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.

In the 1960s and 70s, two ultra leftist groups, the Weathermen in the USA, and the Red Army Faction in West Germany, used the same slogan to clarify the motivation for their violent response to the US invasion of Vietnam: ‘bringing the war home.’

There are two movements we can describe as ‘bringing the war home’ at the moment in the UK. One if the EDL, the other is the Palestine movement. Neither is intrinsically progressive, and both have huge potential. Obviously, however, we have no interest in helping the potential of the EDL, and every interest in furthering the progressive elements within the pro-Palestine movement.

The EDL are indeed the ‘cutting edge of racism’, but this doesn’t mean they are outsiders. Rather, they are exaggerating ideas at the heart of the British state’s war rhetoric. The recent investigations by the Guardian and the BBC have shown clearly that there is (at least for now) a few black and asian supporters among the EDL. The key here is not that the EDL aren’t racist: but simply that skin is no longer the locus of their struggle. Instead, perceptions of Islam (fundamentalist and otherwise), those same perceptions peddled by all three political parties over the years, have taken centre stage. There has been a movement away from skin and towards faith: note the prevalence of crosses, both on the English flags and on necklaces worn by EDL members. And surely this is the same kind of religion-baiting adopted by Richard Dawkins and other populist atheists.

On the other side, the Palestinian movement seems also to be shifting (growing up, perhaps): no longer are there the cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ outside the Israeli embassy, and anti-Zionist jews are welcome at the demonstrations. Here the locus of struggle is still within the realm of religion, but not exclusively – it still also remains in that of nationality. The cries of ‘Viva Viva Palestina’ are increasingly joined by ‘In our thousands in our million, we are all Palestinians’, and the even more the disturbing ‘from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’.

The first of these is a cry of support, the last a promise of revolutionary justice, with a potential for veiled anti-semitism. The middle slogan, however, is one of the creation of a political subjectivity, and one based very much around nationality. Just as the Proletariat, the Indigenous, the Global South or the Multitude are the naming of a global resisting mass, through which a common identity can be formed, so the “thousands and millions of Palestinians” attempts to invoke a mass movement around Palestine. However, here the name is given by a nation. Israel was created in a similar way, through the invocation of a nation as a unifying call for a political movement to support an oppressed people, a call which did create a political subjectivity, one which still survives.

The EDL are similarly attempting to create a political subjectivity around the notion of England, a subjectivity which includes non-white skin, but still supports a base Nationalism. The different levels of capital and power employed by England and Palestine, neither of which are sovereign states, does not make a difference to the nationalism within them. And this is the bringing home of the war, the resort to nationalism as a mode of struggle.

I do find this worrying. No, it’s not something we can easily change and yes, there are more important immediate aspects within the Gaza movement (as I would rather call it) to be addressed. But we shouldn’t abandon the political subjectivities we form for ourselves in order to show solidarity, so I won’t be claiming to be a Palestinian any time soon.

What I think we are doing here is bringing the war home – but not in a useful way, and not in its physically violent form (as the Weathermen did), but in its structurally violent one. And in doing so, we risk replicating the discourse of their war, rather than our own.

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.

Interview by Dan Swain and Lorna Finlayson

"Revolution isn't rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be"

Ted Honderich is Grote Professor Emeritus of Mind and Logic at University College London. Since 9/11 he has written several books on the subject of terrorism and war, most recently Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War, and has become a vocal advocate of the right of the Palestinians to a state, and to the means of achieving that state. We interviewed Honderich following his paper at Cambridge University’s Moral Sciences Club – their anachronistically named answer to a departmental seminar – where he laid out his views on Zionism, neo-Zionism, Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, arguing that support for the Palestinians includes acknowledging their right to terrorism. The discussion was mostly cordial, though it was clear that most of the philosophers and students present were sceptical.

