ブライアンとデヴィッドの関係は70年代にデヴィッドが率いていたトーキング・ヘッズのプロデューサーを手がけた頃にまで遡り、二人でのコラボレーションとなる1981年の『マイ・ライフ・イン・ザ・ブッシュ・オブ・ゴースツ』や08年の『エヴリシング・ザット・ハプンズ・ウィル・ハプン・トゥデイ』もこれまで手がけてきている。
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ブライアンはかねてからパレスチナ問題についてイスラエル批判を繰り広げてきていて、今回、デヴィッドに自身の書簡を託したというが、特にアメリカ世論にイスラエルの行状の正当性を問うため、アメリカ人であるデヴィッドを頼ったものと思われる。デヴィッドはサイトで、ブライアンからの手紙を自身のスタッフの間でも回覧し、ブライアンのヘヴィーだが読まれるべきメッセージを広く伝える責任があるとの意見の一致をみて公開に踏み切ったと説明している。
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基本的にブライアンはパレスチナの一般市民を巻き込んだイスラエル側の非人道的な数々の攻撃を批判していて、なぜアメリカはこんな国家を支持しているのかと問いかけている。アメリカではユダヤ系の政治団体が大きな影響力を誇っていて、戦後アメリカは一貫して親イスラエル政策を推し進めてきているが、ブライアンはこの「不文律をあえてこの手紙で問い直してしまうことになるような気がするが、もう問わずにはいられない」と次のように綴っている。
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「今日ぼくはパレスチナ人男性が泣きながら肉片の入ったポリ袋を掲げている写真を見かけたんだ。袋の中身の肉は男性の息子の身体だった。この少年の身体は明らかにフレシェット弾を使っていたイスラエルのミサイル攻撃を受けて、ばらばらに切り刻まれることになった（と病院は説明している）。フレシェット弾とはなにかもうご存知だと思うが、これは小さな鉄製の矢じりを数百個爆薬の周囲に固めた爆弾で、これが爆発すると人間の皮膚を切り刻んで剥がしていくことになるんだ。少年は名前をモハメド・カラフ・アル=ナワスラといったそうだよ。5歳だったそうだ。
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ぼくはふと、この男性の袋に入っていた少年の肉片が自分の息子でもおかしくなかったのだと気づいて、その思いにもう何年も感じたことのない腹立たしさに捉われることになったんだ。
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その後、国連がガザ問題についてイスラエル側に戦争犯罪を犯している嫌疑があるとして調査委員会を設立したいと表明していることを読んだんだ。でも、アメリカはこれに同意しないというんだよ。
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一体、アメリカではなにが起きているんだ?
アメリカのニュースがいかに偏向しているか、ある事件についての報道があったらそれについての別な見方をほとんど誰も提供しようとしないということもぼくは自分の経験から知っている。でも、本気で調べようと思ったら、実はすぐにでもわかることじゃないか。このあまりにも一方的な、ほとんど民族浄化のような行いをなぜアメリカは盲目的に支持しているんだ?
どうしてなんだ? ぼくにはどうしてもわからない。これが単純にAIPAC（アメリカ・イスラエル公共問題委員会。親イスラエル政策を政府に推すアメリカのユダヤ系政治団体）の影響だけでそうなっているんだとぼくは思いたくない。もし本当にそういうことなら、アメリカ政府は基本的に腐敗しきっているということになるからだよ。いや、これだけが原因だとは考えられない……けれども、ほかにどんな原因があるのかぼくには思い当たらないんだ」
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さらにブライアンはエルサレムなどパレスチナ自治区のヨルダン川西岸地区への現地調査に赴いた時の経験も綴っていて、パレスチナ人住民が常日頃からイスラエル軍より受けている暴力や嫌がらせの数々を目撃してきたことについて触れ、こうした事態を「アメリカ人は本当にこれを許容しているのか?
本当にこんなことでいいと思っているのか? それとも知らないだけ?」と問いかけている。
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さらにイスラエル・パレスチナ和平プロセスについてブライアンはイスラエルが望んでいるのは和平ではなく、実現させる気のない和平へのプロセスだけで、その時間稼ぎの間に西岸地区に武装移民を送り込み続けるのが目的なのだと批判している。しかも、こうした移民の大半はイスラエルで生まれ育った者でさえなく、神に約束されたという土地をアラブ人から収奪するために、ロシアやウクライナ、モラヴィア、南アフリカやブルックリン（ニューヨーク）から近年移り住んできたような者たちで、アラブ人は害虫という認識しか持たないこういう人間たちの行状はかつてのアメリカ南部で横行していた人種差別となんら変わりはしないと指摘している。また、ブライアンは締め括りに次のようにデヴィッドに詫びている。
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「こうしたさまざまな問題をふっかけてしまって申し訳ないと思う。きみがいろんな意味で政治アレルギーだということもぼくはわかっているつもりだけど、これは政治を越えた問題なんだ。いくつもの世代にわたって人類が蓄積してきた文明の資本を今現在浪費して使い尽くそうとしているのはぼくたちなんだよ。ここでの問いかけに大袈裟なものなど一つもないんだ。ぼくにはまったくわからないし、わかれば楽なのにとも思うよ」
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なお、イスラエルのガザ攻撃を受けて、ワン・ダイレクションのゼイン・マリック、リアーナ、セレーナ・ゴメス、エディ・ヴェダーらが反対を表明していて、ニール・ヤング、バックストリート・ボーイズ、ポール・アンカらがイスラエル公演を中止にしている。
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Dear All of You:
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I sense I'm breaking an
unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more.
