A few days ago I saw this rather disturbing video of a man at the Bristol Occupation explaining that “the Rothschilds and Zionists want to build a new world order”, and getting an incredibly warm reception from the crowd. One of my friends commented:

“There’s so much of this about at the moment and otherwise nice, well-meaning people who usually try to be anti-racist don’t see it. Time for a basic ‘what is antisemitism’ FAQ thing?”

Well quite. And while anti-Zionism is sometimes wrongly condemned as anti-Semitism, it is also not unknown for the term zionist to be used as a euphemism for Jew. Working out when that is the case is not exact science, but I suggest that the following checklist might be of use in dissecting some of the rhetoric.

Does Zionism oppress the Palestinians, or does it cause pot-holes in your road and make your milk turn sour?

Zionism obviously does oppress the Palestians, and one would expect Israel to be blamed for their suffering. However when “Zionists” are blamed for things unrelated to the Middle East – like, for example, the financial crisis (1) – one is entitled to wonder what exactly is meant by the term. Is that person really saying that a category of people, dilineated only by their support for Israel, got together to redistribute the world wealth towards financiers. It’s worth taking the sentence, and replacing the word “Zionists” with “Israel supporters”. If the sentence you are left with makes no fucking sense whatsoever, then it’s probably worth thinking carefully about what exactly is being said.

Equally, the right-wing Venezuelan opposition leader Capriles Radonski is not trying to oust the government because he is a “Zionist”. Nor is the opposition lead by the “jewish zionist bourgioesie”.  Indeed, I would speculate that support for, or opposition towards, Israel is not one of the major social and political cleavages in Venezuela.

Do Zionists want to build a “New World Order”?

No. Many of them want to royally screw over the Palestinians and maintain Israel as a Jewish ethnic state. And yes some supporters of Israel, like supporters of other causes, do seek to influence their local government specifically in relation to its policy towards Israel. The idea that “Zionists” have a comprehensive plan for world domination is completely barmy, except from the perspective of longstanding Jewish conspiracy rubbish.

Who is being fingered as a “Zionist”?.

When you hear a bunch of prominent people being described as a “zionist cabal”, it is worth checking who is being talked about. Are  these people particularly known for what they’ve said about Israel? Or has the person speaking or writing just selected a bunch of politicians with Jewish sounding names.

The google test.

This one should be done with care, and with the understanding that it does not yield definitive answers.  But it is sometimes worth googling the formulations you encounter and seeing what turns up. Googling “Zionists + settlements” or “Zionists + occupation” tends to yield a rather different crowd to googling “zionists + new world order”.

CAVEAT:  Coincidences do occur. Over the centuries Jews have been accused quite a range of things, and it is plausible that some criticisms made of Israel may innocently co-incide with pre-existing anti-semitic myths. A case in point is the killing of children. It is an objective fact that, in the course of occupying the west bank and Gaza, Israel does kill children. It is also true that across the world, opponents of oppressive governments highlight their inhumanity, by noting the killing of children – and sometimes people are too ready to represent these accusations against the Israeli government as a kind of reborn blood libel.
And finally….

The moron test:
If somebody objects to the term “anti-Semite” because “Arabs are semites too”, this might not indicate anything about their political beliefs, but it does suggest that they are a fucking moron. The meaning of words is established culturally and historically. If all words were interpretted by stripping them down to their etymological routes, the english language would sound very strange indeed.

(1) “The Credit Crunch: A Zionist Accident” was the title of a chapter in book recently put out by  ”progressive publisher”. Zero books = scum.

To contact Reuben email reuben@thethirdestate.net

Following Obama’s 45 minute speech about the Middle East and North Africa, I am left predictably bored by it all. We were told the U.S. would be “turning a new page” regarding its relationship with these states which are experiencing great upheaval right now.

Hillary Clinton took the stage first and said “new” about 38 times and left. President Obama then stepped on and began an emotional narrative regarding the rightful internal overthrow of (previously supported) dictators (who he didn’t apologise for supporting). “It should come as no surprise”, he gushed. It didn’t.