Honderich is, in fact, very critical of the institution of academic philosophy and its role in politics: “The contribution of the overt and the more common covert conservative political philosophy is the same. It is to pretend that the political tradition of conservatism, as in the case of New Labour as much as the Conservative Party past and present, does actually have an arguable principle of what is right and wrong to support the self-interest of an economic and social class. In this, the tradition of conservatism in general is different from the tradition of the Left and of old Labour. Liberal political philosophy, as in the case of John Rawls, escapes the viciousness of conservatism, but lacks resolution in thought, feeling and action, and seemingly always will.” His interests haven’t always been in this area – and he continues to work, for example, on the philosophy of consciousness – but he sees a connection between a wider commitment to philosophy and his recent focus on politics: “These interests arose more or less accidentally, but maybe less accidentally than I have supposed. I take it that all decent philosophy is a concentration on — not sole ownership of — the logic of ordinary intelligence. That comes down to clarity, usually in the form of analysis, and consistency and validity, and completeness. What goes with that has to be generality, and truth as against convention. Any philosopher aspires or pretends to aspire to that logic, whatever his or her area.”

“I wouldn’t come now.”

The observation that New Labour is now firmly within the tradition of conservatism is clearly a saddening one for him. He calls the old Labour party “the great party of humanity and civilization in British history”, and the reason he came to Britain from Canada: “I wouldn’t come now.” But what about the hope over the Atlantic, Obama? “Chomsky, the great reality-judge of our age, is not hopeful. I myself think we can still expect more from Obama than from anybody else you could have dreamed would be president. Certainly I haven’t given up. The plain fact is that he is the president of the most powerful of the hierarchic democracies. Its national strength, it seems, is or contributes greatly to the power of the economic and social classes near and at the top. Surely it is also clear that as an astute and morally decent politician, so appallingly superior to our criminals against humanity Blair and Brown, he is judging what is possible and going forward in that rationality.”

For Honderich the modern democracies presided over by Obama and Brown are profoundly hierarchic. We ask what he sees as the alternative: “The alternative is real or realer democracy, of course, where not only two heads are better than one and more heads better than two, but the heads are equally free in expressing their judgements and wants. The question brings back to mind Colonel Rainborough’s moral truth in the Putney Debates in the time of the English civil war. ‘Really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he….’ Are there tanks in those army barracks somewhere around Pimlico? I think some successor to Rainborough should think on him, and on our society, where not only the poorest but at least the six bottom economic deciles are being cheated of fuller lives. He should arrange for his tank to break down in Parliament Square for a while, only long enough for our political class and the telly to become aware of it, and then take himself back to the barracks, and also take his punishment for his civil and other disobedience. Revolution isn’t rational anymore, but a breath of fresh air would be. It might have a little effect on our coming election . Maybe remind some of our low politicians that the response to a question isn’t an answer, that selling isn’t their proper line of life, that the House of Commons isn’t the Student Union in Oxford, and that our elections shouldn’t be Afghanistan with drapery.”

Turning to the questions of terrorism. Words like terrorism, radicalism and extremism have developed a strange currency in recent years. As we are learning, one can be a domestic extremist merely for attending a demonstration or going to the wrong meeting. Honderich is struck by the speed of this development: “It has surprised me that transparent terminological means, such as persuasive or loaded definitions, or indeed the pretence of actual definition, have been so successful in the forming and manipulating of public feeling and opinion. This has something to do, presumably, with a new and larger role of the media in society. The effect is more pervasive than supposed, far wider than the effect of such organs as The Daily Mail.”

Precision in terminological definitions is crucial here. ‘Zionism’, defined as the project of establishing a Jewish state in 1948 and within those borders, is a project Honderich defends. It was justified in part by the horrors of the holocaust, he says, and the reality of that state now requires the defence of it. He is an implacable enemy of what he calls ‘Neo-Zionism’ – “the taking from the Palestinians of at least their liberty in the last 5th of their homeland”, and is critical also of ‘semitism’ – “the prejudice in favour of Jewish people right or wrong.” Whilst justifying the creation of the Israel, and therefore a commitment to what is commonly called a two-state solution, is a common (though far from universal) opinion amongst the Palestine solidarity movement, one of his reasons for it seems odd. In Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War… he attaches considerable significance to the question of whether the Palestinians were ‘fully a people’ in 1948, arguing that they were, but that it was reasonable to believe otherwise on the basis of the best information available at the time. Why is this so important? “I have the feeling that you have hit on the weakest point in that book, as some others have. But I still stick to it. The Principle of Humanity, in short, is that we should take rational steps to get and keep people out of bad lives — with bad lives defined in terms of deprivation of the great human goods, these being length of conscious life, bodily well-being, freedom and power, respect and self-respect, the goods of relationship, and the goods of culture. A people not organized into a state and society, I take it, not well-defined as a group, are not open to a kind of insult, a kind of disrespect. They are also less likely to have already achieved the other great goods. That is a beginning of a reply.”

