“Bear me up on angels’ wings, and other transcendental things. Where the golden walls still glow, let my people go to Jerusalem”.
Jerusalem is all about faith and passion, and there is no city on Earth that people get more passionate about. The light is luminous. In high summer it almost shimmers. The very air is full of prayer and politics, passion and pain, and the rocks and stones virtually sing a hallelujah chorus of history. I am not a religious person, but I cannot help getting excited by the place – although I do not transcend to transports of delight and delirium. Some folk love Jerusalem so much, they go mad.
As I contemplate my annual review of In That Howling Infinite, I am reminded, with clichéd predictability, of that well-worn Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times”.
A torturous and seemingly endless US election campaign defied all the pundits by producing an colourful and unpredictable POTUS. In the UK, the unthinkable Brexit came to pass, dividing the polity and discombobulating the establishment. Next year is certainly going to be worth watching.
The slow and tragic death of Syria continued unabated with Russian and Turkey wading into the quagmire alongside Americans, British, French, Australians, Iran, Lebanon, Gulf tyrants, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Da’esh might be on the the ropes in Iraq, but the long term survival of the unitary state is doubtful. And the proxy wars of the Ottoman Succession have spread to Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle Eas as Gulf tyrants face off against Shia Iran’s alleged puppets, and, armed and abetted by British and American weaponry, South American mercenaries, and Australian officers, bomb the shit out of the place.
Whilst the grim reaper scythed through the world from Baghdad to Berlin, from Aleppo to Ankara, the Year saw the passing of a record number of icons of the seventies and eighties, two of whom who have provided a continuing soundtrack for my life, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. We shall not see the like of them again.
In our little corner of the cosmos, we endured the longest and most boring election campaign in living memory, resulting in an outcome that only accentuates Australians’ disenchantment with a lacklustre Tory government, a depressingly dysfunctional political system, and politicians of all stripes who, blinkered by short-termism, and devoid of vision, insist on fiddling whilst the antipodean Roman burns.
Meanwhile, in our own rustic backyard, we find that we too are “going up against chaos”, to quote that wonderful Canadian songster Bruce Cockburn. For much of the year, we have been engaged in combat with the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales as it proceeds to lay waste to the state forest that surrounds us. As the year draws to a close, our adversary has withdrawn with only half of its proposed harvest completed. But it will return in 2017, and the struggle will continue – as it will throughout the state and indeed the nation as timber, coal and gas corporations, empowered by legislation, trash the common treasury with the assent of our many governments.
And yet, life on the farm remains pleasant and delightful, though dams are low and rain would be most welcome. The bird and reptilian life continues to amaze us, and an ironic corollary to the clear felling of the Tarkeeth Forest is that “refugees” are seeking shelter here. Wallabies rarely seen on our land are now quite common, whilst echidnas, and, we suspect, endangered spotted quolls have been sighted hereabouts
We took time out mid-year to revisit Israel and Palestine, and road-trip through the two countries was much an education as a holiday. We certainly got our history and archeology fix, and in travelling through the Golan and the Negev, we found respite in a stunning natural environment. But the answers to our many political questions merely threw up more questions. We have unfinished business in this divine but divided land, and will return.
In That Howling Infinite addressed all these concerns during 2016, and matters more eclectic and exotic.
And so, to the year in review:
The new year commenced with a reprise of our memorable journey to Hadrians Wall, and of the Victorian lawyer who helped preserve it for posterity, the saga of the viking Harald Hardraga and also, my subjective overview of world history. In a more lighthearted vein, I indulged in an unscholarly discussion of how film and fiction have portrayed or distorted history, and in a review of Mary Beard’s superlative history of Rome, I asked the immortal question “what have the Romans done for us?”
In April, in response to a discussion with a Facebook friend in Oklahoma, I wrote a trilogy of exotically-titled posts examining the nature of rebellion, revolution, and repression: Thermidorian Thinking, Solitudinem Faciunt Pacem Appellant, andSic Semper Tyrannis. The origin of these Latin aphorisms is explained, by the way, in the aforementioned Roman review.
Our travels through Israel and Palestine inspired numerous real-time posts, and a several retrospectives as we contemplated what we had experienced during what was as much an educational tour as a holiday. Historical vignettes included a tribute to bad-boy and builder King Herod the Great, a brief history of the famous Damascus Gate, and its place in Palestinian national consciousness, and a contemplation on the story of King David’s Citadel which overlooked our home-away-from home, the New Imperial Hotel. Thorny contemporary issues were covered with an optimistic piece on theJerusalem Light Rail, a brief if controversial post about Jewish settlers in the Old City, the story of Israel’s ‘Eastern’ Jews, the Mizrahim, and what appears to be a potentially problematic Palestinian property boom. Th e-magazine Muftah published an article I wroteabout the conflicting claims to the city of Hebron. And finally, there is a poem recalling our visit to the Shrine of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and honouring the Righteous Gentiles who saved thousand of Jewish lives during the Shoah.
Wintertime passed with our minds on the Tarkeeth Forest. I had the pleasure discovering the history of our locality, and connecting via Facebook with the relatives of the Fells family of Twin Pines. But the latter half of the year was very much taken up with enduring and bearing witness to the clear- felling of the forest to our east. “If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today, you’ll never believe your eyes”. And you’d ask “what would JRR Tolkien have thought?”
The UK And US paroxysms fascinated and exasperated the mainstream and social media in equal measure, whilst the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the presidential election has initiated an a veritable orgy of punditry. Never have so many column inches and kilobytes been spent on loud sounding nothings as the sifting through the entrails of such events as Brexit, the US election, and the Australian senate! With half a dozen elections coming up in Europe, Trump’s inauguration and the triggering of Article 50 to take Britain out the European Union, we’re gonna have to endure a lot more. I confined my posts to two insightful pieces by respected right-wing Australian commentators, Paul Kelly’s Living in Interesting Times, and Greg Sheridan’s The Loss of American Virtue, and my own reflection on the right-wing media’s strange fascination with “insiders” and “outsiders”.
Finally, in comparison to last year, this year was very light on music and poetry. But American satirist Tom Lehrer got a retrospective, and murdered Pakistani qawwali singer Madhaf Sabri, an obituary, whilst an abridged and vernacular version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost told the tale of Lilith, the first and greatest femme fatale. In the words of the gloriously-named jockey Rueben Bedford Walker III says in EC Morgan’s magnificent The Sport of Kings, the subject of my first post for 2017, “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man”.