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Today I saw a picture of a
weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his
son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack -
apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what
those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear
the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years
old.
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I suddenly found myself
thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought
upset me more than anything has for a long time.
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Then I read that the UN had
said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to
launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it.
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What is going on in America?
I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you
get to hear about the other side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! -
it's not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support
of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don't get it. I
really hate to think its just the power of AIPAC… for if that's the case,
then your government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don't think
that's the reason… but I have no idea what it could be.
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The America I know and like
is compassionate, broadminded, creative, eclectic, tolerant and generous.
You, my close American friends, symbolise those things for me. But which
America is backing this horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can't work it
out: I know you're not the only people like you, so how come all those voices
aren't heard or registered? How come it isn't your spirit that most of the world now thinks of when it hears
the word 'America'? How bad does it look when the one country which more than
any other grounds its identity in notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes
and puts its money exactly where its mouth isn't and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?
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I was in Israel last year
with Mary. Her sister works for UNWRA in Jerusalem. Showing us round were a
Palestinian - Shadi, who is her sister's husband and a professional guide -
and Oren Jacobovitch, an Israeli Jew, an ex-major from the IDF who left the service
under a cloud for refusing to beat up Palestinians. Between the two of them
we got to see some harrowing things - Palestinian houses hemmed in by wire
mesh and boards to prevent settlers throwing shit and piss and used sanitary
towels at the inhabitants; Palestinian kids on their way to school being
beaten by Israeli kids with baseball bats to parental applause and laughter;
a whole village evicted and living in caves while three settler families
moved onto their land; an Israeli settlement on top of a hill diverting its
sewage directly down onto Palestinian farmland below; The Wall; the
checkpoints… and all the endless daily humiliations. I kept thinking,
"Do Americans really condone this? Do they really think this is OK? Or
do they just not know about it?".
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As for the Peace Process:
Israel wants the Process but not the Peace. While 'the process' is going on
the settlers continue grabbing land and building their settlements… and then
when the Palestinians finally erupt with their pathetic fireworks they get hammered
and shredded with state-of-the-art missiles and depleted uranium shells
because Israel 'has a right to defend itself' ( whereas Palestine clearly
doesn't). And the settler militias are always happy to lend a fist or rip up
someone's olive grove while the army looks the other way. By the way, most of
them are not ethnic Israelis - they're 'right of return' Jews from Russia and
Ukraine and Moravia and South Africa and Brooklyn who came to Israel recently
with the notion that they had an inviolable (God-given!) right to the land,
and that 'Arab' equates with 'vermin' - straightforward old-school racism
delivered with the same arrogant, shameless swagger that the good ole boys of
Louisiana used to affect. That is the culture our taxes are defending. It's
like sending money to the Klan.
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But beyond this, what really
troubles me is the bigger picture. Like it or not, in the eyes of most of the
world, America represents 'The West'. So it isThe West that is seen as supporting this war, despite all our
high-handed talk about morality and democracy. I fear that all the
civilisational achievements of The Enlightenment and Western Culture are
being discredited - to the great glee of the mad Mullahs - by this flagrant
hypocrisy. The war has no moral justification that I can see - but it
doesn't even have any pragmatic value either. It doesn't make Kissingerian
'Realpolitik' sense; it just makes us look bad.
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I'm sorry to burden you all
with this. I know you're busy and in varying degrees allergic to politics,
but this is beyond politics. It's us squandering the civilisational capital
that we've built over generations. None of the questions in this letter are
rhetorical: I really don't get it and I wish that I did.
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XXB
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And now, Peter's reply:
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Dear Brian and friends,
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I am writing to respond to
your note about Gaza and how America is responding. It deserves a response.
My feelings and the actual realities are complex on several levels; the
realities of the Arab-Israeli history and conflicts, global politics and
modern American history/demographics. All three levels interact to create the
current situation. And to understand the US posture you have to consider the
history. Let me say, that, as you know I am an immigrant and child of
Holocaust survivors. I am culturally Jewish, but with no religious or
spiritual inclinations, an atheist. And I believe that creating the Jewish
state of Israel was a historic mistake that is likely to destroy the religion
behind it. The actions nation states take to assure their survival are
usually in contradiction to any moral values that a religion might espouse.
And that contradiction is now very evident in Israel’s behavior. Israel will
destroy Judaism.