"As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them"

Over the past few years the question of Palestine has played a controversial role in universities. There is anger over the government’s requests for lecturers to spy on students, the way in which Islamic societies are being monitored and clamped down on, and controversy over strategies for delivering solidarity. There has been much concern over the desire of the government to channel funding towards such ‘key issues’, with terrorism being a primary one. Honderich puts this in perspective: “In a society as morally stupid as ours, nearly always a stupidity owed to ignorance and the success of keeping people in that ignorance, I am tempted to have the feeling that research funding should not be at the forefront of our concern. The cosmeticism of New Labour comes higher. So does not forgetting about the estate agents and the private schools along with the bankers. So does Noam Chomsky not having a Nobel Prize.” What about two of the most controversial solidarity strategies on campuses? “I have not myself joined the academic boycott of Israel, which so to speak has left me with a bad conscience as well as a good one. The main difficulty, as always, is a factual one. Same as with terrorism. Will a boycott serve the end of the Principle of Humanity and more particularly the cause of the Palestinians? There are arguments both ways, but maybe I am moving towards the boycott. As for the pro-Palestinian student occupations, I am absolutely for them. They don’t come to much, incidentally, against the neo-Zionist and semitic activities in the universities.”

“I suspect my view is easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about expressing it”

This year we mourned the death of Marek Edelman, the heroic resistance leader of the Warsaw Ghetto. The widespread respect for him surely shows that the notion of legitimate armed resistance is something people are, at least historically, happy to assent to. Why, then has Honderich’s position made him such a controversial figure? “I wonder if the explanation has partly to do with a perception of philosophy, not only a popular one. It is a perception, even in this degraded society, that carries with it respect, even in the midst of our monstrous plague of the celebrities. That a member of a respected profession and line of life, not gone over entirely to journalism, holds particular views, gets him or her attention. The explanation also has to do, of course, with the convention that we leave such judgements to governments, and in particular our hierarchic democracies. I suspect my view, on Zionism and neo-Zionism and Palestinian resistance to or self-defence against neo-Zionism, is in fact easily the majority view in the world, however quiet people are about it, however reluctant to express it.”

The Moral Sciences Club meets Tuesdays during term time in St. John’s College Cambridge.

Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War is published by Continuum. Ted Honderich’s personal website is here.

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

Walking through security at Portcullis House, the fabulously expensive building standing adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, is a bit like going through any airport anywhere in the world. But making your way through the spacious courtyard, past green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome towering overhead, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is still the seat of power of a great empire. The man I’m here to see, however, is one of the country’s most vocal critics of imperialism. George Galloway rises from his computer to shake my hand as I enter his office. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he says. I remind him we met once before when he came to destroy a pro-war American politician at the Cambridge Union many years ago. “You’re far too young to say that,” he laughs.

Born in 1954, Galloway joined the Labour Party at the tender age of thirteen and has been a Member of Parliament since 1987. His strident opposition to the Iraq war, describing Bush and Blair as wolves and calling on British troops to disobey orders, led to his expulsion from the party in 2003. “His comments were disgraceful and wrong,” Tony Blair said. But Galloway has never been one to lie down in the face of his enemies. The following year he formed a new left-wing anti-war party, Respect, and in a stunning victory overturned a Labour majority of over 10,000 to oust Blairite Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow. Since then, however, Respect has suffered a disastrous split, whilst Galloway has found himself having to fend off a barrage of media criticism for his famous decision to appear on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006. With a general election just months away, I ask George Galloway what he thinks his chances are of holding his seat.