On that wise note, I wish the world a Happy New Year – and may it be less interesting than this one.
In That Howling Infinite is now on FaceBook. Check it out. And just for the fun of it, here’s my review of 2015.
When I first visited Israel in the early ‘seventies, it seemed to me a white man’s land with the look and feel of a European colony transplanted in Levantine soil. But first impressions were deceptive. Subsequent visits made it very clear to me that State of Israel is anything but monochrome, but rather, a technicolor cultural melting pot.
Back then, European Ashkenazim (literally, “German” Jews), the returnees of the diaspora, were in the majority. They had dominated politics and culture from the days of the first Zionist immigration, and through the mandate years of the Yishuv when Eastern Europeans predominated in the movement and in the fledgling military. The republic that the Ashkenazim prepared for during the Mandate and then built after 1948 was, in intent and in actuality, a white, secular, socialist outpost of Central and Eastern Europe. But then things changed utterly.
The Sephardim, Jews who had lived in Palestine for centuries, and up to a million Jews expelled from Arab countries after 1948, were, for some forty years of Israel’s existence, a disadvantaged minority. The name itself was misleading. ‘Sephardi’ originally described Jews who had been expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth century. But it came to be applied to anyone who was not Ashkenazi. These Jews of Middle Eastern origin are now generally referred to as Mizrahim – “eastern” or “oriental” Jews. They were discriminated against in many spheres of Israeli life, regarded as primitive, backward, ill-educated, and poor – and more like Arabs than Jews.
And this was indeed the case in many respects. Jewish communities had been an integral part of Arab society for centuries. From Morocco to Iran, they had lived, thrived, and prospered among the their Muslim neigbours. The Jewish communities in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran were old and populous, and indeed often predated Christianity. From high to low, they were entwined in their local politics and economics.The lower classes were as poor and as downtrodden as their Arab neighbours. The professional and mercantile middle class lived very comfortable lives, and under late Ottoman rule, and British and French suzerainty, enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Embedded in the heart and soul of their Arab homelands, they shared the same history, suffered the same depredations, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, made and listened to the same music. Many of their values and cultural norms had more in common with the east than the west.
Oriental Jewish culture was based on three pillars: the community, the synagogue and the father. Faith was the cornerstone and family paramount, and with these, the authority of the rabbi and the head of the household. Piety was respected, chastity honoured, modesty and decorum observed, and marriages arranged. Religion, tradition and patriarchy preserved the community for a millennium. It did not experience European-style secularization, western enlightenment, or a revolt against religion. Even when modernization came, the father and the rabbi remained dominant.
There was harmony between Arab and Jew. Life had order, meaning, and a timeless rhythm. No one imagined that one day, they would have to abandon their lives, their homes and possessions and the graves of their ancestors. Never did they contemplate having to flee, in fear of their lives from the people among whom they had lived for generations, and seek refuge in a fledgling European, secular, modern state on the edge of the Mediterranean.
After 1948, the relatively charmed existence of oriental Jews in North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia ended, and thousand year old communities disintegrated. A million Jewish Arabs were uprooted, their world destroyed, their culture ruined, their homes lost.
In an ironic twist, their Aliyah (literally “ascent” to Eretz Israel) confounded the Zionist model. Israel was created to be the home of European Jewry – until the Shoah brought those Jews to the brink of extinction. Young Israel had to populate or perish, and whilst designed for a European population and culture, it had no choice but to accommodate an oriental one. .
In yet another ironic twist, the creation of the State of Israel doomed the Jews of the Middle East by making mortal enemies of its Arab neighbours. But by giving these exiles refuge, Israel saved them from a life of repression, misery and backwardness in an unstable and violent Middle East. And yet, even as their numbers rose from under ten percent of the population to over fifty today, they were looked down upon, humiliated, discriminated against, neglected, and indeed, ignored by the secular Ashkenazi establishment. They were the Israeli “other”.
Destitute and grieving for their lost world and their old identities, and for the manner in which their longtime Arab compatriots turned on them, they were like flotsam on the shore of a new land. But it was an unfamiliar world, a world made for and ruled by European Zionists with an ethos alien to their own. This was a pioneer society, spartan yet permissive, that valued the individual and his or her contribution to the new state’s collective enterprises above the ties of family, custom and congregation. And for sound if not satisfactory reasons: the ties that bound European Jews to their centuries-old communities had been severed in the killing fields of Mitteleuropa – so many had few or no surviving relatives and friends from the prewar days – and new loyalties forged in the displaced persons camps of Europe, the mass Aliyah into disputed Palestine, and the cauldron on the Independence War.
The immigrant nation of Israel was conceived as a melting pot. The goal of the education system, the exclusive use of a reinvented and modernized Hebrew, and mandatory national service in the IDF, was to assimilate all who made Aliyah as Israelis. To make them Ashkenazis, in fact. The Ashkenazi social engineers encouraged European Jews to get over the Diaspora and the Shoah, and the struggle for independence and national survival, and to get on with the challenges of nation building. These orphans of Europe neither appreciated nor accommodated the eastern Jews’ attachment to their Arab identity, tradition, and culture. And indeed, may have resented, both consciously and subliminally, the fact that these Arab Jews had not come through the Holocaust or fought in the War of Independence
In the national project, the easterners were banished to existential shadow lands. Isolated, marginalized, dispersed, and cut off from their roots and heritage, their rabbis and synagogues, they were consigned to arid development towns in the Negev, to remote villages, and to the impoverished suburbs of the major cities. The state provided refuge, housing, schooling, and jobs. But it took away community, honour and tradition, the social and normative structures that kept Jews together in the eastern diaspora. They were given few tools to deal with the new world of physical and economic hardship, no authority, no bearings, no compass, no meaning. They took low paid, menial jobs, and a lost generation of youngsters drifted into crime and gang culture, drugs and prostitution.
Decades later, these “forgotten people” rose up against the (self)chosen race in a political and cultural revolution that saw “downstairs” gate crash the “upstairs” party. In the political turmoil that followed the Yom Kippur war, they found a political voice and demanded a seat at the top table. They backed Likud against “born to rule”, secular, Ashkenazi Labour, and precipitated a new political dispensation based on faith and values-based political parties and shifting and opportunistic coalitions. They were the working class, the factory hands, the tradies, and the small business owners. They were the parvenus, the usurpers, the nouveau riche, rising about their station, and as such, were scorned and maligned by many Ashkenazim. But they were now the majority. Through immigration and natural increase, their numbers grew, and with it, their political clout. One no longer heard the term ‘Sephardi’ – but rather, ‘Mizrahim’, literally ‘easterners’ – the descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern countries. Their values, interests and expectations were different to those held by the secular, liberal-minded Ashkenazim.