Obama then explained that America’s interests are not contrary to the peoples hopes and ambitions in these troubled countries, but are intrinsically tied to them, even inferring that they depend on them, as we will see later. Iraq was mentioned as if were a previous drunken adventure they have now learnt from. Still, he insisted that Iraq projected a “promise of democracy […] a multi-ethnic, a multi-sectarian democracy”. Still only a promise? This after 8 years and hundreds of thousands dead. I think the invasion was based on a promise too.

He woke from the malaise and was sterner when mentioning Syria. He declared that Assad and his regime must either “lead the transition [to reform and democracy], or get out of the way”. What is mystifying is how there is even an option here as Assad has already killed hundreds of protestors, much like Gaddafi, who is now branded an illegitimate tyrant. A bit of convenient inconsistency then. Moreover, “get out of the way” was not his most detailed and explanatory comment regarding Syria since the uprising. Softening again, he spoke of Bahrain as a “long standing partner” who had a legitimate right to exact the rule of law and maintain its sovereignty and integrity. He blamed a lot of the strife on Iranian influence, but did say the Bahraini regime must conduct a dialogue with the protestors, and can’t if they keep throwing them in prison. It seems the Saudi tanks were incredibly well disguised.

Moving on to Egypt and economic policy, he said that America were prepared to “relieve up to $1bn in debt” Egypt owed, and “ensure $1bn was made available for borrowing” for various infrastructure projects. This was seemingly part of an economic plan which involved, as quoted, “trade, not just aid” to the countries in the region. His idea was that “protectionism [would give] way to openness”. Convenient if you’re America, I’d say. You know, after you are done with being protectionists over your own economy in the past in order for it to develop so it doesn’t become destabilised by flaky and unreliable foreign investment. But nevermind that.

After all of these periphery, drawn out comments, Obama came to the meat of the speech everyone was waiting for – Israeli/Palestinian relations and America’s role in and around them. As both peoples become more shrill in their indignation, the U.S. has not provided anything resembling an assertive turning point in the mediation of the affair:

But what America and the international community can do is state frankly what everyone knows: a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples. Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people; each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace.

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine.

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

Now, this prelude to anything meaningful already positions the Israeli argument as the driving one. Obviously, Israel will be controlling the conversation because it is already a state and any negotiations are negotiations regarding Israeli concessions. However, calling for a “viable Palestine” shelves any notion that one has been dreamt of yet by the Palestinians, and damages their bargaining power when the U.N. General Assembly convene later this year in what could be a historic moment in this war of attrition.

The lacklustre speech slowly unravelled its deceptive purpose:

These principles provide a foundation for negotiations. Palestinians should know the territorial outlines of their state; Israelis should know that their basic security concerns will be met. I know that these steps alone will not resolve this conflict.

Two wrenching and emotional issues remain: the future of Jerusalem, and the fate of Palestinian refugees. But moving forward now on the basis of territory and security provides a foundation to resolve those two issues in a way that is just and fair, and that respects the rights and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians.

This is important on two counts. Firstly, Obama positions the issues of territory and security before the issues of Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees right of return. What remains to be seen is if these issues do in fact come before the more sensitive ones he has placed afterwards. Is there even a solution to security and borders without addressing the massive hurdles of Jerusalem and the right of return for Palestinian refugees? It is almost a non sequitur. This subtle infraction will have neo-cons and the American Israeli lobby sit back contented with the speech. By way of this deft positioning, Obama has reiterated U.S. hostility towards Palestinian aspirations by delegitimising the seemingly inevitable declaration of Palestinian statehood in September, and harming the on-going reconciliation of Fatah and Hamas, which is key to it and proves quite a problem to an Israeli dominated discourse.