“Well I’m not standing again in Bethnal Green and Bow,” he tells me. “Because I promised last time that I’d stand only once and if the people elected me, the next MP for the constituency would be a Bengali.” It’s a straight fight between Labour and Respect in Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway explains, and with both parties selecting a Bengali candidate, his promise looks set to be kept. “For the first time, the Bengali community will have a member in the House of Commons and that’s something I’m particularly proud of.” Galloway has instead chosen to stand in the neighbouring Tower Hamlets constituency of Poplar and Limehouse. “We have a fighting chance of winning both seats,” he says. Galloway also believes Respect has a chance of breaking through in Birmingham – where the party came a close second in 2005 – and of Salma Yaqoob becoming the first ever Muslim woman MP. “If we could pull those three off, I could retire a happy man four years later.” Respect was founded in 2004 as a coalition seeking to bring together the disparate strands of perhaps the greatest mass movement in modern political history. In practice, what emerged was an alliance between George Galloway, a few prominent anti-war activists and the Socialist Workers Party. In 2007, for absolutely no reason that seems at all relevant, the party split in half and the SWP walked out. I ask Galloway if the split has harmed Respect’s chances of achieving the breakthrough he hopes for. “I don’t know if it’s damaged our electability. Certainly not if we do win three seats. Even having one seat in 2005 was almost unprecedented. It had been 60 years since a left of Labour party last won a seat in Parliament in 1945. And in the same constituency by the way.” Galloway has to admit, however, that the split has definitely affected the party’s power outside of Parliament. “The departure of key activists and leaders has weakened us. About half the members left.” I ask Galloway how many members Respect still has. “I don’t have the exact figure,” he says. “It’s a small number of thousands.”

In an interview with The Third Estate in June, Mark Steel told me that the feud in Respect was about nothing that anyone can work out. It has often seemed to me that whilst the left sits on the steps of the amphitheatre shouting splitters at each other and arguing about what society should look like after the revolution, it is failing to speak to ordinary people about the everyday issues that affect their lives. I ask Galloway how he would explain the split to voters who care about social justice and jobs and housing, but have little interest in sectarian squabbling. “With respect to you, and I don’t mean at all to be offensive, I wouldn’t care to explain it to anyone,” Galloway says. “I think that the arcane disputatious nature of the far-left in Britain is of interest only to the cognoscente and the cognoscente already know the reasons.” Galloway pauses as his phone rings. Sorting out a quick bit of business in ten seconds, he apologises before continuing. “For the rest of the public, Respect was always me, Salma Yaqoob, Ken Loach and so on, and it still is. So we’d rather go forward than look back.”

Respect, of course, will not be standing in every constituency at the next general election. “There are 649 seats, that’s beyond any small party of the left. We will be standing in more seats than just those three, but they’re the target seats.” In the constituencies where Respect is not standing, Galloway explains that they will back other progressive candidates. “Brighton, for example, where Caroline Lucas is standing for the Green Party and has a real chance of winning. I expect that we would support her, we haven’t made final decisions on these constituencies yet. Similarly Peter Tatchell is standing in Oxford, we would probably support him. There may be one or two other places where we would support a left, anti-war candidate.” I ask Galloway – who has branded the three main parties as “Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee and a half” – whether he would call for a vote for Labour to keep the Conservatives out, and am genuinely surprised by the firebrand MP’s response. “We definitely want the Tories to be defeated, so for the most part that would mean that we ask people to vote Labour.” It was understandable that Respect backed Ken Livingstone against Boris Johnson in last year’s election for London Mayor. But would Respect really ask people to vote for an arch New Labourite who voted for the war? “Most of them are arch New Labourites who backed the war, so we wouldn’t be able to have that as a hard and fast rule. It’s unlikely that the worst of the war criminals would attract our support, but we wouldn’t be able to use who voted for the war entirely as a yardstick.”

It’s surprising to hear Galloway say this – not least because he is Vice President of Stop the War Coalition and perhaps the most outspoken critic of New Labour’s neo-conservative foreign policy in the country – but because in June he called for an immediate election, arguing that the current Parliament is “utterly bereft of credibility.” I ask him if it’s possible that a Labour defeat at the next election could help bring back the party he once called home. “No, I don’t,” he says. “In any case, it would be too high a price to pay. The Tories will be a catastrophe for ordinary people in Britain, for the working people, the poor, the old, the sick, the disabled. So I want to see them defeated.” Galloway has to concede, however, that that’s not very likely. “Looking at the opinion polls, reading the runes, it would appear that the Tories are on course for a big victory. And if that happens, then we’ll have to see what happens to the Labour Party that I spent almost forty years in.”

