Drumming up hatred

David Pryce-Jones

John k Carre's thrillers have conveyed, as

few others, the urgency of the struggle waged between East and West, between totalitarianism and democracy. The strug- gle is openly about human values, and its outcome will affect the lives of virtually everyone. Some aspects of it nevertheless are largely invisible, or at least concealed from public inspection, and it is upon them that le Carre has focused. In order to depict the East-West struggle in fictional terms,.he has blurred its moral outlines, to show that both side use comparable means to advance their very different ends. The intensity and drive of his thrillers have derived from the ambiguity at their centre, whereby good men often do evil for reasons of state.

His latest book, The Little Drummer Girl is constructed upon the fraught issue of the Palestinians and the Israelis, a microcosm of the East-West struggle, to be sure, but more importantly a historical issue in its own right. The famous seductions of le Carre's fiction, however, are not the whole story- For all the twists and turns of his Plot, and the ironies and complexities of his character portraiture, this novel is about a current flesh-and-blood conflict. Here, one might have thought, is an ideal subject for moral ambiguity. Le Carre finds it clear- cut. To him, the Palestinians are good, the Israelis are bad. Such tension as there is springs only from the presentation of the good as unfortunately weak, and the bad as unnaturally strong. In this novel, the Israelis have become committed to sweeping away the whole Pack of Palestinian men, women, and Children . Israeli murderous intentions are Posited time and again. 'Nervous politicians and war-hungry generals' are accused of making the killing of innocent Palestinians the habitual practice of the armed forces. In the novel's foreground are the first-line killers, members of the Israeli secret service, repulsive characters one and all. Neither universal morality nor the laws of their Country act as the slightest restraint upon their urge to power and domination, for the greater glory of Israel. Their funds are ap- ParentiY unlimited, so that their corruption ramifies through one society after another. Kurtz is the leader of the team, Kurtz of the short fuse, 'lacking the elitist ackground of the kibbutzim', but one who wheeled and dealed and lied even in his Prayers'. He is possessed by 'a deep and awesome hatred' that later evolves into 'the glint of hatred in his dark Slav eyes'. His assistant, Shimon Litvak, a white-faced fanatic, 'hated inefficiency as much as he hated the enemy who was guilty of it'. He .ba. s 'Bible-black eyes', and in them 'rab- binical anger', whatever that may mean or

imply. Oded, also on the team, has eyes 'darkened with hatred' at the sight of Salim, a captured Palestinian terrorist, and becomes ill and grey from the tension of keeping him alive. In fact Salim is subjected to prolonged psychological torture and deception before being horribly done to death. Not even the girls on the secret ser- vice team, Rachel and Rose, show the least squeamishness. Only two Israelis in , the novel are recognizably human, Professor Minkel, an elderly left-winger who lectures about Palestinian rights, and his wife. 'We couldn't stop the Nazis,' Mrs Minkel says, 'now we can't stop ourselves.'

The team is completed by Gadi Becker, with 'his Semitic looks ... his look of being the chosen one to the detriment of others not so favaoured'. When asked how many Arabs he has killed, this chosen one simply replies 'Enough.' In the Yom Kippur War he fought in the place where it really mat- tered, behind the Syrian lines. The man's powers of disguise, his self-control and ruthlessness, are so sinister that le Carre ap- propriately introduces into his portrait a reference to Mephistopheles. To every Israeli who knows of him, however, he is a hero.

The team's task is to eliminate an outstandingly successful Palestinian ter- rorist network. In order to break the ter- rorists' security and reach their leader Khalil, elder brother of the murdered Salim, .Kurtz selects an English girl, Charlie, as a decoy. Charlie is a young fringe actress, with generous and innocent left-wing instincts. Little could she suspect that she would be so vilely exploited, that her life would be so wantonly endangered on account of Israel.

