, the British government has committed another enormous sum of money this week to supporting the banks (several hundred billion; proportionally, an amount that makes the current US commitments seem small; and a very strong indicator that we'll see some crazy numbers coming from the White House this week). The immediate result: bank share prices collapsed across the board as traders realised that the real value of the banks being supported had sunk to an effective level of zero; and rumours spread that the credit rating of government bonds could be downgraded to a level lower than that of many multinational corporations. Essentially this means that people in the know consider it a possibility (not necessarily a likelihood, but a possibility) that the British government could even be forced to default on its debts.

This is a sure-fire case of the real economy telling the strange world of high finance to wake up. These capital injections don’t come from nowhere: they either come from inflationary practices (that is, printing new money), or from debt (which, at this level, means higher and higher interest rates in the long term). And inflation and high interest rates? Although deflation is clearly the worry at the moment, in the longer term this could make the stagflation of the 1970s pale into insignificance.

In the end, we have to get real and apply some basic home economics to the international economy. Things will only get better when we end up with a system where real national wealth bears some relation to our capacity to produce, and our standards of living match up with our ability to save and invest in the future. This means that it’s not just important that Obama spends money, but that he spends it wisely and constructively, in a way that stimulates America’s future productivity without wrecking its future ability to save and pay off its debts.

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My political schizophrenia

A battle is raging in me as the inauguration day approaches. In the short term, I know which side will win as the excitement and pageantry begins, but in the long term it’s a real bind...

Alex 1 says that this is the dawn of a new era. Let’s say that we’re far from bottoming out in this economic crisis. Let’s say also that some of these ridiculous spending plans are going to turn out to be a bad idea in the long term, even if there’s no immediately obvious alternative. Let’s also accept that Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan, and who knows where else are going to continue to be intractable problems. None of these are things that one man, however articulate and judicious, can fix, anyway.

But despite all that we can be certain of something: that Obama in the White House means that Dubya’s left, that for the first time in eight years the guy driving the bus actually knows how to operate a stick shift. So as much as I, like most of us, are going to miss having someone so appallingly incompetent around every day, someone to get together and beat up on, it really is the dawning of a new day in Obamaland.

Alex 2 is nervous that Alex 1 is getting just a little too optimistic about politics. All that ‘dare to dream’ stuff is just marketing, remember? The best thing about it is that a team that’s great at organizing a campaign may well be great at organizing other things, too. The big man is still a politician in the end, and that means compromising with the powers that be, especially in congress and the party system. Don’t buy into this idea that a new face topping an old system will somehow stop the United States government from pursuing its crazy war on drugs in Colombia, for instance. Power is inescapable and eternal, and justice is subject to it.

As a Brit, it’s hard not to be tempered by the experience of Tony Blair – a charismatic, disciplined and talented individual who was able to pull together the fractious elements of the Labour party through a determination to win, pull them towards the centre of politics, and win a record number of elections for them by inspiring people to have faith in his political project. I remember the day after the Labour party landslide in May 1997, the sun was shining just a little bit brighter. And then I remember how half a decade in power was enough to give Blair such a sense of his own wisdom that he pulled Britain into a conflict that the majority of the public opposed, in a manner – through spin and deception – that, irrespective of the justice of the invasion – has tarnished our country irredeemably.

I was never as enthusiastic about Blair in the first place as I am about Obama. (Even if I do have some doubts about the rump of the Democratic party.) Obama has a lot more power to act than Blair did, because we’re talking about the US, not the fifty-first state. And I was mostly excited in ’97 because the Tories, who had been driving our public services into the ground for twenty years, were out, as that the Labour party was in. So Alex 1 counters that Alex 2 is being just a little bit cynical. But Alex 2 is too immersed in his thoughts to listen...

I know what Obama would say. That’s what right-wing politics is about. You run everything badly and that damages peoples’ faith in the possibility of making positive changes through government. Now’s the time for faith, to redeem the potential to act. Well, I hope you’re right, big man... but Alex 2 still has that nagging doubt lurking in the back of his half of the brain...

