In the world of sectarian Scottish football, as you may know, they have adopted the Israeli-Palestinian fight as their own. Celtic fans wave Palestinian Authority flags, in an attempt to draw parallels between the Middle East and the troubles they wish people were still having in Ireland. Rangers fans wave Stars of David in response. I always thought this was the crassest, stupidest, most historically illiterate appropriation of a conflict imaginable. But then this week Sarah Palin went to Israel.
What a chump. What a cloth-eared, small-minded, blinkered idiot. She turned up wearing a Star of David T-shirt, and went on to tell some Israel politician that she has the iconography of the Israeli flag ‘on my desk, in my home, all over the place’. This would be her desk, and her home, in Alaska. Off the top of my head, I suspect Alaska might be more unlike the unhappy half of the old British mandate than anywhere else on earth. Massive, sparsely populated, overwhelmingly white — what does she see in Israel that makes her think she has anything of value to say about anything? Does she look at the fence and the rockets and the refugee camps, and shudder and think ‘This is how home would be, if the Eskimos got really uppity’? Or what?
Of course, ignorance has never been a bar to Middle East pontification. Palin’s ignorance, though, soars into self-parody. ‘Why are you apologising all the time?’ she asked her hosts. Even they must have been baffled by that one. I like Israelis a lot. They’re fun and spiky and they’re far more bothered by global opprobrium than they let on. But I’ve never yet heard one apologise for anything. If an Israeli ran over your foot, he’d shout that it was your fault for wearing a road-coloured shoe. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if Palin was simply operating under the assumption that Israel was a country chock full of people like Woody Allen.
On her last day in the country, the great hope of the American know-nothing right headed off towards Bethlehem, got within sight of the Israeli Army checkpoint, and then turned around and went home. The mind boggles as to why. Did she get cold feet? Did she not realise there was a border? Had she forgotten that passport which she has so proudly owned for a whole two years? Was she suddenly worried there might be drugs in the car? We’ll never know. We don’t really need to.
I’ve been working on a theory for a while now, that the greatest barrier to peace between Palestinians and Israelis isn’t the terrorists on one side, or the settlers on the other, but the third tribe with interests in the region, which is the great international conspiracy of pundits. Some claim to be on one side, some on the other, but actually they’re all on the same side, which is their own.
Any fool can go to the West Bank. Even I’ve been to the West Bank. You can wake up, have a cappuccino and a croissant in a nice Tel Aviv café, commute over to the warzone, watch one bunch of frightened kids shoot at some other frightened kids, file your lofty, pious, pained thoughts, and be home in time to work on your tan. If real peace were ever to break out, the damage to the pundit economy would be terminal. All those think-tanks, suddenly with nothing to think about. All those research fellows, suddenly with nothing to research. All those people merrily using this little nutcase corner of the Middle East as a proxy for other fights, actually in much the same way as your Glasgow football fans, who would suddenly have to find another one.
Palin is worse than any of them. She didn’t bother learning anything, or even try to. This was a trip conducted in the same ignorance with which it was conceived. She wasn’t there to learn. She was there to look like she had learned. Didn’t work. Crazy old fraud. Good.
In one of the first extracts that the Daily Mail printed this week from Bercow: Rowdy Living in the Tory Party, Bobby Friedman’s book about the speaker, was a brief outline of a plot to run a candidate with a terminal illness against the speaker in his own constituency, in the election of 2010.
‘If this unfortunate had died some time between nominations closing and polling day,’ Friedman writes, ‘the contest would have been delayed — as would Bercow’s return to the Commons as an MP. Consequently, he would have been ineligible for re-election as Speaker. The plan floundered, inevitably, on the difficulty of finding a suitable volunteer.’
‘WT’, as Sally Bercow might tweet, ‘F’? Really? Really, really? Were anti-Bercow campaigners lurking outside the oncology wards? ‘I’m dreadfully sorry about your terminal bowel cancer, but you might be able to help us out of a fix…’
Yes. I bet they were. I’ve never met Bercow, and everything I’ve ever read about him has made me suspect that if I did, I’d probably want to give him a kick. But at the same time, there’s something so bitter, petty and gross about the forces who range themselves against him that I inevitably find myself rooting for him all the same. This story captures that perfectly. It has to be true.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times
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