Secondly, Obama has solidified the role of the U.S. in these negotiations. By identifying the conditions of peace and stability as such, he is putting a deflated ball back in the court of the Palestinians, while “unshakably” supporting Israel as it “must defend itself” and its borders. All of this can only be said and done from a position of leadership and demonstrative power. The U.S. has strategically reasserted this. As we have seen with the recent and isolated veto in the Security Council relating to Israeli settlements, the American administration is not changing its policy or its position in this conflict and will remain a staunch defender of Israeli interests.

Hearing “new this” and “new that” repeatedly at the beginning by a hype-woman does nothing to frame the speech as something it isn’t. It was anything but new. What it was was another dressing down of Palestinian aspirations with eyes firmly fixed on September.

Killing 19 people is not actually particularly easy. The Israeli army have defended the actions of their commandos by suggesting that they faced  violent resistance. But the point is surely this: these heavily armed soldiers had no legal or moral right to be there in the first place.

As Andy says over at Socialist Unity, “the boarding of a ship under the Turkish Flag in international waters at dark by commandos was the first act of violence.” And indeed this is true. Israeli commandos were in fact hijacking a ship –  in the dead of night – in international waters. And hijacking is the correct word, for they had no authority to do so. The fact that Israel has unilaterally declared a blockade of Gaza does not alter this. Nobody recognises Israel’s sovereignty over Gaza. If Iran  declared a blockade of Britain, this would not give their soldiers the right to take over ships in the north Atlantic. And it would not compel the crew of those ships to acquiesce in such acts of aggression.

I can quite imagine that the Israeli commandos on the ship feared for their lives. But then, I too would be putting myself in danger if I attempted to physically take over ship sailing in international waters. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I wouldn’t do such a thing – along with the fact that I would be crap at it.

What amazes me is the extent to which Israel appears incapable of even rational self interest. Lowering commandos onto a ship from a helicopter in the dark of night is the kind of high risk strategy you might expect in the case of a hostage situation or terrorist threat.  The IDF employed a strategy that maximised the possibility of bloodshed, and therefore the fallout with its most important regional ally – Turkey. Considering the gung ho attitude Israel takes to EU/Nato nationals operating in the glare of the media, one can only imagine what it what it is like to be an ordinary Palestinian under Israeli occupation.

It’s quite extraordinary, given how offensive some of their content is, what the BBC chooses to apologise for. Invite a fascist on flagship programming; proud commitment to free speech. Let a comedian tell a joke about appalling human rights violations; a step too far.

So three cheers for Frankie Boyle for not just objecting, in eloquent and passionate terms, but using the opportunity to raise the plite of the Palestinian people.

In case you missed it, the jokes in question are: ‘I’ve been studying Israeli Army Martial Arts. I now know 16 ways to kick a Palestinian woman in the back. People think that the Middle East is very complex but I have an analogy that sums it up quite well. If you imagine that Palestine is a big cake, well…that cake is being punched to pieces by a very angry Jew.’

The situation in Palestine seems to be, in essence, apartheid. I grew up with the anti apartheid thing being a huge focus of debate. It really seemed to matter to everybody that other human beings were being treated in that way. We didn’t just talk about it, we did things, I remember boycotts and marches and demos all being held because we couldn’t bear that people were being treated like that.

Last week’s Jewish Chronicle ran a story on the Board of Deputees of British Jews’ new campaign to instigate a so-called “buycott” in which, British Jews are encouraged to buy Israeli-produced goods. This is a response to the boycott of Israeli goods that has been hanging around anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian campaigns since the early-2000s, but which has really been stepped up in the last year or two. We now see whole organisations springing up around the idea of a boycott, protesters performing non-violent direct actions in supermarkets, and institutions taking on the boycott, yet it remains one of the most divisive strategies of pro-Palestinian campaigning, and therefore demands at the very least further discussion.

Many of the arguments in favour of a boycott seem to go along the lines of “erm, well it worked with South Africa in the 1980s.” In fact, looking through a website such as Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, one is simply stunned by the constant references to South Africa. Words like “apartheid” and “Bantustans” are bandied around, just to convince you all the more that this is “another South Africa” and therefore the solutions must be the same. Ok, well there are good arguments for calling Israel an apartheid regime, but what is clear is that there are significant differences between what happened in South Africa and that the answer cannot be justified by the simple transposition of what has worked elsewhere. Furthermore, such a transposition seems, to me, to lead to a clouding of the issues at stake.

