Clowns in Charge
At what point did the Soviet Union begin to collapse? The day Stalin died?
The Pasternak affair showed both the intolerance of the government and its ineffectiveness - a tired authoritarian bureaucracy that wasn't flexible enough to fool the outside world, but didn't have the tools to silence its author (murder was no longer an option). The result? Doctor Zhivago was published and the author became an international celebrity, and the Soviet Union condemned on all fronts.
Last week Israel stopped Noam Chomsky from delivering lectures to the Bir Zeit university in the West Bank. The result? To the world they look both intolerant and foolish: how better to advertise the repressive measures of the occupation, and create an uproar against them?
I explore some parallels.....
When Harold Macmillan visited the Soviet Union in 1959 the Soviet authorities arranged for Boris Pasternak to leave Moscow, and to go Georgia, to avoid any contact between the British Prime Minster and the country’s then most famous writer. It was scared of a poet.
Last week Noam Chomsky was barred from speaking at Bir Zeit university in the West Bank, and from meeting the Palestinian Prime Minster, Salam Fayyad. Like the Soviet Union, Israel it seems is afraid of words.
Noam Chomsky is the Bertrand Russell of the 2nd half of the 20th century. He has the same moral and intellectual authority; and like Russell is highly controversial, upsetting all the right people. In one respect though Chomsky is very different: Russell was born into the establishment and maintained close links to it – he could talk and write directly to Lenin or Roosevelt. Of course this didn’t stop him getting arrested – protesting the First World War or for CND. Chomsky, on the other hand, tends to eschew power – he’s not interested in meeting Obama or Lyndon B Johnson.
With both men their controversies bring out a lost and strange, an uncomfortable, world; and this illumination is often is more important that the events themselves. Take the New York Times report on the incident:
Late last month, Ivan Prado, one of Spain’s most famous clowns, spent six hours at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv being questioned before being sent back to Madrid. He had planned to run a clown festival modeled after one in Spain in the West Bank city of Ramallah but was accused of having ties with Palestinian terrorist groups by the Israelis.
The clowns really are in charge. Today the word terrorism has become a form of abuse to chuck at your opponents. Just to visit the Occupied Territories is to become a terrorist? All too familiar, of course. Here’s some examples from the Soviet Union:
Pasternak is an internal émigré, so let him become a real émigré, and clear off to his capitalist paradise…his departure from our midst can only clear the air… Weeds should be uprooted (A. Bezymenski)
For forty years now this hidden enemy, full of hatred and spite, has lived amongst us, and we have shared our bread with him. To my mind it would have been better if he had first joined the ranks of the Soviet Union’s open enemies… (Smirnov)
Pasternak is the clearest example of a cosmopolitan in our midst… We do not need a citizen like this! (Lev Oshanin)
All quotes from a meeting of writers to denounce Pasternak; his novel and the award of the Nobel Prize. He wasn’t called a terrorist. There were different names then: capitalist, cosmopolitan, émigré, foreigner:
After the publication… in the New Statesmen of his poem “The Nobel Prize” in an English translation, Pasternak was summoned to the Prosecutor General, R.A. Rudenko. He was charged, under Article 64, with treason to the Fatherland, and threatened with arrest if he should meet foreigners. (Evgeny Pasternak)
The most interesting part of this incident, which doesn’t seem to have aroused too much concern, is that the Palestinian authority in the West Bank has no control over its borders – even the Prime Minster cannot secure a meeting with invited visitors. This is alluded to byYaakov Turkel, a former Israeli Supreme Court judge, who criticized the decision to bar Chomsky:
Every person has a right; it is his right to enter and his right to leave Israel.
Ramallah is part of Israel…. Though it appears the reason for the denial of entry was because Chomsky, unlike previous visits, didn’t include Israel in his itinerary – this seems to have been a particular concern during the interrogation at the border. How odd! But then in the Soviet Union who exactly was a foreigner? An Italian? an American? or a Czech or a Pole? While Pasternak was a major translator of not only Georgian, but Hungarian, German, and English verse.
Turkel’s assumption and the tangled use of language is a sad, but accurate, reflection of the true state of affairs in the West Bank, where Israel’s government creates this ambiguity and uses it to deny Palestinians rights. This and much else about the West Bank settlements is detailed at great length in Idith Zertal’s and Akiva Eldar’s powerful book, Lords of the Land. It shows, from almost immediately after the Six Days War in 1967, the close links between the Settler Movement and the high Israeli establishment, and the concentrated efforts to annex the most valuable land in the occupied territories. And over the years the government’s positions have hardened, and in many ways become far more extreme. Golda Meir refused to recognise the idea of a Palestinian people, Rabin a Palestinian state, yet history before Oslo feels strangely more liberal than the times since. This is partly an illusion; but in part its because the trends of the first 20 years after the occupation have picked up momentum, and thus their effects, the daily grind on the Palestinians, has become that much worse. For the West though, for its mainstream media, where we get our views, we’re always on the road to peace! And one day there will be a real state in the West Bank, a little municipality than can collect taxes and put people in prison….