The Garibaldi of this Mizrahim Risorgimento was the charismatic Moroccan Jew Ariyeh Deri who formed the ultra-Orthodox Shas party – Shomrei Sfarad, literally, “(Religious) Guardians of the Sephardim”. Through the late nineties and into the twenty first century, Shas has become a pivotal political player. In the hurly-burly of Israeli coalition politics, its Mizrahi constituency has delivered parliamentary numbers that can make or break governments, and through the torturous wheeling and dealing, it influences policies as diverse and as critical as education and defense.
One of Binyamin Netanyahu’s key people in the current right-wing government is his Minister of Culture Miri Regev, whose family came from Morocco, a former brigadier general in the IDF, where she served as chief spokesperson during the Gaza pullout. She is a member of Likud, not Shas, and Netanyahu needs her backing in order to maintain his support among the Mizrahim. Regev likes to rail against what she calls “the haughty left-wing Ashkenazi elite” and once proudly told an interviewer that she’d never read Chekhov and didn’t like classical music. She has sought to give greater prominence to Mizrahi culture and to deprive “less than patriotic” artists of government subsidies. Many of the government’s recent actions appear designed to address the traditional disenfranchisement of the Mizrahim and of citizens living in the country’s “periphery” (that is, far from the central Tel Aviv–Jerusalem corridor), whilst other measures are aimed at promoting social mobility amongst these “outsiders”.
A changing world
Which brings me back the present and to my return to Israel after an absence of thirty years.
The dazzling sunlight reflected off the limestone brickage was the same. The history literally oozing from the stones was still exhilarating and addictive. The dry heat of summer in Jerusalem was as ever cleansing and enervating. The sociability, conviviality, argumentativeness, and at times obstreperousness of Israelis was the same. But Israel, as a society, had changed – and not just the cosmopolitan cafe and restaurant strips, the vibrant arts scene, the high-tech, wired-to-the-world communication systems, and the ever-present security presence.
Israel’s complexion has changed. Over half of the Israeli population are now Mizrahim (and some twenty percent are Arabs), and Russians and Ethiopians have come in by tens of thousands. There is intermarriage between Jews of all colours and cultures, and the place has taken on a coffee-coloured hue. Israel became the multicultural country it is now.
And it is changing still. As more and more foreign workers come in to work here – one of the consequences of the lock-down and separation that followed the 2002 Intifada, as Chinese and Southeast Asians replaced Palestinian Arabs in many sectors of the booming economy, there will be an increasing number of Israelis taking Filipina, Thai and Indonesian brides..
On our recent visits, we noted the high proportion of Mizrahim, and also, to a lesser degree, Ethiopians – most particularly, among young people. In the street, in the cafes, on the light rail, and especially with respect to the conscript army in which all young Israelis, boys and girls, must serve when they turn eighteen (with the exception of the ultra-orthodox Haredim and Israeli Arabs).
We had been contemplating why in recent years, and particularly, during the last Israeli election, right wing politicians were able to capitalize on an anti-Arab sentiment so incongruent (to liberal-minded outsiders, at any rate) among a people that proclaims itself to be conscious of its history of victimization and oppression. Why Israeli street protests and social media feature virulent tirades and slogans against the country’s Arab citizens and Palestinian neigbours (such inflammatory sentiment is returned with equal if not more vigour on the Arab street, on tabloid television, and from the mana-bir of mosques during Friday sermons). And why, therefore, Bibi Netanyahu’s election dog-whistle was so effective, resulting in a coalition government that is probably the most nationalistic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian in memory.
Commentators have suggested that the political shift to the right and to an increasingly authoritarian character has been due in part to the influx during the nineties of tens of thousands of Russian Jews who have no experience, appreciation and empathy for the occidental democratic model established by Israel’s founding fathers. It has also been said that the shift has been propelled by the exigencies of the security state that has perpetuated a pattern of fear and retaliation with respect to internal and external threats, be these Palestinian resistance to the occupation, as in the violent street protests and and bombings the first and second intifadas, and the lone-wolf vehicle attacks and stabbings of recent times, the ongoing rocket attacks and tunnel construction of Gaza, or the calls for the destruction of the Zionist entity by the Iran and its Hizbollah proxy, and by the televangelists and shock-jocks of the Muslim media.
It may well be “all of the above”, but there is also possibly the Mizrahi factor.
Now the majority of voters – this is where I am going out on a polemical limb with an argument that runs counter to what I have written above about the Mizrahim and their oriental legacy – Mizrahim don’t want Arabs – as friends, as neighbours, as fellow-citizens. Although Arabs and eastern Jews are literally ‘brothers under the skin’, although they shared the same lands, cultures and lifestyles for centuries, have they grown so far apart that the chasm has bred contempt?
They have grown up with the stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ own Nakba, the Arabic word for “the Catastrophe” of the 1948 war, when their families were cast out of their oriental Eden, expelled from Arab countries amidst threats and pogroms, murder and plunder. They spend their military service as conscripts and as reservists either serving in the occupied territories, or subject to deployment there or in Gaza when tensions flare, as they do frequently. They are aware of Arab mainstream and social media denigrating Jews and Israelis and calling for the destruction of their country. They know that any time, they and their loved ones, including particularly their soldier children, could be attacked by car, knife or bomb, or worse still, killed or kidnapped. Young – and not so young – Mizrahim have been hearing all their lives from their families and from the Arabs themselves that “they want to kill us”.
Nowadays, in many quarters, the Arab pogroms of the twenties and thirties appear to feature more prominently in Israel’s creation story than they did in earlier decades, providing an historical leitmotif to contemporary acts of violence. Times past, it was always the about the Zionist pioneers and, inevitably and unavoidably, the Shoah (and left-wing, peacenik Jews are predominately Ashkenazi of pioneer or Shoah heritage). Back then, there was also the image of triumphant David fending off five Arab armies and killing and expelling Arab Palestinians to create a contiguous national territory. Over half of Israel’s Jewish population has no connection to the Shoah, and to the secular and socialist Zionist ethos and once-powerful foundation institutions like the Kibbutz and Histradrut. The Israel of today, and the average Israeli, indeed, are very different to those of forty, fifty, sixty years ago, as are their perceptions and prejudices.