There are also lefties who have made arguments against boycott strategies: Some see it as challenging workers in Israel, and alongside this the call for an academic boycott has been massively unpopular with the political centre in Britain. There have also been arguments that academic and cultural boycotts challenge the most radical and dissident members of Israeli society. In terms of a comparison to South Africa, the first of these arguments seems rather weak, but nonetheless significant in determining people’s views. Again, there are disapproving sounds made whenever and wherever the word apartheid is used with regard to Israel. That is not to say that the term is incorrect, but rather that it demands proper justification and the left should not be using it just for the sake of rhetoric.

I personally remain unconvinced of the effect a boycott can have. I think it probably is a good idea, and is particularly useful for goods produced in the occupied territories, but the point with South Africa is that this was a popular campaign. In the case of Israel we still have a battle of minds to win before we can even begin to think of anti-Zionism as popular, and as such I think it is a grave mistake to organise our campaigns around an idea as divisive and as unpopular as a boycott. By all means people who do not wish to put money into the Israeli economy should stop buying Israeli products, but maybe our time would be better spent with serious work winning round the views of the people, creating solidarity with dissidents in Israel, and publicly showing Israel to be an inherently unjust state before we start embarking on solutions that haven’t been thought through and which may never work.

Marking 30 years of the London Review of Books, The Third Estate talks to Senior Editor Paul Myerscough and attempts to condense three decades into three thousand words

On Friday the London Review of Books will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a bumper length edition and the launch of the magazine’s online archive comprising no less than 30 million words in 12,000 essays by more than 2,000 contributors.

I started reading the LRB the year after I left university, while working in Hong Kong as a secondary school teacher. With no marking to do, few lessons to teach and no extra-curricula activities to oversee, my timetable might have been gratifyingly blank but for the school’s draconian (at least as it seemed to me at the time) working culture. Teachers, when not in the classroom, were forbidden from leaving their desks in the staffroom, much less the school, during working hours. It was bad form to turn off your computer or to use it to play videos or computer games (though such programmes were far beyond the capabilities of my laptop which wheezed whenever asked to load so much as a picture or the bright, gurning dragon school logo on the screensaver). ‘You have to appear to work at all times’ an experienced TEFL teacher had counselled me, ‘which is why I choose a desk at the back of the room. They can’t see the screen that way.’

But I couldn’t get my desk moved and with the Head of English seated behind me I had to be careful what I looked at. Too long surfing the BBC Sport’s website inevitably led to the questions like, ‘Hey what you doing?’ or ‘Hey, Lazy, you want do some marking?’

Mercifully at some point I stumbled upon the LRB’s website. It remains one of the best presented and easy to use sites on the net and, wondrously, it had no slow to load, easy to condemn, pictures. Reading the LRB I looked like I was working. Sometimes I even felt like I was, but not too often. Plus I learned stuff, stopped reading my father’s Spectator, made ill advised friendships with people like Salman and took my first steps towards apparently continuous, unemployability…

To mark 30 years of LRB, I spoke to Senior Editor, Paul Myerscough, about where the magazine stands politically, how significant political essays can be, whether he’d noticed any changes to government policy following articles written in the magazine, the sensitive issue of ‘snark’ and whatever happened to Christopher Hitchens.

The Third Estate: So how are you marking the 30th Anniversary?

Paul Myerscough: It’s an occasion when you roll out the people who are seen as your key contributors. We have pieces by Hilary Mantel, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester, a huge piece by Jacqueline Rose on honour killing, Jeremy Harding and so on. It’s an occasion to show the kind of writing resources we have available.

Early next year there will be a series of lectures at the British Museum by Neil McGregor, Frank Kermode and Rory Stewart. We are about to launch the archive, the whole 30 years online. Next year we’ll have the anniversary of our independence from the New York Review Books. We started out as an insert and became independent after six months.