Labour’s abandonment of the left goes part of the way towards explaining the success of Respect. But it is Blair’s utter betrayal of British Muslims, incensed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which explains why so many Labour voters in East London and Birmingham have turned to Respect. Not least because of Galloway’s standing amongst Muslims. When housemates on Celebrity Big Brother were asked to rank themselves in order of fame, he mused: “If we’re talking worldwide fame, I’m most famous. Virtually every Muslim in the world knows who I am.” Whether or not that’s true, George Galloway has done perhaps more than anyone else in the country to help politicise marginalised Muslim communities, introducing to them left-wing politics as an answer to racism, Islamophobia, imperialism and neo-conservatism. But there’s another, more reactionary, current amongst Muslim communities that seeks to present itself as the sole representative of Islamic identity. I ask Galloway if Respect could do more to challenge religious fundamentalism and social conservativism amongst the communities it represents? “No,” he says, “I think the first part of our agenda is big enough. The question of social conservatism within Muslim communities is a matter for them largely.”

It’s a contentious point, and one that many on the liberal left will disagree with, but Galloway has never been afraid of courting controversy. In 1994, he flew to Iraq to meet Saddam Hussein in an effort to prevent war and end the sanctions which were bringing further immiseration to the Iraqi people, saluting their courage, their strength and their indefatigability. More recently he has spoken out in support of Ahmedinejad in Iran following the disputed elections, attacking the protesters as class enemies and drawing a comparison with opposition to Chavez’s reforms in Venezuela. But despite the similarity in their anti-imperialist rhetoric, is it really fair to compare the ultra-conservative, fundamentalist Ahmedinejad with the democratic socialist Chavez? “I’m not sure that Chavez would describe himself as a democratic socialist,” Galloway says. “But I do think the comparisons between them are stark. Not just in their international rhetoric, though that is a very significant thing for me, but in terms of their social base. The social base of Ahmedinejad is the poor masses; the enemies of Ahmedinejad are the English speaking, highly-educated, well-off elite. I’ve been several times to Venezuela, and that’s exactly the polarisation that exists there.”

Galloway concedes that Ahmedinejad is not a socialist, whilst Chavez is. But both, he argues, are populists. “I do think you can measure a man by his enemies, and both have the same enemies. My main interest in Iran is that is should remain an independent country and not a puppet of the West like virtually all of the Muslim countries already are, and to that extent I’m glad that Ahmedinejad won over Moussavi who, whether he liked it or not, was riding a wave of people who wished to see the return of the Pahlavi dynasty and who wished to see Iran as an outcrop of the United States. And I’m sure that he did win.”

It’s an uncomfortable prospect, that the left must lend its tacit support to tyrants opposed to Western imperialism, and even though Galloway has described Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust as “a disgrace”, I ask him, if the enemy of my enemy must always be my friend? “No,” he says. “That’s why I could never line up behind the dictatorship in Burma. It’s anti-American, but I could never say that that enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Nevertheless, Galloway tells me that Ahmedinejad is the president of an important country and we’ll just have to accept it. “Iran is much more important than the sort of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses in the British media have realised. Its geo-political position is strategically significant, it has a very young population, it has an ocean of oil and gas and soon will have a nuclear power industry, famously as we know.” It is for these reasons that Galloway argues Iran must be treated with more respect. “Ahmedinejad is the president, that’s why he was speaking at the United Nations a fortnight ago, there’s no point in second guessing other people’s choice of their leaders. I believe strongly that every people have the right to choose their own leaders and not have them chosen by their adversaries.”

It’s a position to which Galloway has remained consistent throughout his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But with violence surging in Afghanistan, what is the answer to the country’s problems now? “The opposite of what we’re currently doing,” he says. “The war is doomed, it cannot be won. No one has successfully occupied Afghanistan, not even Alexander the Great, and Bob Ainsworth definitely isn’t Alexander the Great. No matter how many soldiers they pour in there, they’ll never pour as many in as the former Soviet Union did. That occupation failed as this one is bound to.” Galloway believes that a negotiated withdrawal is inevitable. “It’s better that that starts now rather than later. Many more people will be alive, the radicalisation of the Muslim world, which is a real danger, will be lessened, we’ll be able to spend the money we’re burning in Afghanistan on our own people at home, and we’ll begin to defuse the tensions that exist in our own country between Muslims and non-Muslims.”