Gadi's careful seduction of this girl is in fact a kidnap. Trying to soothe her in front of his team, Kurtz reveals his devious pur- poses, whereupon she blurts out, 'You go- ing to put the electrodes on me?' She wants the Israelis, in her own words, to leave the poor bloody Arabs alone. 'Stop bombing their camps. Driving them off their land. Bulldozing their villages. Torturing them.' Le Carre elaborates, 'She had a decent vi- sion, when it was allowed her, of a Palestine restored to those who had been hounded from it in order to make way for more powerful European custodians.'

In spite of these views, Charlie allows herself to be recruited, all for love of Gadi, a love at first sight for a stranger (which for some reason does not prevent her, on closer acquaintance, from calling him `a blood- thirsty landgrabbing little Jew'). For his sake, apparently, she enters into a com- plicated pretence of having been the girl friend of the murdered Salim. A false iden- tity is concocted. She carries the deception through. She duly penetrates the Palesti- nian network, is accepted, travels to Lebanon, where she receives training and is bombed by the ubiquitous genocidal air- craft. Another irony: Charlie, the secret Zionist 'agent, looks up at these Israeli air- craft and explodes on behalf of the Palesti- nians, 'You rotten killing bastards. If 1 hadn't been here, you'd have bombed them to Kingdom Come.'

In contrast to the Israelis, the Palesti- nians are motivated by love, 'I kill only for love, I kill for Palestine and her children,' Khalil declares, 'The Zionists kill for fear and for hate.' Fatmeh, his sister, spends her time swabbing babies' eyes in a clinic. The refugee father of the family died of despair. He asked to be buried in Hebron — in El Khalil — so they took him to the Allen- by bridge. The Zionists wouldn't let him cross. So Michel (nom de guerre for Salim) and Fatmeh and two friends car- ried the coffin up a high hill, and when evening came they dug a grave at a place where he could look across the border into the land the Zionists stole from him.

Another brother, Fawaz, a lawyer, had been gunned down without pretext by the Zionists, as he came out of a house one morning.

Young Kareem, a Palestinian fighter, has a sister killed in a Zionist air attack, and a brother killed in a naval bombardment. Kareem wants to return to Jerusalem only in order to study, but thinks he will die first: 'The Zionists will genocide us to death.' His friend Yasir, 'a big Communist', is an exception in that he feels hatred, an elevated hatred: he aims to destroy colonialism everywhere in the world. Selma, whose mother has been killed by the Israeli aircraft, takes Charlie dancing and singing with the masses, and ironing children's shirts for a parade in honour of Yasir Arafat. 'In the camp, Charlie ex- perienced at last the sympathy that life till now had denied her. Waiting, she joined the ranks of those who had waited all their lives. Sharing their captivity, she dreamed that she had extricated herself from her own.' Fashionably liberationist and left- wing as these sentiments are, Charlie nonetheless carries her deception through to the end, making love to Khalil in the cer- tain knowledge that she is thereby betraying him to his death. Gadi bursts in on the bedroom scene to spatter her with Palesti- nian blood.

Involvement with Charlie has stirred Gadi's conscience, and he may therefore be redeemable. Gadi has been to see for himself the village where Khalil and his family came from; he had sensed in Hebron 'the explosive quiet and smouldering dark glances of the occupied'; and he had paused in thought at a spot where 'a huge Israeli settlement stood like the emissary of some conquering planet'. Pursuing Charlie, he gives her back 'the identity he had stolen from her' — a miniature, presumably, for the larger redemption to be made by return-

ing stolen land to the Palestinians. Perhaps the two of them will live happily ever after. But not in Israel. 'What are we to become?' Gadi finally wonders of his country, 'A Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?' In Gadi's crisis of conscience, as in Charlie's devotion to him, le Carre makes gestures at depicting a more ambiguous im- age of Israel.

