A portrait of the anti-Israeli mind in upper class Britain
Sir Max Hastings is an establishment man. Born in 1945 and educated at Charterhouse — the exclusive English private school founded in 1611 — then Oxford (for a year), he has edited two of Britain’s best known newspapers: the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard. Like so many who rise to the top in British journalism, he was born into it. His father, Macdonald, was a celebrated war correspondent; his mother, Anne Eleanor Scott-James (or Lady Lancaster), edited the UK edition of Harper’s Bazaar. He writes columns for the Daily Mail, the Guardian and many others. He regularly appears on the BBC, for whom he was himself a celebrated war correspondent. He is President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England and he is a fellow of The Royal Society of Literature, an elite institution founded by King George IV in 1820. Sir Max Hastings is an establishment man indeed. He despises the State of Israel.
In May 2009, he delievered a Leonard Stein Lecture on Israel and the Palestinians at Balliol College Oxford, extracts from which were used for an opinion piece in today’s Guardian. His writing is an almost parodical one-stop shop for every misconception, misreading of history and civilisational pathology in the mindset of Britain’s upper class, Arabist, right.
The piece, with a link to the full lecture, can be found at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/israel-middle-east-max-hastings
The tale Hastings tells is a familiar one, almost a cliche. His adimiration for the Israel of 1967 knew no bounds. Victory in the Six Day War of that year “was an awesome display of command boldness, operational competence and human endeavour,” he glowingly recounts.
But through the 1970s things began to change:
“… I glimpsed a darker side of Israel. I learned a lot about the ruthlessness of Israeli anti-terrorist operations. I spent many hours talking to thoughtful Israelis, who voiced their fears about the perils, the threatened corruption of their own society, which they perceived in the 1967 conquests. I also became dismayed by the naked imperialism displayed by Israel’s rightwing zealots. One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. “In the next war,” he said, “we’ve got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good.”
That young Israeli, he later tells us, was none other than Benjamin Netanyahu, now Prime Minister of Israel. The complete lack of empathy is breathtaking: no sense whatever that after all the Israelis had been through in their struggle for survival the belief that the Arabs had turned it into a zero sum game might be at least understandable. Just shallow-minded demonology wrapped in emotive name calling — “naked imperialism”; “rightwing zealots”.
And so he continues, drawing a portrait of a Palestinian people seemingly devoid of agency, entirely stripped of any responsibility at all for their predicament.
Instead we get the standard shabby defence of terrorism that is now commonplace across Europe:
“The policies of modern Israel have created the certainty of new generations of neighbours committed to its undoing. The Palestinians’ only influence rests upon the power of such weapons as they can obtain, and upon their destructive capacity to broadcast terrorism. Who can be surprised that the people of Gaza elected a Hamas government? No sane society engages an overwhelmingly militarily superior nation on the battlefield on terms which suit the possessor of power. There is no purpose in wasting rhetoric upon moral denunciations of terrorism or even suicide-bombing, especially so when Jewish terrorism played a substantial part in Israel’s birth. The Palestinians, together with the Muslim world and many in the west, no longer believe that Israel will grant justice to their people by negotiation; they believe that only force might eventually drive the Israelis to make concessions.”
There is more, much more of this kind of moral incontinence, half-truth and falsehood slithering its way through his text. I deal with reams of this kind of thing in my forthcoming book — A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem With Israel. (It will be published in September) — and I will conclude this posting with a point which is central to my argument.
Contemporary Europe is simply incapable of dealing with the issues that the Israel-Palestine conflict throws up. A pacificistic, relativistic, civilisationally exhausted continent may think that it is doing the judging, but it is not. It is Europe that condemns itself through the screeds of people like Hastings. Would that he were an exception. But as I said at the start, Sir Max Hastings is an establishment man.
May 16th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Very interesting. I came across you from Melanie Phillips, good recommendation.
I like Max Hastings, but you’re right about this garbage being put forth.
May 17th, 2009 at 4:08 am
Oh dear, Serves me right for looking at blogs, Max Hastings was my favourite WW2 writer. Do I now have to re read him?
Regards, Ralph.
May 19th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Excellent article. I too came here from Melanie Phillips site. Yes I enjoy Hastings books but I long knew he has had a bug up his butt concerning Israel for many years now. Funny how British establishment types can never forgive Israel for winning its independence even though the British fought far bloodier colonial conflicts with the Cypriots, Irish, Kenyans, Malaysians, etc.