I have received some very complimentary letters about my 22 July column, the one dealing with the plight of a Palestinian female doctor in Gaza. I will not mention the names because they were, after all, private messages. You know who you are and I thank you. And now for the bad news: my Washington spies report that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was planned on 17 and 18 June of this year, between the former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky, and US Veep Dick Cheney. Basically, the assault on Lebanon was stage-managed between the government of Israel and the neocons in the Bush administration, those nice guys who have given us Afghanistan, Iraq and who now threaten Syria and Iran. Netanyahu and Sharansky laid the groundwork, as they say.
Easy to say, you might say. The internet, which incidentally I don’t read, is full of conspiracy theories. And DC’s rumour mill is as vibrant as Paris Hilton’s sex life. But consider this. Israel looks as if it pre-planned the attack when it denied entry to the West Bank to Palestinians holding US passports. The denial of entry to Palestinian–Americans was a violation of both the Geneva Convention and the Oslo Accords. But the fix was in. Israeli planners, after all, know how to play Palestinian extremists like the proverbial fiddle. Israel’s border exercise inside Lebanon immediately following — and the subsequent kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers — provided the pretext for the attack on Gaza and Lebanon. We know the rest.
Netanyahu, who had some interesting things to say to Allister Heath in these here pages last week, was the author of ‘Clean Break’, a white paper written in 1996 by him and other militant Zionists such as Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Perle, Michael Ledeen and Netanyahu himself still call the shots on US and Israeli policies. With an American election not too far away, turmoil in the Middle East, and the ensuing ‘terrorist’ threats, are not exactly vote losers as far as the simpleton in the White House is concerned.
So far so good, as far as Israel is concerned. But what about if one is a poor Lebanese in south Lebanon, or an Iraqi, for that matter? Here’s John Podhoretz, a slob of a man whose warlike rhetoric is matched only by his sloppy and unattractive physical appearance. He is writing in the Murdoch New York Post: ‘What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?’ Do you see, dear readers, what coarse rhetoric we’re up against back in the Land of the Depraved?
Even the civilised John Derbyshire, a Brit, writing in National Review, the magazine which gave me my start, wishes ‘we had rubbled Iraq’ in order to show our enemies we know how to punish them. Does no one remember what our Lord Jesus said about turning the other cheek? As Sam Leith wrote, had we treated September 11 as a criminal outrage, and not gone ahead and rubbled innocent Iraqis, not only would we be holding the moral high ground, I doubt if we would now be unable to carry a shaving kit on to an aeroplane. Violence breeds more violence, something the Israelis have failed to understand in all these years of suppressing and humiliating the Palestinians. You’d think some monkey in DC would have figured this out by now, but no. Not with bloodthirsty slobs like Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Perle and Ledeen as the organ-grinders. What saddens me is that the often talked about special relationship is a joke. There is no special relationship between America and Britain. There is only one SR, and that’s between Israel and the United States, with the former calling the tune. Get used to it, you Brits.
And now for further bad news: as of last Friday I had lived 25,656 days, and the same amount of nights. A friend figured out that I must have been conceived on the 19 November 1935, most likely the second time my sainted mother ever made love, and definitely the last. The mother of my children, in cahoots with the divine Charlotte Goldsmith, made a short film which made me out to be some kind of Ancient Greek hero. Paul Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Alexander Chancellor, Charles Glass (who asked me to emerge from the closet), Bill Buckley, Nicky Haslam, the Duke of Beaufort, the sainted arts editor Liz Anderson were some of the contributors to a propaganda film that would have made Dr Goebbels blush with feelings of inadequacy. A beautiful painting of my boat from George Nicholson, a signed-by-Papa first edition of A Farewell to Arms from John Rigas, and a hell of a lot of other nice presents softened the blow. I am now considered middle-aged even in Palm Beach, which must be the cruellest blow of all.
Comments