Perhaps the “victim” narrative appeals to and exploits atavistic fears of Arab hordes threatening to push the Jews into the sea. Maybe, too, it is a function of Israel’s dysfunctional place in the turbulent and bloody Arab world: a garrison state of citizen soldiers on a permanent, war-footing, the only democratic nation in these parts that nevertheless, paradoxically and immorally, maintains a military occupation of a conquered people, and sustains politically, financially, and among many Israelis, ideologically and spiritually, a neocolonial settler society. But in a sinister twist of fate, it is a narrative that would have been music to the ears of those long-gone Revisionist Zionists who harkened to the call of Zeev Jabotinsky and his Eastern European Ashkenazi crew who had resolved during the Mandate years that there could only be one people in Ha’Aretz, and that The Land would range from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Zeev’s vision inspired the vicious Irgun and Stern Gang, and these morphed in time into Likud, which is now effectively the ‘party of government, and the driver of all things intransigent.
One thing’s for sure: the Mizrahi factor adds to the many complications that hinder a just and permanent solution to the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
In writing this piece, I am indebted to Israeli journalist and author Avi Shavit and his controversial and enlightening “My Promised Land – The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” (Scribe 2014). Shavit wrote a brief, sad sequel in March 2015:
Veteran Zionist, humanist, journalist, and fighter for justice Uri Avnery wrote the following in February 2017: “When and how the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Rift was born”. It is well worth reading:
http://www.haaretz.com/life/1.795156
hthttp://www.haaretz.com/life/1.795156tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel
In the statistics cited herein, there was no distinction made between Sephardim and Mizrachim. (If the Sephardim, Mountain Jews and other non-European groups are included in the Middle East and Asian group, then Middle Eastern and Asian Jews outnumber European and American Jews by a margin of 52 to 48
On a musical note:
From way back, I was particularly familiar with world-famous Israeli singers of eastern origin – Esther Ofarim, of dubious ‘Cinderella Rockefeller’ fame, (with her then-husband Abi, who was, incidentally, of Russian heritage), the late, sublime Ofra Haza, Noa, and latterly, Ladino diva Yasmin Levy].
During the Shoah, the biblical word for ‘the destruction”, and today, the standard Hebrew word for The Holocaust, the Nazi’s progress towards the Final Solution was aided and abetted by governments, armies, auxiliaries, officials, and individuals in the many countries that fell under the Axis thrall between 1939 and 1945. But there were also many, many people of goodwill and extraordinary courage from all walks of life who risked their lives and often, those of their families and friends, to protect Jews from persecution, and to save them from capture, deportation and extermination. untold numbers perished along with their charges. Many survived, as did thousands of Jews.
For Oscar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and the ‘Righteous Gentiles’. In the words of the Talmud, “he who saves a life, saves the world entire”
We said “the worst is over”,
When the laws began to bite,
And our people crouched in silent fear
That fiery crystal night.
When they burned down the synagogues
And made Jews wear the star.
“this madness will not last”, we said,
“Nor reach us where we are”.
And we said “the worst is over”,
Bought the optimistic line.
We shared the hopes of millions,
Prayed for peace in our own time.
And we listened to our elders,
And we kept our fears controlled.
And we thought the worst was over.
Until the panzers rolled.
Then we thought the worst was over
When our army laid down arms.
And we went back to our daily lives,
Dismissed as false alarms
The rumours that these conquerors
Would wipe us from this earth.
It didn’t take us long to learn
What such false hope was worth.
Still, we thought the worst was over
When they made us wear the star,
And gathered all our people
From their townships near and far.
And they forced into ghettos
And set guards upon the gates.
We had seen worse persecution
In the history of our faith.
But we knew the worst still to come
As we watched the trucks appear.
And whispered talk of death camps
Gave dark substance to our fear.
When they sent in dogs and soldiers
To cull those trapped inside,
The ghetto was a station
On the road to genocide.
In the world beyond the wire
None could hear our people crying
As silence like a curtain fell
And cloaked a nation’s dying.
The ears of men were stricken deaf,
The eyes of men were blind
As the free world’s incredulity
Built the wall we died behind.
But we believed that at the hour of death,
When all our hopes had gone,
From the ranks of Gentiles
A just man would soon come.
He would part engulfing waters
With bold deeds and sleight of hand.
He would lead a tortured people
To a safe and promised land.
And, we believe
That when all doors are bared against us,
He will come.
When all hands are raised against us,
He will come.
When no man will defend us,
He will come
Into our darkest day.
He will walk up to our sepulcher
And roll the stone away.
Yes we believe
That in the hour of our worst torment,
He will come.
Like an angel in the darkness,
He will come.
When all our hope is dying,
He will come.
And in our blackest day,
He will walk up to our sepulcher
And roll the stone away.
Featured Image, from Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre
I know we’ve come a long way, We’re changing day to day, But tell me, where do the children play?
Cat Stevens
A feature of the growth of Jewish “settlements” in the Old City of Jerusalem – houses occupied by Jewish families, bought or rented from Muslim and Christian owners through a mix of arms-length transactions, subterfuge, proxy purchasers, and intimidation – is the appearance of “kindie convoys ” in the crowded, colourful, bustling streets of the Muslim Quarter.
You will be walking down Suq al Khan az Zait towards the Danascus Gate, or al Wad, the Main Street, towards where it crosses the Via Dolorosa at the IV and V Stations of the Cross, amidst busy weekend shoppers and folk heading to the Haram for Friday prayer. Then, of a sudden, like a school of little fish, a gaggle of small children in kippas and backpacks flows onto the crowded street, enroute to kindie or home.
But these kids are like none other around them – those running, jumping, excitable, hyperactive Arab children who regard these ancient streets as their playground. For the Jewish littlies are being herded, and guarded, by slim, casually dressed young men with tee shirts over what appear at first glance to be bulging waistlines, but are in fact utility belts that would make Batman proud, and concealed handguns.
Two to the fore, two aft, and two more on each side of the infant convoy, keeping them in line and coaxing in the strays who meander out of the designated two-by-two line. And all the time, these young men turn and scan the streets, pedestrians, the roof tops, constantly alert, constantly scanning – and not being discrete about it either. They make no pretense at subtlety. For their very attitude is a warning, a demonstration of firepower, to any who would disturb or threaten their little convoy in any way: “you don’t want to mess with us!”
