Israeli and Palestinian
D. C. Watt
tban Robert St. John (W. H. Allen £5.00) My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary Leila Khaled, edited by George Hajjar (Hodder £2.50) One of the distinctive marks of the British is their comparative inability to avoid taking sides. In foreign disputes this is often dangerous. But in no case ought it to be more held in check than in the matter of the establishment of the state of Israel'and its effects on the Arab population of the' former Ottoman province of Palestine. Both sides of the dispute can plead a case which is almost overwhelming and totally convincing, until the case for their rivals is heard. Both can plead sufferings, wounds, subjection, atrocities, martyrs. Both tend to lapse into purely conspiratorial theories of history to explain any support their opponents enjoy from the outside world. Both offer a half range of attitudes among their adherents, all the way from would-be ' moderate' to hard-line terrorist. In essence, however, the difference between ' moderates ' and ' extremists ' is not one of aims but of methods, even more of styles. And finally both sides inspire whole libraries of books and pamphlets which vary from the outspokenly awful to the committedly mediocre. Very few good books emerge from the smoke of this particular battlefield.
These two books, the one a biography of an Israeli 'moderate,' Abba Eban, Israel's present foreign minister, the other the autobiographical manifesto of a Palestinian extremist, Leila Khaled, the would-be hijacker of an El Al plane in 1971, are not among this small minority. Mr St John obviously composed his work for an American audience. Connoisseurs of unconscious humour should turn to the passages in which he explains the nature of the Cambridge Union and quotes at .length both from the young Eban's speeches and from the reports of them carried by Granta and similar Cambridge journals. The
awful humourlessness of the self-consciously and laboriously witty can hardly have been more accurately, though unintentionally, set out. At over 500 pages, the book panders to the desire of the dwindling band of American purchasers of hard-cover literature for something obviously substantial enough to be displayed on their shelves. But the cost of this is paid in lengthy and tedious passages of pad ding, pointless anecdotes, laudatory quotations from the convinced press, inaccurate and biased recapitulations of the general history of Eban's times.
The pity of this is that there is an excellent biographical study concealed beneath all this fat. Eban is of Russian Jewish stock but of British education, a product at one remove of the great exodus from eastern Europe at the turn of the century and beyond. His family and backround have very little to do with the long-assimilated Sephardic Jewish elites in Britain; yet in 1945 the way lay open to him for a similar act of assimilation. A double first in oriental languages, Fellow and Tutor at Pembroke, he could have sunk into British academic life with ease. Instead he joined the Jewish Agency in 1946, became in 1947 Liaison Officer to the UN Special Committee on Palestine, and in 1948 head of the Israeli delegation to the UN. St John is excellent on Eban's childhood, and, hidden in the mass of ill-constructed verbiage of the later chapters, is a good deal of interesting and, to a historian, useful detail on the conduct of Israeli foreign policy during the great crises of 1956 and 1967, detail derived in the main from interviews with Eban himself and his closest associates. Readable, however, this book is not.
The autobiography of Leila K haled, on the other hand, is almost compulsively readable.
Those who believe the assurances of Mr Gordon Waterfield's recent letter to the Times, and expect something which will enhance their understanding of the phenomenon 'presented by the Black September movement and the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine, will be sorely disappointed. The book is astatement of a commitment, a statement couched in a fog of verbal ambiguities through which shines nothing but unreason and violence. Glubb Pasha's foreword attempts to explain this by the formula 'violence breeds violence.' Miss Khaled, aged four, saw a bit of fighting in Haifa, her birthplace, in April 1948, and was then taken by her family to Sour in Lebanon. She grew up, according to her own account. in schools of Palestinian refugees, was taught an intensively anti-Zionist education, joined the Arab nationalist movement, studied briefly at AUB, and went to teach in Kuwait where, again on her own account, she lived in reasonable comfort. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, and the ill-judged taunts of a young American YWCA girl drove her to throw this up and join the PFLP, who eventually trained her for two hijacking jobs she undertook, the successful hijacking of a TWA plane to Damascus in 1969 and the unsuccessful attempt on the El Al plane two years later which landed her in Ealing gaol.
Enough has been said to show that the Glubb formula is more than a little inadequate. Miss Khaled is clearly a case of arrested development. She has the teenager's inability to spot logical irreconcilabilities between the various principles she embraces so strenuously. Like the Queen of Hearts, she has practised believing impossibilities. She indulges in high-flown reflections and poetry — all of which is faithfully reproduced. She behaves with an ill-mannered and arrogant petulance towards those she encounters, characteristic of a certain kind of half-educated, spoilt, poor little rich girl stereotype — the Jane Fonda syndrome. She is capable of vowing that she will never harm children in the course of her hijacking attempts although her weapons are hand-grenades. She despises the pilots who yield to her threats against the lives of their passengers. And throughout, she Is in a state of self-induced exaltation, achieved by repetition of the formulas of PFLP-type Marxism and the idealisation of a hagiarchy of revolutionary saints, Che Guevara naturally being the St Michael of the Whole clutch.
Her lucubrations are particularly notable for her ability to substitute abstract short hand terms like 'America,' Britain," West
. Germany,' etc. for the individuals against whom her violence is directed. Where this
fails, an equally conscious effort is made to deprive them of personality and individuality, as with the unfortunate Chief Superintendent Frew to whom her interrogation was en trusted in Ealing gaol, whose sympathy and tact is rewarded with denunciation and ridi cule. This inability or unwillingness to relate to people is a characteristic touch of our latterday revolutionary young, described by the dreadful word 'depersonalisation ', an almost Orwellian concept. But only the truly dedi cated or the emotionally stunted can actually apply the concept to those with whom they are in direct personal contact.
The question that always arises with these latter-day Charlotte Cordays, is whether a Particular situation creates them, as it might be the tyrannical repression of a tiarat, the Iniquities of American capitalist society, the sufferings of the Palestinian refugees, or Whether it merely attracts them from the milieux the situation most affects. In the latter case we are forced back into the area of indi vidual psychological development and the respective influences on this of genetics and
Political environment about which it is at present so dangerous to deliver public lectures to student audiences for fear of the Leila Khaleds of the rent-a-crowd set. On this Miss 1 O. C. Watt is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics
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