But his heart clearly is not in the effort. The willing submission of Charlie to Kurtz and Gadi is an implausibility so enormous and so central that the story collapses under it. Love is all very well, but she is risking her life every day on behalf of Israelis whom she scarcely knows, who treat her abominably, and whom she thinks wrong and wicked, in order to damage Palesti- nians whom she admires without reserve. Her motivation is incoherent. Manipulated in this incredible manner, she is that very old figment indeed, the nice Gentile girl who has fallen into the hands of secretive and scheming Jews who will stop at nothing. •

The implausibility serves a purpose for le Carre, however, for it allows him to express the most extreme anti-Israel passions through the mouth of a character ostensibly working for Israel. When Charlie screams that the Israelis are fascists and rotten kill- ing bastards, these obscenities can appear to be wished upon her by exigencies of plot. Such is not the case, however. Here is a matter, which for all its twists of narrative, belongs to the dimension of agitprop. It is wretched. It is also childish in its sentimen- tal personifications of good and evil. To reduce the complex Arab-Israeli encounter, with its weight of suffering, to this pictorial simplicity, is to ignore its history and its contemporary reality. To select some ideals for praise, or some guilts for blame, at the ,expense of all other ideals and guilts, is not an act of imagination, but a lie.

Israelis and Jews everywhere have become accustomed to such lying, new in form since 1967, to be sure, but very familiar indeed in substance. The primary explanation for the development of lying about Israel is political, and dates from the Six Day War. Up to 1967 the Israelis had been perceived as victims of manifold in- justices, immediately threatened by Arabs whose own evident claims to justice were to some degree vitiated by an absolute refusal to compromise, and by their blood lust. The 1967 war in itself did not affect the historic rights and wrongs of the Arab- Israeli dispute, nor the basic geopolitical factors, except possession of the West Bank and Gaza. Yet in many eyes, Arabs were in- stantly established as victims of manifold injustices, and Israelis as bloodthirsty con- querors refusing to compromise. Here was a reversal of opinion and emotion of the kind described by George Orwell in /984. In the campaign of vilification, it became an automatic reflex to blacken Israel as Nazi.

Le Carre's opinion of Israel — his par- ticipation in this campaign against it — is a matter of record. In the Observer of 13 June 1982, he laid the foundation for a

comparison between Israelis and Nazis. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, he wrote, was 'a monstrosity, launched on speciously assembled grounds'. Too many Israelis, he went on, have persuaded themselves that every Palestinian man and woman and child is by definition a military target, and that Israel will not be safe until the pack of them are swept away. It is the most savage irony that Begin and his generals cannot see how close they are to inflic- ting upon another people the disgraceful criteria once inflicted upon themselves.

Generally speaking, people of indepen- dent mind can acquire adequate informa- tion to measure agitprop against what ac- tually happens in the Middle East. Lies and distortions, even in newspapers or on televi- sion, are open to correction. But The Little Drummer Girl matters very much indeed, because in it the contemporary image of Israel as an unutterable, indeed Nazi, evil is crystallised, and this portrait will go round the world with the authority of a best seller. Statements in fiction are immune to the truths of real life. A novel lives in the im- agination, after all, and it is there, for the credulous, that the image of an evil Israel will be fired and sustained. And an im- agination like le Carre's, when out of con- trol, is a thing that will impress those who want to believe in a demonological vision, or perhaps cannot judge it for themselves, and it will scarify a good many others. Palestinians, needless to say, are not responsible for those who claim to be their saviours. They have not only had to deal with unwelcome Soviet sponsorship, but with the more confusing threat of the tens of thousands of Western supporters who have swarmed upon them since 1967, also believing for a variety of reasons that Israel is uniquely evil. But the Palestinians have seen for themselves why and how Jews ar- rived in their midst, not in the least as 'powerful European custodians' but as pitiful survivors from a real genocide. It has not been the failure to kill more Jews that has aroused their bitterness, but the failure to make peace. Even in PLO circles, they know that they and the Israelis have been inexorably trapped in the same history: that is the nature of the tragedy.

But now an author of renown and stan- ding comes to inform the Palestinians that they have been wrong in these perceptions. They are to understand instead that they have been seledted for premeditated assault by a people too powerful to be defeated, but so inherently evil that peace cannot be made with them. Incited to become .as- gressive, they also find themselves patroniz- ed for being helpless. If le Carre's view is correct, then the Palestinians have nothing to live for, since whatever they do in these frightening circumstances, the Jews will still be the death of them. Real enemies are not so harmful and demoralizing as friends like these.