The Origins of the Middle East Mess - A Historical Analysis

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda - excellent article by Adam Curtis, thanks for posting.

It's all worth reading, in large part because Curtis' historical method has always involved the interpretation of archive film - original documentary and news. Curtis (and his film researchers) search for both rare and what we would now call MSM material, and then read these documents (documentaries) with intelligence and insight.

A case in point is his interpretation of the impact of Eichmann's trial on Israel and the Zionist movement, where vox pops from a kibbutz provide a perspective which other historians attempt to deny. The discussion of the meaning of Hannan Arendt's "banality of evil" in this context is provocative too.

A number of historians have argued that Eichmann's trial created an enormous shock to Israeli society because for the fifteen years after the second world war no one in Israel - or in the Jewish communities in America - really talked about the Holocaust. It was if it was forgotten and wiped.
Hundreds of thousand of survivors from the death camps came to Israel, but the mood among them was to look towards the future - turning their faces towards a better future promised by the Zionist dream, and trying to forget the horrors of the past.
Above all they didn't want to be seen as victims in an optimistic age. The leader of the American Jewish Committee wrote that
"Jewish organizations should avoid representing the Jew as weak, victimized and suffering" Because it reinforced "long ingrained stereotypes - the hunted wanderer, inured to universal hatred and contempt"
Other historians have challenged this argument - and it can quickly lead into the dead end of arguments about how the memory of the Holocaust has been used and abused.
But I have found a really interesting film shot in Israel in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. It asks ordinary Israelis - including some on a kibbutz - what they feel about Eichmann and his effect on their world. Some approve - but the majority feeling is that this should have been forgotten - and is doing real harm to the new country of Israel.
One woman who speaks very powerfully finishes - "I would be happy if he had never entered this country"But that was only the beginning of the terrible corrosive effect Eichmann was going to have not just on Israeli optimism about their society - but on the whole western liberal belief that human beings could be transformed for the better.
In 1963 a political philosopher called Hannah Arendt who had attended the Eichmann trial published a series of articles in the New Yorker. In them she challenged the idea put forward by the Israeli prosecutors that Eichmann was a special kind of evil human being. Arendt argued that he was the very opposite - that he was "terrifyingly normal". That far from being a demonic monster he was actually a bland, mindless and extremely efficient bureaucrat. He was motivated, she said by personal ambition and that he wasn't even particularly anti-semitic.
Arendt called it "the banality of evil".
"evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer.
However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic.
Evil can spread over the whole world like a fungus and lay waste precisely because it is not rooted anywhere. It was the most banal motives, not especially wicked ones which made Eichmann such a frightful evil-doer."
Arendt's reports caused an outrage. The journalist Norman Podhoretz wrote that Arendt's picture of Eichmann -
"violates everything we know about the Nature of Man."
And that went to the heart of it. Because what Arendt was implying was that human beings might not be changeable or perfectible. That anyone could do really evil, horrible things any time depending on the circumstances they found themselves in. And what was worse - that the modern world of intricate bureaucracies and bland management might make it more possible.
It was a pretty pessimistic and conservative view of human beings - and it challenged the idea that you could change the world for the better. And this dark frightening idea, born out of the horrors of twenty years before, began to worm its way into the post war optimism not just in Israel but a whole generation of liberals in Europe and America.

The discussion of the tangled, interlocked relationship between Hamas and Zionism is equally fascinating.

Abu Warda speaks like a religiously inspired anarchist...

Here are the reports of the Afula and Tel Aviv bombs. They show the shock and fear that was now gripping Israeli society. And note the politician who turns up at the end of the Tel Aviv report - Benjamin Netanyahu - he says that Rabin's concessions in the peace process have led to this.Hamas insisted that there was a perfect logic behind the civilian killings - Sheikh Yassin gave interviews saying that if they kill our civilians, then we'll kill theirs. But everyone knew that the real aim was to stop the peace process - to undermine the negotiations between Arafat and Israel.
Then in 1996 there were elections in Israel. The Prime Minister was Shimon Peres who was a veteran of the left-wing Labour Zionist movement. His opponent was the star of the newly rising right in Israel - the leader of the Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu. He was an opponent of the peace process.
Hamas intensified their suicide bombing campaign. They claimed it was in response for the killing of their best bomb maker - called The Engineer. But in March 1996 Palestinian TV broadcast an interview with a jailed Hamas member who had been organising the bombings.
He was called Abu Warda - and he claimed in the interview that the leaders of Hamas' military wing had told him that the aim of the bombings was to make sure that Peres was defeated, and Netanyahu was elected.
"They thought that the military operations would work to the benefit of the Likud and against the left. They wanted to destroy the political process, and they thought that, if the right succeeded, the political process would stop."
Everyone was furious and all sides - Likud, Fatah, and Hamas said that Abu Warda had been forced to lie. And each blamed the other for doing it. But Netanyahu then went on to win the election by a narrow margin - and he started to do everything he could to drag his feet on the peace process.
And since then Hamas and the Israeli right have been locked together in a terrible cycle in which both shift back and forth between politics and violence in order to promote their aims. Last week's flare up in the Gaza strip was just another example of that cycle.
And at their heart those aims are deeply conservative. Both Hamas and the Israeli right are rooted in defensive ideologies that distrust change and are seeped in a deep pessimism about the ability of politics and politicians to change the world for the better. To try and prevent change both groups have increasingly turned to violence to stop things from running away from them. But it is growing increasingly desperate - because it is impossible to stop the world from changing and the growing addiction to using violence to stop change has corrupted both sides ideals.
But it cannot last. In Egypt, the new President - Mohammed Morsi was elected as a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet this week he started acting in the very way the Islamists fear most. He used his political position to ride roughshod over democracy - grabbing power for himself.