When Harold Macmillan visited the Soviet Union in 1959 the Soviet authorities arranged for Boris Pasternak to leave Moscow, and to go Georgia, to avoid any contact between the British Prime Minster and the country’s then most famous writer. It was scared of a poet.
Last week Noam Chomsky was barred from speaking at Bir Zeit university in the West Bank, and from meeting the Palestinian Prime Minster, Salam Fayyad. Like the Soviet Union, Israel it seems is afraid of words.
Noam Chomsky is the Bertrand Russell of the 2nd half of the 20th century. He has the same moral and intellectual authority; and like Russell is highly controversial, upsetting all the right people. In one respect though Chomsky is very different: Russell was born into the establishment and maintained close links to it – he could talk and write directly to Lenin or Roosevelt. Of course this didn’t stop him getting arrested – protesting the First World War or for CND. Chomsky, on the other hand, tends to eschew power – he’s not interested in meeting Obama or Lyndon B Johnson.
With both men their controversies bring out a lost and strange, an uncomfortable, world; and this illumination is often is more important that the events themselves. Take the New York Times report on the incident:
Late last month, Ivan Prado, one of Spain’s most famous clowns, spent six hours at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv being questioned before being sent back to Madrid. He had planned to run a clown festival modeled after one in Spain in the West Bank city of Ramallah but was accused of having ties with Palestinian terrorist groups by the Israelis.
The clowns really are in charge. Today the word terrorism has become a form of abuse to chuck at your opponents. Just to visit the Occupied Territories is to become a terrorist? All too familiar, of course. Here’s some examples from the Soviet Union:
Pasternak is an internal émigré, so let him become a real émigré, and clear off to his capitalist paradise…his departure from our midst can only clear the air… Weeds should be uprooted (A. Bezymenski)
For forty years now this hidden enemy, full of hatred and spite, has lived amongst us, and we have shared our bread with him. To my mind it would have been better if he had first joined the ranks of the Soviet Union’s open enemies… (Smirnov)
Pasternak is the clearest example of a cosmopolitan in our midst… We do not need a citizen like this! (Lev Oshanin)
All quotes from a meeting of writers to denounce Pasternak; his novel and the award of the Nobel Prize. He wasn’t called a terrorist. There were different names then: capitalist, cosmopolitan, émigré, foreigner:
After the publication… in the New Statesmen of his poem “The Nobel Prize” in an English translation, Pasternak was summoned to the Prosecutor General, R.A. Rudenko. He was charged, under Article 64, with treason to the Fatherland, and threatened with arrest if he should meet foreigners. (Evgeny Pasternak)
The most interesting part of this incident, which doesn’t seem to have aroused too much concern, is that the Palestinian authority in the West Bank has no control over its borders – even the Prime Minster cannot secure a meeting with invited visitors. This is alluded to byYaakov Turkel, a former Israeli Supreme Court judge, who criticized the decision to bar Chomsky:
Every person has a right; it is his right to enter and his right to leave Israel.
Ramallah is part of Israel…. Though it appears the reason for the denial of entry was because Chomsky, unlike previous visits, didn’t include Israel in his itinerary – this seems to have been a particular concern during the interrogation at the border. How odd! But then in the Soviet Union who exactly was a foreigner? An Italian? an American? or a Czech or a Pole? While Pasternak was a major translator of not only Georgian, but Hungarian, German, and English verse.
Turkel’s assumption and the tangled use of language is a sad, but accurate, reflection of the true state of affairs in the West Bank, where Israel’s government creates this ambiguity and uses it to deny Palestinians rights. This and much else about the West Bank settlements is detailed at great length in Idith Zertal’s and Akiva Eldar’s powerful book, Lords of the Land. It shows, from almost immediately after the Six Days War in 1967, the close links between the Settler Movement and the high Israeli establishment, and the concentrated efforts to annex the most valuable land in the occupied territories. And over the years the government’s positions have hardened, and in many ways become far more extreme. Golda Meir refused to recognise the idea of a Palestinian people, Rabin a Palestinian state, yet history before Oslo feels strangely more liberal than the times since. This is partly an illusion; but in part its because the trends of the first 20 years after the occupation have picked up momentum, and thus their effects, the daily grind on the Palestinians, has become that much worse. For the West though, for its mainstream media, where we get our views, we’re always on the road to peace! And one day there will be a real state in the West Bank, a little municipality than can collect taxes and put people in prison….
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