It reminded us of the scene in Series Three of “Deadwood” when, after Alma Garrett is fired upon by Hearst’s hired guns, antihero Al Swearengen orders his men to watch over her as she walks to her bank.
We follow them for quite a distance – immediately behind them, in fact -, and the rearguard look us up and down too. This is not the time for grabbing a Kodak moment.
Then, just as suddenly as they first appeared, the young men herd their charges into the passageway of a hidden house, or up a deserted alleyway, the wary rearguard facing the street until their cargo is safely delivered.
And then they are all gone.
Demographic Qualifier
The events described above took place in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City.
The population of the Old City is overwhelmingly Muslim – are an estimated thirty thousand Muslims here, and the population is growing due to high birth rates.
In the past, Christians, predominantly Armenian and Greek Orthodox, constituted a significant minority, concentrated in the centuries-old Christian and Armenian Quarters. The Arab Christian population has declined significantly since 1967, and stands at less than 6,000 according to the latest census figures. As with so many things in Jerusalem, appearances are deceptive. In the Christian Quarter, where pilgrims and clergy throng 24/7, almost all of the shops that cater for the tourists and the faithful are owned by Muslim Arabs as Christian owners have sold up and departed.
Christian numbers have declined drastically over recent decades, a development that has been mirrored throughout East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. From some 20% during the Mandate, to under 1% today. Bethlehem was once a predominantly Christian city, and this is no longer the case. Ramallah’s population used to be about 20% Christian, but no more.
The Jewish Quarter, which appears so vibrant and fresh since being rebuilt and repopulated 1967, and bustling with people visiting the Kotel and the many synagogues, is home to some three thousand souls only. In addition, there are some two thousand transient yeshiva students. Apart from the Jewish Quarter, Jewish residents are very few, living in dwellings scattered throughout the Muslim Quarter.
A Bigger Picture
This is Jerusalem. In London, Paris, and in other cities throughout Europe, synagogues and Jewish schools are for good reason under armed guard as antisemitism rises.
During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.
The Citadel or Tower Museum at the Jaffa Gate, the westernmost entrance to the city, is all the history you can eat in a four hour sitting. It’s a four thousand year old story: from the Canaanites and the Hebrews to the end of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, via Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatamids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Tartars, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and even Australians. Each left their mark on Jerusalem, and most planted their brickage upon and within the Citadel.
There is a long roll-call of famous names who may or may have not resided in the place.
King David didn’t, despite his name being given to the place and the apocryphal story that he once spied on the bathing Bathsheba from its ramparts – indeed, her bathroom is said to be underneath the New Imperial Hotel, just across the way. Nor did his son and heir, Solomon, builder of the First Temple. Conquerors Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus did not. They just wrecked the joint. Judah Maccabee might have, and those other famous Jewish rebels, the Zealots didn’t, but during Great Revolt, they retreated there and trashed the place. Herod the Great, a psycho with an serious edifice complex, resided here. As did also Procurator Pontius Pilate when he was in town (he preferred the luxuries of Caesaea Maritimus (Latin for “on Sea). Historians now believe that the Citdel was where he actually cast judgement on Jesus, and not in the Antonine Fortress which overlooked the Temple (where the Haram al Sharif now stands) throwing into question the whole basis for the existence of the Via Dolorosa.
Roman general and future emperor Titus would have taken up residence therein after he destroyed the city in 70CE, leaving only the citadel standing. His troops needed somewhere to crash. Constantine didn’t, but his mom Helena most likely did when she “discovered” The True Cross, commissioned the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and single-handedly invented the Holy Land pilgrim industry that endures to this day. The Muslim conquerors Omar Ibn Khattab, Salah ud-Din, and Baybars may have, but Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, who built the city walls we see today, never set foot in Jerusalem, and nor did his successors.
Ottoman troops occupied it, and General Djemal Pasha would hang Arab Nationalists in the Square before it. General Allenby declared Jerusalem and Palestine liberated on the steps leading to the citadel in 1917, but most likely stayed across the square at our wonderful East New Imperial Hotel (the Kaiser stayed there too when he visited Jerusalem in 1898). British troops garrisoned it during the Mandate years – like the Roman legionaries before them, they’d’ve needed a place to lay their heads. The British-commanded Arab Legion of then Transjordan took control of it in during the the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 and defended it successfully against the new IDF. They did so again in 1967 only to lose it and the Old City.
If the stones could talk, what a tale they would tell. And indeed, the museum now does just that, in content and in form. We sit on the roof garden of our hotel, directly across the street on Omar Ibn Al Khattab Square, and look across at its towers, ramparts and gardens, and sense it’s story in our souls. We watch present generations passing beneath its walls, and the young folk dancing on the ramparts, all part of the passing parade of humanity that has lingered by and upon these ancient walls.
For further reading, you can’t beat Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Jerusalem : The Biography (Phoenix 2011).
“Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train.
Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again.”
Cat Stevens, Peace Train
Completed in 2011, the Jerusalem Light Rail unites east and west Jerusalem. This how a light rail should be – small, light, and frequent, on a traffic free Jaffa Road. It links the Jewish suburbs of west and northeast Jerusalem with the Arab suburbs of the north and east of the Old City. The featured picture shows two trains passing at Jaffa Central, underneath a neat mural that shows one weaving down Jaffa Road through vignettes of Israeli urban life. Their destinations are shown sequentially in three languages. Synchronicity determined that in the picture, both were in Arabic.
It was controversial when first mooted, and extreme elements on both sides of the conflict opposed any such normalization of relations between the Jewish and the Arab communities. There were demonstrations in European countries against the “line that divided a city”, but these petered out when polls showed that Arabs in East Jerusalem found the line to be a blessing. It got dad to work on time; it got mom to the cornucopia that is the Mahane Yehuda fresh food markets, just four stops from the Damascus Gate; and it delivered the kids to school and back safely and punctually. It is said, with some justification, that earlier attacks on the line were perpetrated by thugs incited by Fatah, the political wing of the Palestinian Authority, which is alleged to control the taxi industry of East Jerusalem.
During the recent unrest, the line was often blocked and trains attacked during demonstrations and street fighting, but service was resumed quicksmart. Arab passengers were at times abused by Jews, and stations were the targets of random rammings by cars and heavy vehicles – the so-called “siyarah intifada” – with many Jewish casualties and “neutralized” perpetrators.