But withdrawal brings with it its own dangers, not least the possibility of the Taliban returning to power. I ask Galloway what he thinks will happen to Afghanistan? “The first thing I need to say, and it’s a contentious point, is that it’s none of our business what happens. British people, after several hundred years of empire, have become used to the idea that we have some right, maybe even some duty, to determine what happens in other people’s countries. I never believed that and I certainly don’t believe it now when we’re an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. The days when the building you’re currently in ruled a quarter of all the world’s population are gone. Hallelujah!”

That’s not to say that Galloway is unconcerned with the future of Afghanistan. “I have interests in that country as a British citizen and they are this: that it must not be a base for those who wish to harm me, us, our country and our legitimate interests.” However, he believes that it is important to separate the pan-Islamist al Qaeda from “Johnny Afghan who just wants foreigners out of his country.” These, he argues, were never the same thing. “Insofar as there’s an al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, it was we who sent it there, paid for it, armed it, glorified it, paraded it at the Tory conference and at Ronald Reagan’s Republican national convention, called them Mujahedeen and all that you know. To punish the Afghans for al Qaeda when we sent it there, is double jeopardy.” Instead Galloway wants to see a negotiated outcome with the Afghan forces to ensure that the country is not used as a base to harm Britain and its legitimate interests. “I can’t guarantee that Afghanistan will be a lovely place if the foreign armies withdraw, but I can guarantee it will never be a lovely place if they don’t.”

There are many far-from-lovely places in the world that Galloway is concerned about, but perhaps none more so than Palestine. He recently returned from a convoy to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, the occupied territory which would form part of any future Palestinian state. But, I ask him, is a two-state solution really the best way to achieve justice for the Palestinian people? “I’m pleased that Hamas and Fatah have signed a unity agreement,” he says. “I hope it works. The division within the Palestinian ranks has been catastrophic for them and for those of us who support them from the outside, as I have been doing now for almost 35 years of my life. As to what the final outcome is, this is really a matter for them.” Galloway says that if the Palestinians decide on a two-state solution then he, as a supporter of their cause, must accept that. “My own personal view, however, is that Palestine is too small, the issue of the refugees too great, the topographic and demographic cleansing that has occurred has been too extensive. The building of the wall, the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem, the building of the settlements, which are really cities, have all been too extensive to make the separation of this small piece of land into two viable states realistic.”

Galloway is keen to point out that he does not support sectarian countries. “When Mandela was asked by the Boers at the end of Apartheid if they could have the Orange Free State as a white state, he said that he didn’t believe in white states or black states, only democratic states. One man, one woman, one vote, one government and everyone equal under the law. And if I believe that in South Africa, why should I change it for Palestine?” Instead he would like to see a democratic state, where everyone is equal, where all the existing inhabitants have the right to live, and all the people who were driven from the land have the right to return. “One state between the river and the sea is by far the best solution.”

In the meantime, Galloway believes that the convoys he is leading to Gaza to bring aid to the Palestinian people are crucial acts of defiance and solidarity. “I’m leading another one on the 6th of December to arrive on the 27th, which is the anniversary of the war. I think that these attempts to break the blockade are the most urgent priority for solidarity organisations around the world. We can march here, and protest here, and hold public meetings, but they make little difference.”

Somehow I didn’t expect George Galloway – the firebrand activist and unremitting radical who has always spoken his mind even when his opponents don’t like what’s on it – to say any different. His has always been one of the loudest voices for change and he has never lacked the courage of his convictions. I thank him for his time and make my way back through the courtyard and the green trees and sun-dappled water features under the enormous sparkling glass dome: the seat of power of an almost bankrupt set of islands off the coast of mainland Europe. On my way home, I pass Brian Haw, whose protest, like Galloway’s, will continue unabated till the people in power take notice.

http://www.georgegalloway.com/

Guest Post by David Rosenberg

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors”.

The author of these words was the Bundist Marek Edelman who has just died aged 90. He was one of the commanders of the ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation that led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.

Edelman's funeral in Warsaw on Friday

To anti-fascists and human rights activists around the world he was a hero – plain and simple. He wrote one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, The Ghetto Fights, which was published in Poland in 1945 and subsequently translated into several languages. It is an incredible text which pains and inspires the reader in equal measure.

After escaping the burnt-out ghetto through the sewers he continued underground anti-Nazi activity and then joined other Poles in the Warsaw Rising of 1944. After the war he saved countless more lives working as a cardiologist. In recent years he used the medical arena to make contact with Dr Mustafa Barghouti, director of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.