The Third Estate: The archive must have been very time consuming and expensive to organise so why have you chosen to put it up now?

Paul Myerscough: In a way all magazines of any status seem to be doing this, and quite right too. Technology and culture have brought us to a point where I’m not sure that any magazine or periodical can be excused for not doing it. I think you need to be able to trace the history of a publication―not least as a matter of pleasure: it’s such a lovely thing to go back through the history of a magazine to see how it’s contributors have changed, how its thinking might have changed―if a magazine can be said to have a consistent line of thought―and to build a cross reference, in so many ways: across personalities, across historical periods, across places to tease out a paper’s identity. If you can do this with the Economist, or the TLS or the Guardian, or the London Review of Books, then an archive seems to be indispensible. Magazines no longer live in the present moment. They live in the past too. We want them to do that, especially during an age in which information is processed incredibly quickly. Magazines now seem to be engaged in curation.

The Third Estate: That idea reminds slightly of Jonathan Franzen’s essay on the social novel, where he suggested the novel was incapable of keeping up with the contemporary world. There’s seems to be more reportage in the LRB nowadays and I wondered whether it sees itself as filling a gap which novels about contemporary events might have covered but aren’t able to any longer―or whether it may be facing the same problem as the social novel, that it can’t keep up with the 24 hour news cycle?

Paul Myerscough: It’s certainly true we have more reportage than we used to. We have more long essays on political and cultural subjects. We do think of ourselves as responding to an absence elsewhere―but the absence is not of coverage so much as simply of depth. It’s the length of the LRB articles that make things possible. Some of the broadsheets do a very good job of commentary alongside news, but they always have to compress it into spaces of no more than a thousand words. And that necessarily forces them into certain modes of speaking, certain ways of presenting an argument. What the LRB and some other magazines do is give their writers space to breathe. This makes certain kinds of argument possible. To take one example it makes historical argument possible, so when Ross McKibbin writes for us on politics he’ll very often set Labour thinking in the context of Labour thinking over the past ten, twenty, thirty years― sometimes fifty or a hundred years. It’s very difficult to do that except in a gestural way at a shorter length. What I think we’re doing is making available an old journalistic mode; the long 19th century essay. So your reference to the social novel may not be a coincidence. There’s something about the length that makes it possible to examine the social in a way that we tend to identify with the 19th century essay or novel, and that doesn’t fit very well into the other sources from which we get our news.

The Third Estate: It seems to be having more of an impact―I noticed Rory Stewart’s article got picked up recently and I wonder how much you consciously try to influence the news agenda.

Paul Myerscough: OK, where did you see it picked up?

The Third Estate: BBC Newsnight, and I’m fairly sure the Daily Mail ran a long extract.

Paul Myerscough: Possibly, possibly. I have thought about this… getting picked up: where you can expect to get picked up? I don’t think any of us imagine, do we, that Barack Obama after an eighteen hour day at work goes to the West Wing and reads the New York Review of Books? We don’t imagine either that Tony Blair or Gordon Brown do, even though both have written for the LRB in the past. Are their advisors reading magazines? I’m not sure how far down the chain you have to go before you get people, young people probably, in lower levels of government, who are reading everything. But that process of filtration begins at that lower level and gets honed and honed until at a senior level you really can’t expect to be having an impact in that sense. So you have to rely, as you say, on other media sources. It’s in those places you hope to make an impact. Even then it’s initially disappointing. When you’ve being doing this for a while, you just have to be sanguine about it. It just doesn’t happen very often. It happens with Rory. Rory is a prospective Tory MP, already a very significant figure in his own right, one of the few authoritative voices on Afganistan we have in this country and so it’s not surprising when he makes a statement in the LRB that it will get picked up by other sources. It would get picked up wherever it was. But what happens when Gareth Peirce writes about the al-Megrahi case for us? She publishes her essay and you think my God, this surely has to be answered at some level―and nothing happens . The Independent reprinted it in entirety, but it just doesn’t make the same sort of impact. You want to cry that it doesn’t, because in a sense the case she’s presenting is so extraordinary that it can’t be addressed in a culture in which there’s consensus: every time al-Megrahi is referred to he is the Lockerbie Bomber―and that’s in news sources. So what happens when you have piece that says he didn’t do it, actually it was someone else? You can’t really expect that to be picked up at―except that it’s Gareth Piece, the most respected defence solicitor on miscarriages of justice this country has. So I think you have grounds to influence whoever by publishing it. All you can really do is put these things into the public sphere and hope that they get picked up. Very often it doesn’t happen.