If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.
They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.
Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.
But calm appears to have descended, and folk of good will on all sides of the literal and figurative line pass in peace through Arab and Jewish Jerusalem.
“I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem”
Steve Earl, Jerusalem
Light Rail Mural, Jaffa Road
Facebook Postscript from Sarah Tuttle-Singer, 20th February 2023
If you’ve ever ridden the light rail in Jerusalem, then you’ve seen the section with the chairs that go down when you sit on them – each has a wheelchair sign because people in wheelchairs get priority there since there’s space, but if you’re a mom and you’ve got a stroller, you can sit there, too, and that’s where these two women are sitting: I watched them both get in, one wore a hijab and the other wore a sheitel, and they both had their arms and leg covered, and no collarbone, no sir, and I watched the struggle through the crowd on the light rail with their strollers, big and blue and bulky, match match.
They each took a seat on opposite sides of the row where the wheelchairs go, and they put their strollers in the middle. Each woman stared straight ahead out the window as Jeursalem went by in one long smear, looking straight past each other.
Strangers on a light rail, with their matching strollers, but by accident, their strollers faced each other, and the kids met eye to eye — both bundled up in winter coats and hats and shoes, both brown eyed babes with pink cheeks, and curly hair, well fed and well loved, and they could have been brothers. And while their mothers stared straight ahead watching Jerusalem blur by, the two boys smiled at one another, and chatted back and forth as only little babies can, but as everybody should.
Like Lord Byron, he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know. He may or may not have been a psychopath – he killed his way to the top, murdering his relatives, and also, his wife Mariamne, whom loved truly, madly, deeply – but he suspected her of plotting to depose him, so she had to go too. He regretted it instantly and embalmed her in honey so he could spend quality time with her by her open catafalque.
Herod did a lot of questionable things, but he has gone down in Christian demonology for an atrocity he did NOT commit – he didn’t massacre the Innocents to ensure that baby Jesus would not live to supplant himself as King of the Jews! The slaughter of the babies was an invention of later Christian propagandists. Also, he was not the Herod who’s daughter Salome invented lap dancing and in payment, demanded the head of John the Baptist. Nor was he the Herod who told the imprisoned Jesus “I’m the King of the Jews!” That was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s camp caricature. Herod was a common name amongst the later (and last) Hasmoneans.
To his Jewish subjects, he was not a Kosher King, being only half Jewish, and then, only through this dad (even today, opinions about him are mixed for the same reason). Accordingly, he felt that he had to prove himself, like similarly half-Jewish, and much wiser King Solomon. So he built things. And man! Could he build! His stuff was not large – it was Monumental.
At Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast, he build a port, a seaside palace and a city. In Jericho, another magnificent palace. At Herodium, he built a fortress-palace-mausoleum, but first, he built a hill high enough that he could see Jerusalem from the summit. Across the River Jordan, in present day Jordan, he rebuilt a fortress-palace at Machaerus which was said to be location of the imprisonment and execution of John the Baptist, and the venue for Salome’s notorious dance, The ancient town of Sebastia, on a hill with panoramic views across the West Bank, is another location of Herodian brickage; its Nabi Yahya Mosque is said to be the burial site of the Baptist – although his head is believed to rest in an ornate catafalque in Damascus’s splendid Umayyad Mosque. And he a fortress and summer palace on the Masada massif overlooking the Dead Sea, and the site of one of history’s most famous “last stands”.
He obviously liked palaces. When he died – and he died horribly as befits a bad boy – he was laid to rest in a bespoke tomb in his Herodium eyrie.
But his crowning glory was his breathtaking refurbishment of the Second Temple, rendering it a wonder of the contemporary world. Too bad that a “wabble of woudy webels”, to quote Bickus Dickus in “The Life of Brian”, had to rise up against Rome in 66CE, precipitating the destruction of Jerusalem, the death of thousands, and the razing of temple to the ground. All that impressive Herodian brickage was sent crashing to the ground, and all that remains is the Kotel, the hallowed Western or Wailing Wall.
(The featured image shows signature Herodian ashlar blocks in the Kotel, the Western or “Wailing” Wall)
Apart from building things, was Herod really that “great”? I reckon he gave himself that soubriquet – or else the Romans did, probably in sardonic irony (which Herod, narcissistic and paranoid, probably didn’t get). His subjects didn’t think so and were happy when he died. Some accounts suggest that he’d ordered his bodyguard to slaughter the heads of prominent Hebrew families on the event of his death so that the people would not feel like rejoicing when he passed.
Herodian brickage thrown down by the Romans
Herodium
Masada
The largest house brick in the world. The Western Stone of the Kotel 13.6m
You come at the king, you best not miss.
Omar Little, The Wire (after RW Emerson)
The phrase “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” is at once apt, correct, and yet often oversimplified to the point of disingenuousness. The word “terrorist” itself describes its goal. To instill fear in the heart of the enemy. In the past, the target would have been the king, the dictator, the ruling class, and those who served them and upheld their rule. Politicians, officials, solders and policemen. Today, terrorists indiscriminately target whole societies. Irish bombers blasted communities of the rival faith, murdered shoppers, office workers, and pub patrons, as well as soldiers and policemen. Palestinian suicide bombers hit malls and pizza bars in city centres. ISIS, al Qa’ida and the Taliban detonate cars in busy city streets and publicly execute prisoners in callous and calculating “lectures in flesh” (the phrase is civil rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson’s, from his chilling account of the trials and execution of King Charles I of England and those who sentenced him, The Tyrannicide Brief.).
But targeted and random terrorism has a long historical pedigree. For centuries, it has been the desperate and nihilistic weapon of last resort of resistance and rebellion against perceived oppression and injustice, and against invaders and occupiers.
In the second century BCE Palestine, the Maccabees used assassination in their resistance to the Seleucid Greeks, and a century later, the Jewish zealots, the Sicarii, named for the easily concealed small daggers, paid the Romans in like coin, and ultimately in an insurrection that culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE and the scattering of the Jewish race (giving history the emotive and symbolic last exit that was Masada). In an etymological irony that Mark Twain would have been proud of, the present unrest in Jerusalem, a large number of young Palestinians have perished in attempting to stab jewish soldiers and civilians. Their jaquerie is called the “Intifada Sakni-in”, the ‘Knife Uprising – an echo of those long-dead Sicarii “dagger men”.
