ROBERT FISK:Leon Uris’s Exodus – a racist, fictional account of the birth of Israel in which Arabs are rarely mentioned without the adjectives “dirty” and “stinking” – was one of the best pieces of Socialist-Zionist propaganda that Israel could have sought. Even Ben Gurion agreed, claiming that it was “the greatest thing ever written about Israel”, although he correctly dismissed any literary qualities this nonsense might have possessed. But when the Israeli ambassador to the US told us (after almost 2,000 Palestinians had been slaughtered, most of them civilians) that the Israeli army should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its “unimaginable restraint” in the Gaza war, I had to glance at the calendar. Was it 1 April, perhaps? Was this some kind of gargantuan joke, so obscene, so grotesquely inappropriate, that it contained some inner meaning, some kernel of truth, which I had missed? The Nobel Prize for “unimaginable restraint”, according to Ron Dermer, should have been solemnly handed out to an army which much of the world believes guilty of war crimes. Oddly, I find myself more in awe of the word “unimaginable” – what does this mean, for heaven’s sake? – than the “restraint” which the West always begs of Israel when it is flattening villages and cities (along with their occupants) in its various civilisational wars. Besides, if the Nobel Peace Prize can be awarded to Obama – presumably for public-speaking – why not hand the wretched thing to the IDF after another bloody war?
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 02:11:44 +0000