The Third Estate: It seems to fall on one side of the mass civilization, minority culture side of the debate. Does it consciously pitch itself there or is that an inevitable consequence of the way it’s written?

Paul Myerscough: No, it’s not done consciously. You have a magazine which if you set out to publish long reviews and essays on a full variety of subjects you do so hoping to bring―not a seriousness, though often that―but a depth, an angle, an originality and a style―and you’re doing that with 70,000 words per issue―then you really can’t expect very many people to engage with that. It’s a real demand, a demand which we don’t expect a lot of people, younger people in particular, to meet any more. Which, again, is why the archive has been made available online, why, also the blog. You have to find new ways of presenting the mode of thinking in technologically more accessible forms. The paper will always be there for people who want to read. We’ve always made quite a lot content available for free and that’s helped our traffic and helped us put our major intervention pieces up there in a way that helps them circulate

The Third Estate: Perry Anderson wrote in the introduction to one of the LRB’s anthologies that ‘the style of the writer comes before the importance of a subject or the affinity of a position’ is that true?

Paul Myerscough: Did he say that so concisely? That’s interesting. I’m glad we got Perry to do that knowing that Perry will not bend himself… It’s an accusation that’s been made of us. But it’s not true of course. Yes, we try to publish writers who are as stylish as possible in the field they write about. But the point of the style is not as some sort of decorative accessory and if the style is obfuscatory, that is a disaster. The point of being a stylish writer, of being a good writer is to bring alive the subject you’re writing about, the idea you’re trying to convey, in such a way that the reader is carried along with them. When you’ve got an essay of three or four thousand words, you’re hoping the reader will find their way to the end of a piece. Most people are going to give up on a piece that long unless it is well written. Style is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Style has to be in service of content. Maybe we used to publish articles like that, not anymore.

The Third Estate: Has that changed since 2001, since 9/11?

Paul Myerscough: In a way you’re speaking to the wrong person. I joined the paper the week after and was interviewed here the day after 9/11. You can imagine what the interview was like, essentially an editorial meeting on how the event was going to be covered… I don’t think it was a watershed for the paper in terms of its political thinking, because you’re able to go back to the beginning of the paper, certainly back to the Falklands and the Miners strike, and see very engaged political coverage of the news events of the day. Of course it had already been involved with Israel, Palestine so in terms of its thinking, coverage and way of doing things―no 9/11 was not a watershed. But it was in the kind of attention given to the paper, turning people’s eyes towards it, both in terms of people newly admiring and also newly suspicious.

The Third Estate: I think at this point I’m going to ask about Christopher Hitchens. He hasn’t written for the LRB since 9/11 and his last two books weren’t reviewed particularly favourably.

Paul Myerscough: At the level of reviews that’s not by design, we almost go in the other direction. I’ll come back to Hitchens I don’t want to avoid that. The Believer, a magazine in the States, launched a good few years ago with a manifesto against ‘snark’, which said they would avoid ‘snark’ and as one of their examples of ‘snark’, they chose a particular review published in this magazine by James Wood, of a Zadie Smith novel. Now we just don’t commission people to write that kind of review. That kind of review very rarely appears. Of course occasionally someone will write a piece that is deeply negative because, when they get the book, they feel that way about it. But we really don’t set people up. So if Hitchens has had negative reviews from our contributors it’s absolutely not because we’ve decided to give Hitchens a kicking. And we absolutely don’t want to because there’s actually quite a lot of love for Hitchens here. He wrote many wonderful pieces for this magazine. On certain subjects we wish we could still have him but over the question of 9/11 and American foreign policy, in relations to Iraq and attitudes towards Islam, I think at that time, it became more difficult for us to carry his articles. They wouldn’t have sat very well in the London Review’s pages.