Edelman was never a Zionist, and he opposed Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory. He met with Palestinian political figures and expressed support for their struggle against occupation while at the same time urging them to firmly reject terroristic methods. He angered Israeli leaders by pointedly addressing the Palestinians he made contact with as “leaders of the Palestinian Fighting Organisations”. In Tel Aviv they were indignant that such a prominent figure in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance would choose to continue to live in Poland (his homeland!) after the war – a place they regarded simply as a Jewish graveyard. Even worse, he had the chutzpah not to take his political lead from less heroic and far more reactionary Zionist spokespersons and cheerleaders.

Not that Edelman was worried. This hero of the Jewish people and of anti-fascists had long been treated as persona non grata by the Israeli political establishment and its mainstream media. Edelman would not countenance Israel’s attempt to appropriate Holocaust resistance to justify its political actions, and he said so on several occasions.

He refused to allow the historical experience of the Ghetto fighters to be claimed by any group/nation exclusively. On the contrary, he argued that this history belonged to everyone and carried a universal imperative to fight for equality, democracy, human rights and dignity wherever these were threatened or suppressed

He continued to repudiate the Zionist narrative of Jewish history with its blinkered ultra-nationalism. Instead he remained loyal to the Bund’s socialist political tradition which, as its 1938 manifesto had declared, rejected “one’s own and foreign nationalism”.

Throughout his life Edelman worked for human rights, democracy and egalitarianism. He remained sceptical of nationalism in general and critical of state power. He was a brave and forthright opponent of the Stalinist regime in Poland and, in the 1980s, actively supported the Workers Opposition Movement – KOR.

In 1988 – on the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – he snubbed the official commemoration in Poland attended by Stalinist dignitaries from Poland and Zionist dignitaries from Israel, in favour of an alternative ceremony at the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, attended by 3,000 people, where he unveiled a monument to Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter – Bundist leaders of the 1930s who had been captured and murdered on Stalin’s orders during the War.

I treasure the fact that I had the good fortune to hear Marek Edelman speak and briefly meet him in 1997 at a conference in Warsaw marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Bund. Naturally a lot of people wanted to speak to him. He sat, relaxed, making time for everybody. He was a hero, a fighter and a true mensch. Koved zayn ondenk (honour his memory)

The proms don’t normally get much in the way of political coverage. In fact the last time they did was about a year and a half ago when Margaret Hodge decided to make some stupid announcement about them not being inclusive enough, so it was a real joy to have such a politically charged concert as the performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio last night as a highlight of the season. The opera was performed by the East-Western Divan Orchestra, which was set up ten years ago by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. The orchestra is made up of young musicians from around the Middle East, including members from both Israel and Palestine. Barenboim says that the idea of the orchestra was to find common ground in knowledge, and offer a chance for dialogue to young people.

Daniel Barenboim and members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (image taken from West-Eastern Divan Orchestra website)

In the context of the ongoing oppression in the Middle East, Fidelio is a poignant work to bring into the debate. It tells the story of Leonore, who rescues her lover from a prison, where he his being held by Rocco under the orders of the corrupt Don Pizarro. It is a story of bravery, hope, and ultimately emancipation. The political message is clear, that there is an analogy between the prisoners kept by Pizarro, and the oppression faced by the Palestinians, and yet there is rather more to the politics of this opera, and in fact the situation in Palestine, that warrants further discussion.

Beethoven is, in many ways, the first self-consciously philosophical composer of the Enlightenment era, and his philosophical concerns are tied to the idealism of the French Revolution, and later to Hegel. These may seem like big claims, not least when we are so often told that “music speaks for itself”, but the reality is that Western European music in the 19th century was completely inseparable from a number of philosophical and political debates. We would miss so much of what this opera has to say if we were unwilling to discuss it in these terms, and whilst new readings are always possible, and new significances can always be brought out, it is useful in understanding the motives of the opera to consider it in its own period and its own intellectual tradition.

