Not all of one mind
Judy Kirby reviews a book with new insights into the complexities of the Middle East
Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche by Arthur Neslen, Pluto Press. ISBN 0 7453 2365 0. £16.99.
Who are the Israelis? We may think we know – proud, motivated Jews defending their right to a homeland. But is it true?
Some of the people Arthur Neslen spoke to in his psychic journey conform to this expected profile. Most do not. It isn’t long before the reader is confronted with the stark reality of a country facing the impossibility of moulding a modern state from a diaspora.
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>> When a number arrived as immigrants from Baghdad – some of whom had been in the forefront of Iraq’s cultural revival – they were doused with DDT and housed in tin shacks.
We know now that DDT is toxic, but at the time - I assume this was in the 1950s or ‘60s - it was used with gay abandon: good, all-American housewives would, with their children, go to DDT parties for similar treatment. Silent Spring wasn’t published until 1962.
The fear of malaria or typhus did strange things (and it’s making a *controlled* comeback for that reason).
The tin shacks is also a misnomer… these were constructed for the refugees and other arrivals. Anyone without self-sourced accommodation generally ended-up (still do) in such temporary accommodation. I know a European Jew who found himself in a room with rats the size of cats (and without a production crew from I’m a Celebrity in sight).
Most importantly, those Iraqi Jews no longer live in temporary accommodation or under “refugee” status.
Nor does the image of Yasser Arafat as “an honest man with faith concerned for his people” sound familiar. One of the darkest pieces of humour - more so than piping, which could be used to reduce the sewage backlog in Gaza, being stolen to make qassams - is of what happened to cut-price concrete supplied to the Authority by Saudi: a goodly part of it was sold by members of his clan, at market prices, to Israeli companies.
No properly formed moral creature could fail to feel sorrow for the suffering of individual Palestinian Arabs; and their political leaders, who have appropriated sums the per capita equivalent of four Marshall Plans, are a significant cause.