The Third Estate: With the editors or the readers?

Paul Myerscough: Well, I suppose people will always want to ask about the relationship between the magazine and its editors. Contrary to what many people think this is not the kind of office where it’s understood what kind of line the magazine will take before we do anything, there is no consensus on many things. None the less, in the way that any magazine has a more or less defined political identity, the LRB is not the Spectator. Clearly it is left-of-centre. Clearly it is more interested in talking about certain issues in one way rather than another. We actually crave finding people who disagree with us, who present their arguments cogently and coolly, in the same kind of prose we hope our writers consider political issues. We often don’t find that our opponents do that. It’s quite hard to find rightwing thinkers who write in a way we feel we can publish, when we do we will publish them; Edward Luttwack for example and Ian Gilmour. A lot of our writers simply wouldn’t identify themselves as coming from the left. I’m not even sure some of our writers on British Politics would identify themselves as being from the left. But, Hitchens, it wasn’t so much his position (although I doubt it was one anyone here would have agreed with) but it was also the case his writing seemed to us rhetorically enflamed in a way that offered―more heat than light.

The Third Estate: Are there any personal favourites coming out in the archive?

Paul Myerscough: Quite a lot of pleasure will just be clicking on a name and seeing what they did. One of the pleasures for me will be going back to particular events. So, go to 1984 and see what the LRB had to say about the Miners Strike, go to 1982 and look at the Falklands War, go to important moments in the recent history of Israel and Palestine and see what Edward Said had to say about them. Or to take an example that leaps to mind, look at an article that by someone few people have heard of, Norman Dombey, about the state of the Iraqi arsenal before the Iraq war and find out just how many things he said came to be true in the light of events. But there’s so much it would be quite an obsessive job to get a grip on the whole 30 years.

The Third Estate: I have a not entirely formulated question on how the LRB sees itself as promoting more sophisticated literary fiction. Do you worry that its message is getting trampled out by things like the Tesco Top 40 or Richard and Judy’s book club?

Paul Myerscough: No, I think we’d always sit on one side of that. Part of the point of opening a bookshop was to give a spatial possibility for people to curate their reading in a different way. What the supermarkets and Richard and Judy do in terms of selecting and producing a kind of hierarchy of books has little to do with what we do. These days we don’t publish negative long reviews. We publish at most two novel reviews an issue, fifty in a year. We get sent fifty novels in a week sometimes. So there isn’t much point reviewing novels which you don’t think deserve the reader’s attention. You try to pick the ones that have a chance of being good and send those out to get reviews. It’s hard, you’d actually like to be reviewing literature in translation more, you’d hopefully be making your novel coverage more abstruse, not less. Making it less tailored to the British publishing market. It is still interesting to have reviews of the latest novels of major figures writing. Even so we aren’t going to review every novel by AS Byatt or Martin Amis. You go back to these writers every so often, to see whether there’s a good revisionary account to be made. In the end you hope to be able to say you have given some attention to most of the writers who people might want to read. But it’s hard finding as much space as you would like, never mind finding the writers you want to write about them.

The Third Estate: Was it a good year for the Booker Prize? Does the prize have too much influence?

Paul Myerscough: It was a good year for us in the sense that Hilary Mantel won. Hilary has been writing for us for a long time. Just because of that prejudice it was easy to think they’d made the right choice. There are all sorts of prizes which are given disproportionate amounts of attention in different fields. The Turner Prize would be one for example. But again it’s a similar situation to supermarkets. The Booker Prize is a matter of the logic of publicity and sales. Its impact is massive in that area. Look at the statistics about the sort of difference it makes to be on the shortlist on the one hand and to win on the other. It makes thousands of percent difference. We used to carry ‘Shortcuts’ in my early time here. James Francken would read all the Booker Prize shortlist novels and write a short article going through them. We haven’t done that in recent years. We’ll pay attention to the individual works but we don’t prioritize. You have to exist on one side of the prize culture and the mainstream. You either have to give an original take on the things everyone else is paying attention to or you have to pay attention to texts no one else is paying attention to. We try to do both.

