If it’s good that Harry was fighting the Taleban, why are we queasy when Israel fights Hamas?
Do you reckon they told all the royals? Seriously? All of them? Even the flaky minor ones, like Fergie? Or has she been gossiping with the Countess of Wessex and the bafflingly female Princess Michael of Kent, these past three months, wondering where Harry was, and whether this time he’d done something really bad? ‘Has he eloped with a butler?’ ‘Is he in a Thai jail?’ ‘Is he doing that Winehouse girl, do you think?’ Hey, they didn’t tell everybody. They certainly didn’t tell me. And I have a sneaking suspicion that they didn’t tell Jon Snow, either. That would explain a lot. Hell hath no fury like the media stalwart ignored. Imagine him reading about it on Drudge, like the rest of us, and thinking back to all those cancelled dinner parties and those evasive colleagues who kept insisting they were just off skiing, again. Only a totalitarian state could keep a newsreader in the dark, eh Jon? We might as well be living in China.
My reaction, I think, was pretty typical. ‘Gaw!’ I felt inclined to say, as the hairs rose slightly on the back of my neck. ‘Brave little tyke!’ Did you get that, too? That weird sensation where you feel yourself momentarily turning into Barbara Windsor? It is the hardwired British response to the notion of royalty in peril, even if he is behind a sandbag and firing a machine gun. Maybe Snow was brave to challenge it. Maybe he was simply too cross to notice it was there.
I don’t mean to challenge it, a week on, but it has been bothering me. Please forgive this column lurching in what may appear to be a new direction, but it has been bothering me, mainly, because of Israel’s latest onslaught in Gaza. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a hardwired response to that sort of thing, too. It’s a sick, tumbling sensation of despair, in the pit of the stomach. I can feel moral equivocation coming on. I can feel the intellectual faculties shutting down.
I’m not very comfortable writing about Israel. Prince Harry, Jon Snow, skiing holidays, I’m your man. Israel, hmm, rather not. A few years ago, I remember Richard Ingrams saying that he ignored people writing in support of Israel if they had Jewishsounding names. It was a vile thing to say, with a vile motivation behind it, but it was particularly vile because it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. I’d know. I’m Jewish, and I tend to ignore my own thoughts about Israel. I don’t particularly trust them. I’m too conscious of my wiring.
Deeply weird country, Israel. I’ve only been there once. Jerusalem, I thought, was a total basketcase of a place. The Old City sums it up, chopped into ill-conceived factions like the execution of a badly drafted will, with hundreds of little cliques that have essentially just been being wildly unreasonable to each other for at least a thousand years. Take every Big Brother contestant that ever was, pack them into a city, and leave them there. Go back in a few millennia, and that’s Jerusalem. Bonkers.
Tel Aviv, by contrast, seemed a lot of fun. It’s a proper Mediterranean city, going about its business. The mad mullahs who want to push the Jews into the sea, the academics who debate Israel’s ‘right to exist’, they can’t have been there. Such sentiments are meaningless in Tel Aviv. It is there. It is stuck. It won’t wipe off.
Quite recently, I heard an Israeli diplomat expressing dismay about this ‘right to exist’ business. Suddenly, he said, it wasn’t a given. The goalposts had shifted, back beyond first principles. Particularly in the UK, he said, he was being called upon to justify what Israel was even doing there. How do you argue that, about any country? The mind starts to spin.
So that’s my wiring, on Israel. It’s a mess. When they send in the gunships, when they kill 120 Palestinians in a week (and more, I’d bet, by now), over a few wee rockets in a few wee towns, it goes into freefall. And I’m struck, and baffled, by the contrast between that and my Prince Harry wiring, the wir ing that goes all Babs and wants to buy him a pint, and is confident and comfortable in what it thinks. Because when Harry fired that machine gun, at whom was he firing? We have chosen our enemy in Afghanistan, because we have decreed, pretty circuitously, that they pose a threat to us. And yet it’s not like rockets are raining down on Dover, is it?
Wearing my diarist hat, I had some fun with the Ku Klux Klan last week, after the loveable sheet-wearers published a firm statement on their website denying reports that they were backing Barack Obama for the US presidency. To what, one wonders, do they object? His views on affordable healthcare? His speaking style?
I asked, but the Klan didn’t answer. ‘For God’s sake,’ I wanted to shout. ‘You may be bigoted, murdering scum, but at least have the courage of your convictions!’ Is race such an emotive issue these days that even the Klan don’t want to talk about it?
We pick and choose when it is acceptable to talk about race and ethnicity. It doesn’t always make sense. We’ll talk happily about the sympathies between the Iranian Shia majority and the Shias in Iraq, or Kosovo Serbs and Serbian Serbs. We might even seek to draw emotional links between Jewish Britons and the State of Israel.
And yet, as America inches towards electing its first ever President not to be entirely descended from Europeans, there is not a single European voice that appears to mind one whit. In fact, quite the reverse.
Ignoring his Kenyan ancestry, Barack Obama would be the first President, even, without a European name. Indeed, aside from the odd dash of German or Dutch, the vast majority have had Anglo-Saxon names. But nobody worries out loud that a President Obama might not have the same emotional response towards Europe, or Britain, as a President Wilson or Roosevelt.
Is this a good thing? I think it probably is. I just cannot figure out how it has come about. Has multiculturalism seeped so far into the European psyche that we barely even notice? Do we just pretend not to notice? I have no idea. Mind you, there’s always George Bush, with his face and name from next door, and his mind, apparently, from Pluto. Maybe it’s something to do with that.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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