Nowadays, one would be excused for thinking that “terrorism” and “terrorist” are synonymous with Arabs and Muslims. And a historical precedent reinforces this erroneous assumption. The Hashishan or “Assassins” of Middle East fame (yes, that is where that noxious noun originated) were Muslim men and boys mesmerized and mentored by Rashid ad Din as Sina-n, the “Old Man of the Mountain” (and all this, before Osama in the caves of Tora Bora), and were Twelfth Century hit-men contracted out to rival Muslim princes in the internecine conflicts that plagued the Levant in the wake of the Crusades and the demise of the great Arab Caliphates.
But the assassin’s knife (and in modern times, the gun and bomb, and latterly cars and trucks) predates these medieval hoods and links the Hebrew rebels of old to the Irgun and Stern Gang who encouraged Britain and the UN to abandon Palestine in 1948, bequeathing most of it to the new state of Israel, and triggering the Palestinian diaspora. European anarchists and Irish rebels and loyalists were adept at shootings and ambushes. In Algeria, during the ‘fifties, the nationalist FLN and the “colon” OAS shot and bombed each other and those unfortunates caught in the crossfire. The IRA perfected the improvised explosive device that today has crippled thousands of American, Canadian, and Australian soldiers in Iraq abd in Afghanistan. Hindu Tamil separatists of Sri Lanka introduced the suicide bomber, an economical and efficient weapon against soft (civilian, that is) targets, deployed today by Islamist killers in the streets of London and Lahore, Damascus and Dar es Salaam, Jerusalem and Jakarta. Whilst Arabs – and particularly Palestinians may have given the world the hijacking of aircraft – a tactic that fell into disuse due to diminishing political returns and rapid response forces – other Arabs showed us how to fly them into public buildings as the whole world watched in horror and disbelief. The shockwaves of this one are still reverberating through the deserts of the east and the capitals of the western world.
In going up up against their occupiers, the Palestinians have an old heritage. In my old country, Boudicca and Caractacus fought a losing battle against the Romans in Britain during the First CE. The Roman historian Tacitus ascribed to a vanquished chieftain the memorable words “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a desert and they call it peace. After the battle of Hastings in 1066, the defeated Saxons pushed back against the Normans and brought the genocidal wrath of William the Conqueror down on their heads with the devastating “Harrying of the North”. The Green Man and Robin Hood legends are said to be a retrospective and romanticised remembering of the Saxon resistance. Warrior fugitives from that failed guerilla war fled as far as Constantinple, where many joined the Emperor’s acclaimed Varangarian Guard, (see When Harald Went A Viking)
In the streets and the countryside of Ireland, my parents’ birthplace, the United Irishmen, Fenians, Free Staters, IRA and Unionists fought against the redcoats, tommies, and black and tans of the British Army. Fought amongst themselves, fought against each other, and killed and were killed in their centuries long war of liberation. And in my adopted country, indigenous Australians fought a futile frontier war against settlers and soldiers just as native Americans did, albeit on a much smaller scale, and paid the price in hangings, massacres, poisoned wells, dispossession, marginalization, and “stolen children”. The legacy of those times lingers still – see The Frontier Wars – Australia’s heart of darkness.
In Central America, Juarez led the Mexicans against the French, and Sandino, Nicaraguans against US marines. Spaniards rose up against Napoleon’s forces, giving the world the word “guerilla”, or “little war”. Russian partisans ambushed the Grande Armé and the Wehrmacht. Throughout occupied Europe, the very term “resistance” became synonymous with the heroic unequal struggle against tyranny. In another of history’s ironies, muqa-wamat, Arabic word for resistance, unites sectarian rivals Hamas and Hizbollah against Israel.
And not just resistance to invasion and occupation, but also against oppression by one’s own rulers. Religious tracts tie themselves in knots reconciling the obligation to obey our rulers with the right to resist and overthrow those that rule badly. The unequal struggle against tyranny – or what is perceived by the perpetrators as tyranny – is the cause that inspires men and women to desperate acts.
The most celebrated in fact, film and fiction is the death of Julius Caesar at the hands of peers who feared that he intended to usurp the ostensibly democratic Republic (ostensible because democratic it was not) and institute one-man rule. That ended badly for the conspirators, and for Rome, as it precipitated years of civil war and ultimately, half a century of empire).
In 1880 the reforming Czar Alexander II of Russia, discovered the hard way that liberating the serfs did not inoculate himself against the bomb that took his legs and his life. His fearful and unimaginative successors hardened their hearts and closed their minds against further reform. setting in train the crackdown on dissent and democratic expression that led eventually to the storming of the Winter Palace on Petrograd in 1917. Narodnaya Volya, the killers called themselves – the People’s Will. And that is what terrorists do. They appeal and owe fealty to a higher court, a greater good, a savage God.
So it was when student and Serbian nationalist Gavril Princip assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 and ignited the spark that lit the conflagration of World War 1 which precipitated the demise of the old European empires.
So too when John Brown and his sons brought their broadswords to bear on slavers and their sympathizers and made a date with destiny at Harpers Ferry. Their famous raid may or may not have accelerated the downward slide to the secession and civil war that erupted the following year, but it provided a moral and symbolic prelude and also, the resonating battle hymn of the republic. John Wilkes Booth bookended this bloody era with his histrionic and public murder of Abraham Lincoln, shouting “sic semper tyrannis”, “thus always to tyrants,” attributed to Brutus at Caesar’s assassination – today, it’s the Virginia state motto. Brown and Booth were quite clear in their motives. As was were the segregationalist shooters who did for African Americans Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. Less so were the killers of the Kennedy brothers in the sixties.
To conclude, sometimes that savage, rebel God is one of faith, sometimes, of blood and soil. In some instances, it is revenge for wrongs real and imagined – the reasons at times lost or forgotten through the passage of time and fading memories. And often, “the cause” is corrupted by the immoral economics of illicit commerce, including contraband, kidnapping, blackmail and extortion. Sometimes all merge in an incongruous hybrid of religious passion, ethic identity, libertarian or anarchistic fervour, and protection racket. As was the case in Northern Ireland, in Lebanon, in sub-Saharan Africa, and currently so in Syria and Iraq.
But most times, terror and turmoil is simply a political weapon planned, targeted and executed as a mechanism of regime change. Rebellion, revolt and revolution. Resisting, opposing, challenging, confronting and defeating the central authority. The seizing, holding, consolidation and keeping of political power.