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Conflicting visions of Gaza

With the clock ticking down inexorably, it’s sorely tempting to begin posting this year with a comment on Bush’s final limp from office, or perhaps a bit of speculation about presidential pardons (and a comparison to Clinton’s last, lowest moment in office). Or an attempt to take stock of the past eight years and draw some general conclusions. Equally, it might make sense to say something about the continuing travails of the global economy or the nonsense that is Burris-gate. But in truth these'll have to wait. In this New Year it’s very hard to avert one’s eyes once more from further pain and suffering in the Middle East. A friend of mine is a reservist in the IDF – I can’t say I agree with his politics, but it was difficult to watch his obviously conflicted emotions as he was called up and, on New Year’s Eve, no less, preparing to pack and go off to war: an experience that most of the rest of us have no experience of, certainly not me.

I don’t presume to have much to say on the events in Gaza, in fact I think my only qualification is a reluctance to jump into judgement on the matter. I’m about as informed as most of us who pontificate at length on the issue: which is to say, not that much. But I have been struck by one thing in the past week or so that might be of note, something which was perhaps brought into relief coincidentally by reading Philip Roth’s excellent book, The Counterlife, over Christmas (in which he imagines a series of different experiences of being Jewish, in America, in Europe and in Israel, and meditates on their implications). And that thing is quite how dramatic the difference is in the terms of debate between the United States and Europe on this issue.

Last week Jon Stewart received a lot of attention, and no small amount of praise by posing the question on The Daily Show of whether it was possible to criticise Israeli policy in Gaza without being accused of anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Barack Obama returned to AIPAC and told them that he empathised with their need for homeland and security, trying to make it clear, without saying it in so many words, that he was not about to condemn their actions in Gaza (as much as I suspect that an Obama administration would have firmly prohibited this invasion). A trenchant, ritualistic coidentification with Israel as the only truly democratic state in the Middle East seems the default position in the US, with critiques like Stewart's operating in response to this mainstream. Not that I'm saying there aren’t lots of critics of Israeli policy in the States, or a growing number of them, just that the norm, the centre of debate, is a default defence of Israel, and that’s the point of divergence amongst people of differing political views.

The difference, at least in my experience, in Europe is striking. News reports focus on the deaths caused by Israeli bombing, cover the anti-Israel marches in London (without giving attention to similar, pro-Israel marches), and tend to be more nuanced and subtle in their assessment of the conflicts within Palestinian communities (Hamas, Fatah, etc.) than toward the many different Israeli groups (or, indeed, between the diaspora and Israeli Jews). Amongst left-wingers over here, the default assumption is a blanket condemnation of Israel as an illegitimate, stolen state; comparisons between Israeli policy and the Holocaust, or the Warsaw Ghetto are made surprisingly often; and people are fiercely critical of the idea of the Holocaust operating as a foundational myth for the Israeli state (as if the Magna Carta or the American Revolution is somehow a more legitimate basis). Again, this is not to say that there aren’t wide divergences in attitude (in truth, I think support for Israel has probably grown in proportion to a growing hostility to Islam in the past twenty years; and the government in the UK continues to pursue a careful middle road on the issue); the point is that the default position for debate, from which discussion emerges, is one that is suspicious of, and hostile to, Israel.

I never used to have much time for the argument that this was about anti-Semitism in Europe. But in this latest event, even though what’s happening in Gaza is horrendous, I’m beginning to be not so sure. The attacks on Israel from the European left seem to be couched in such black and white, absolutist, terms that it’s very hard not to think that at least part of it comes from prejudice rather than politics, and therefore that at least part of it is a troublesome, deeply hidden and darkly civilized form of inherited anti-Semitism which is bound up with and masquerades as straightforward left-wing politics, and denies itself (prejudice being perfectly compatible with self-delusion and a rhetorical commitment to the Enlightenment).

So it seems to me that the question Jon Stewart raised – can one criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic? – is really a profound one, because it has quite different meanings in Europe and America because of these very different political contexts. (Perhaps the only option is to organize a massive exchange programme, where the best instincts of Americans can be brought to bear in Europe, and vice versa!) In the interim, people will continue to die in Gaza, and a solution – an understanding, even – to this terribly complex and depression environment of hatred, remains far away.

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Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! Holidays and then a bout of seasonal flu has made for a rather stony silence on these pages in the past few weeks, but I hope to be back posting again this week...

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