The first act of the opera is concluded by a chorus of prisoners, who due to a deal Rocco has made with Leonore, are allowed out of their dungeons and into the open air. Their song of “O welche Lust! In freier Luft / den Atem leicht zu heben! / Nur hier ist Leben / der Kerker eine Gruft” [Oh, what joy! In the open air / to breathe with ease! / Only here is life / the prison is a tomb.] represents the ideals of the French Revolution, both of liberty and fraternity. The prisoners are a radical, or in fact revolutionary, collective, and this is an idea that Beethoven returns to throughout his oeuvre, most notably (and probably less successfully than the end of Act I of Fidelio) in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. Leonore is the heroine, asserting too a revolutionary consciousness in order that she and Florestan (her imprisoned lover) may be together, where Pizarro, a signifier of the old feudal order, has previously prevented their love. And finally there is Rocco, the jailor, who in the course of the opera undergoes a complete transformation from being the bondsman of Pizarro, to becoming a collaborator with revolutionaries, for he has seen that what is being proposed is not simply humane but a path to a better, freer world.

There is lots to be taken from this opera in terms of a response to the Israel-Palestine conflict, we have to single act of bravery by Leonore, in rescuing Florestan, showing the difference that the bravery and responsibility of each person can make, we have the chorus of prisoners, who offer a glimpse of an imagined future, one in which freedom and solidarity are inextricably linked, and then most importantly Rocco shows that minds can be changed, that the possibility of a freer future is the emancipation not simply of those who are imprisoned, but of the consciousnesses of those who imprison.

Yesterday’s performance was prefaced by the showing of a film called Knowledge is the Beginning, which chronicled the progression of the orchestra from its inception in 1999 to a concert given in Ramallah in 2005. This film, like Barenboim, is relatively hard-hitting. It may not be hardcore anti-Zionism, but it is heavily critical of the Israeli government and the occupation.

(what is cut from the end of this short clip from the film is the Israeli Minister for Education accusing Barenboim of using the opportunity of receiving the award to attack the Israeli state)

Throughout the film there is yet more Beethoven, but it is never quite made explicit that Barenboim sees the politics of Beethoven as offering an ideological critique of the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Nonetheless, it is clearly important to him, although the superimposition of Beethovenian politics on the Israel-Palestine question does throw up some issues. The most notable, which came up a number of times in the short discussion after the film, is that this is possibly taking the form of colonial ideology, the idea that “we” in “the West” achieved this freedom with our bourgeois revolutions, and that maybe some place in “the East” has something to learn from it. Such an issue is backed up again by the description of music (Western classical) as a universal language, and along with that the freedom expressed in Beethoven, which is of course tied to his own time, and his own intellectual tradition is made transcendent and transhistorical.

These are easy remarks to make in an effort to discredit what the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra do, but I think our theoretical approach need be a bit more subtle than this, and the politics of this project are rather more subtle too. The point of the project is that it is not theoretical in this sense, but rather it is entirely pragmatic. If, as such, the ideas in Beethoven become a useful expression for the problems of the Middle East then we should be willing to accept them, despite the problems. The project, in offering dialogue, is not set out to offer an ideology of emancipation, but rather offers a politics of emancipation.

We should be wary of the possibility of Beethoven, or in fact Western classical music as a whole becoming an instrument of colonial discourse, but here they are being used simply because of their expressive capacity, rather than because an accurate analogy is being drawn. The consequence of this, though, is that we must do away with the notion of music as a universal language. It is only when we address each situation of oppression in its particularity and specificity, that we can come to political conclusions, and so the superimposition of transcendent notions of oppression and salvation (such as those that were inherent in French Revolutionary ideology) obscure rather than elucidate the issue at hand. Beethoven, and many revolutionaries of his era did believe in universal concepts of freedom, and universal concepts of emancipation, this is very much the essence of the idealism of that age, but we must reject the idea that these are universal, and I believe we can do this without throwing out the meaning of these works of art, and without accepting the complete enlightenment project, we can accept its striving for humanity.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is an extremely important project. As Barenboim admits, it will not bring peace, but it is a step forward. It is the same bravery as Leonore, but unlike in the plot of Fidelio, it cannot bring about a revolution. Furthermore, the project is doing a great deal to repoliticise Beethoven, and music in general. That is not to say that music is being made instrumental to external political struggles, but rather that the music itself is being allowed once again to refract on to our society in a way that has been less and less common over the last fifty years.

The concert is available on view again and listen again on the BBC website for another six days.
For more information on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de/