And one thing is for sure. The outcome is unpredictable. History does not move in straight lines, but often follows a bitter and twisted path. Cliched as it is, the phrase “be careful what you wish for” is an apt one. And when, as Bob Dylan sang, “the line it is drawn, the curse it is cast”, there is no going back. To quote WB Yeats’ famous lines, “all is changed, changed utterly”.
Terrorism, then, can shift the course of history. If we were to stumble into the swamp of alternative histories, imagine what might of happened
If Caesar had walked home from the senate on the Ides of March
If Lincoln had been able to guide the Reconstruction
If the reforming Czar had introduced democratic government to Russia
If Gavril Princip’s shot had missed the archduke
If Kennedy had returned from Dallas
If John Lennon outlived George Harrison
If Yitzak Rabin had left the peace concert in Tel Aviv
If the Twin Towers stood still
To quote “Stairway to Heaven”, a curiously apposite title given the millenarian mindset of many terrorists, “Oh, it makes you wonder!”
Its been a diverse year In That Howling Infinite. We have traveled, to quote Bob Dylan, “all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem” – and to many other places in between. Vikings and Roman legionaries; Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn; Britain in the ‘forties and Paris in the ‘fifties; America, the Levant, and even Wonderland. By Year’s end a million souls will have journeyed to Europe from the war-ravaged lands of the Middle East, and my final posts for the year contemplate what it might mean for refugees who find to safe haven in Australia.
Here is a retrospective.
The year began with a short piece on recent archeological discoveries in Jerusalem that strongly suggested that the Via Dolorosathat Jesus trode on his final journey to Golgotha was the wrong route, and that instead, it began just inside of the Jaffa Gate. I took a light-hearted look at the Jerusalem Syndrome, a mental condition involving the presence of religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions and other psychoses triggered by a visit to The Holy City.
I read but one piece of fiction this year – a sad admission from a lifelong bibliophile – but this one book was probably one of the best I have read: The Incorrigible Optimists Club, winner of the prestigious Prix de Goncourt, by Jean Michel Guenassia. It is set in Paris’ Rive Gauche, as the ‘fifties gives way to the ‘sixties; as the crooners makes way for rock n’roll; as the Cold War divides a continent, sending dissidents and refugees fleeing to a safe haven in Paris; as the Algerian war divides and destroys families: and as the seeds of ‘les evenments de Mai 1968’ are sown in the hearts and souls of France’s young people. It is a coming of age book, of young hopes and fears, love and loss, a book about writers and reading, and the magic and power of the written word in prose and poetry.
March saw the passing of my old friend Dermott Ryder, chronicler and luminary of the Folk Music revival in Sydney in the early ‘seventies. Dermott’s Last Rideis my tribute to him. And April was a month of anniversaries and remembrance. Forty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and the centenary of the landings of the ANZACs at Gallipoli. Pity the Nation takes its title from Robert Fisk’s tombstone of a book on the long war; and he had taken it from a poem written in 1934 by Khalil Gibran, Lebanon’s most celebrated poet, a poem that was both a prophetic testament and a testimony of times to come: “Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation”. The Watchers of the Water is a song about Gallipoli sing by a Turkish solder.
May saw two diverse pieces of social history. The Spirit of 45 takes personal perspective of British filmmaker Ken Loach’s documentary of the excitement and optimism that followed the Labour Party’s election victory at the end of World War II. This laid the foundation stone for the British welfare state. Bob Dylan’s Americana discusses the meaning and significance of the lyrics and the imagery of Dylan’s early ‘eighties masterpiece Blind Willie McTell, a harrowing journey through America’s dark heart.
In June, we visited Yorkshire and in London, conjuring up memories and historical connections. Harald Went A Vikingis a saga about the first of two kings to die on English soil in the late summer of 1066, and the adventures that took him from Norway to Constantinople and Jerusalem and finally, to Yorkshire. Roman Wall Bluestakes its title from WH Auden’s poem about a homesick and grumpy legionnaire on Hadrian’s Wall, and contemplates the lives of the ethnically polyglot soldiery who defended the Empire’s borders. And June saw another famous anniversary, the Bicentennial of the momentous and bloody Battle of Waterloo. The Long Road to Waterloo prefaces a song for the men who, after twenty six long years of war, never came home.
Battle of Stamford Bridge, depicting King Harald Hardrada hit in the neck by an arrow
In July, controversy erupted in the Land of the Free over the flying of the Confederate Flag in states that were once part of Old Dixie. The dead hand of the Civil War reached out and touched the hearts of Americans and their friends throughout the world in the wake of yet another mass shooting. This time, a young man gunned down worshippers at prayer. That the victims were folk of colour, and the shooter, a young white extremist, reopened wounds that have never really healed. Rebel Yellsurmises that The South will always be with us, in our thoughts, in our historical memory, in our art and literature, our books and films, and our favourite music.
September marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s timeless, fabulist masterpiece Alice In Wonderland. Go Ask Alice, I Think She’ll Know reproduces Australian critic Peter Craven’s masterful celebration of Alice 150. The title belongs to the mesmerizing Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane who cut through to the rabbit chase channeling the long-gone Lewis in a psychedelic musical masterpiece.
On an infinitely sadder note, Ruins and Bones is a tribute to the memory of Syrian archeologist Khaled Muhammed al Asaad, murdered by ISIS in August 2015, and of Palmyra, the ‘Pearl of the Desert’.
Allende’s Desk and Osama’s Pyjamas is a brief commentary on the extension of American military power and the pathology of demons and demonization. Tales of Yankee Powerlooks at American foreign policy during the 1980s from the perspective of the songs of Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn.
November’s Children of the Revolution looks at the events that led up to the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, and the early days before it became too dangerous to gather on the streets, when men, women and children would parade in public places, waving the flag of the old Syria, the one that flew before the Assad clan seized power in 1966. Canny camera men could take media-friendly shots of photogenic little girls in face makeup looking sad, vulnerable and defiant. Those days of hope are long gone.
A highlight of this past year has been my work as a volunteer with the Humanitarian Settlement Services programme. The HSS’ mission is to assist newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia. In No Going Home, I endeavour to imagine the refugee journey. Hejirais a sequel of sorts and, indeed, a happy ending.
Happy New Year to these prospective New Australians, and to all my readers. May 2016 be fortunate and fulfilling.
In That Howling Infinite 