JW Arble’s pick of the LRB archive

Guest post by Tim Johnston

Following a turbulent week for Israel, Tim Johnston argues that the only path to peace is engagement with Hamas

Hamas, founded in 1987, was elected by the Palestinian people in January 2006 by a landslide. Almost immediately after the elections, they were forced out of power by the US, UK, EU and Israel, leading to the Gaza “takeover” in the June of 2007 as Hamas struggled to maintain its right to govern.

To claim that the US, UK and EU believe in Democracy is to approach lunacy. Hamas is the democratically elected government of Palestine and therefore a peace deal is impossible without them. It is the voice of the Palestinian people and one the West has tried desperately to silence, forcing them to form a unity government with Fatah. If Labour won the next election and was then forced to share a government with the Conservatives, we wouldn’t accept this. Neither should the Palestinians.

The purpose of Hamas’ creation was and still is to help the Palestinian people through the implementation of policies such as free education, the construction of affordable housing, schools, hospitals and jobs. All of which are based on social democratic values, not some crazed Taliban-esque theocracy. Despite all this, Hamas is never recognised as a social movement, rather as some sort of evil terrorist force, hell-bent on blowing Israel to pieces. And whilst  Hamas does have a military wing, the Izz Ed-Din Al-Qassam Brigades, that carries out attacks on Israel, to ignore its social legitimacy whilst accepting that of the Israeli government, which is responsible for atrocities on an even greater scale, is pure hypocrisy.

In the last week alone, Israel has rejected a UN investigation into Israeli war crimes in Gaza, taken over the Al-Aqsa mosque (for the second time in the past few weeks), made plans to remove the term “ethnic cleansing” from its school history books in reference to the explusion of Palestinians in 1948 and has been found to be denying Palestinians of clean water. In some areas Palestinians receive 20 litres per capita, per day, compared to 300 litres per capita, per day, for Israelis in the West Bank. All the while it continues to build settlements in the West Bank whilst evicting Palestinians from their homes and bulldozing their houses. All of this has gone on whilst Israel has maintained that it is trying to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians under the shaky pretense that the only people preventing this peace deal from its actualisation are the Palestinians themselves. Ridiculous.

The people of Palestine are more than pawns. They are human beings who have suffered at the hands of Israel with our help and the billions of dollars in aid and military equipment which the West provides. Hamas is the only legitimate movement of the Palestinian people, and is therefore the only means to establishing peace. Rockets will stop once a fair and just peace deal has been reached. Such a deal has to include Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-1967 war borders,  East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, the removal of “the wall”, check-points, border patrols and outposts, all of which are illegal and in the direct contravention of human rights. It has to grant Palestine its own military (the right to resist) alongside economic independence and the ability to determine its own destiny, uninterrupted and free from coercion.

There has been some progress within the past few weeks due to the publication of the Goldstone Report, which has paved the way to make possible the trial of Israeli leaders and Hamas fighters for war crimes. This is a necessary step in the pursuit of justice, but it doesn’t address the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a whole, given that the report is a document only of Operation Cast Lead (December 2008 – January 2009, in which Israel invaded Gaza killing over 1,400 Palestinians. Hamas killed 13 Israelis, three of whom were civilians).

The daily atrocities committed by Israel are horrific. Palestine has suffered for more than sixty years and Hamas is the actualisation of that suffering. To pretend that Israel is somehow justified in doing these things is utterly wrong. Hamas is the only solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and to refuse diplomatic engagement with them is only to refuse the solution. Hamas is Palestine, and we’d do well to get over it.

You can contact Tim at tjoh71@gmail.com