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First, the history has two
important intersecting threads, Zionism and the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Zionism began near the end of the nineteenth century as a response to a
millennium of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. An end to the diaspora and a
return to the biblical homeland were seen as the only hope of escaping the
persistent repression of places like Hungary, the Ukraine, Russia, etc. The
British government with its Balfour declaration (1917) and the League of
Nations Palestine Mandate (1922) gave impetus to that hope. And of course
WWII and the Holocaust sealed the deal. The murder of 6 million Jews was seen
as sufficient reason to pursue a Jewish state and the UN granted that wish
with the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab States in 1947. The
seven Arab states declared war and urged the Palestinians to flee. After
defeating the Arab armies Israel made it very hard for them return. Hence we
ended up with a large Palestinian refugee population.
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Those Arab states themselves
were the result of a combination of British/French artistry in drawing the
maps of the post Ottoman world as well as the subsequent tribal military
campaigns that left the Saudis in charge of the Arabian peninsula (vast oil wealth
soon to be found) and the Hashemites driven up into Trans Jordan. Other than
the war with Israel, the conflicts and rivalries among the various Arab and
Persian factions have shaped Middle Eastern and North African politics ever
since then.
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Over the subsequent decades
following the 1948 war there was a persistent Arab bombing campaign and two
more large scale Arab attacks on Israel, 1967 and 1973. Until the mid
seventies Israel was seen as having the moral high ground based on the
holocaust and Arab behavior. But beginning with the Israeli incursion into
Lebanon in the early 80s that moral position began to erode. Israel’s
behavior in Lebanon was the first major example of aggressive action and
attacks against vulnerable populations. Israel began to develop a more right
wing and aggressive political faction of which Netanyahu is the worst current
example. The settlements in Arab territory in the West Bank are the direct
result of that evolution. (And of course the mass migration of the 1990s
mainly from Russia) Suicide bombings and missile attacks were the Arab
response. Walling themselves in was yet another ironic Israeli response.
Today’s horrors are a continuing extension of those conflicts following a
cease-fire of a few years.
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Once Israel declared itself a
Jewish state in 1948 the Palestinians had only three options; accept a
division of the land into two states, accept being second-class citizens in
the Israeli state or perpetual conflict because they could not win. The Arab states
chose the third option because it is in their interest to maintain unity
against their common enemy, Israel. They could even share a common
enemy with the hated Persian Shiites in Iran. So rather than helping the
Palestinians develop by investing in education, health care, jobs,
infrastructure etc. the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia help keep them
poor but well armed. Palestinian refugees would remain a festering sore in
the Middle East to remind the world of Israel’s perfidy. And of course any
aid that did come ended up in corrupt pockets not in helping development. The
obvious counter example was Jordan, which developed itself, with little help
from their Arab brethren and eventually made grudging peace with Israel. The
difference in Jordan was good Arab leadership that recognized that Israel was
not going way and war forever was not a good development policy.
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At the geopolitical level
several threads played out. The UN became a place where the Israel and Arab
conflicts became a symbolic pawn in the Cold War, especially in the Security
Council with the US on the Israeli side and the USSR on the Arab side (with
exceptions i.e. the Saudis). That hardened the US position and associated in
American minds Israel with our side and the Arabs with the other guys.
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Even though I have no support
for the Israeli position I find the opposition to Israel questionable in its
failure to be similarly outraged by a vast number of other moral horrors in
the recent past and currently active. Just to name a few; Cambodia, Tibet,
Sudan, Somalia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, Liberia, Central African
Republic, Uganda, North Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Venezuela, Syria, Egypt,
Libya, Zimbabwe and especially right now Nigeria. The Arab Spring ,which has
become a dark winter for most Arabs and the large scale slaughter now
underway along the borders of Iraq and Syria are good examples of what they
do to themselves. And our nations, the US, the Brits, the Dutch, the Russians
and the French have all played their parts in these other moral
outrages. The gruesome body count and social destruction left
behind dwarfs anything that the Israelis have done. The only difference with
the Israeli’s is their claim to a moral high ground, which they long ago left
behind in the refugee camps of Lebanon. They are now just a nation, like any
other, trying to survive in a hostile sea of hate.
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We should be clear, that
given the opportunity, the Arabs would drive the Jews into the sea and that
was true from day one. There was no way back from war once a religious state
was declared. So Israel, once committed to a nation state in that location and
granted that right by other nations have had no choice but to fight. In my
view therefore, neither side has any shred of moral standing left, nor have
the nations that supported both sides.
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So now let’s at look at why
the US behaves as it does with a nearly uncritical support of Israel. You are
right to criticize our media in so many ways, but that only makes things
worse it does not really explain why. They are simply doing what they think
their audiences want to hear. And they are mostly right.
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Part of it has to do with
post war American evolution and perceptions of Israel and the Arabs. When I
was a boy in the fifties, through my teenage years anti-Semitism was still
common in America. If you were Jewish you did not go to work for IBM or GE. You
did not join the Navy. You did not go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale. I could
not play tennis at my local country club. I regularly heard derisive,
anti-Semitic comments from some of my classmates. But by the mid sixties
along with the civil rights movement, toleration in general increased and
anti-Semitism declined, almost vanishing. Support of Israel was part of that
tolerance and was seen as a noble response to the Holocaust. The Arabs were
seen as the oppressors and enemies of the US. That perception was given
particular impetus by the oil embargo of 1973 and of course the Iranian
revolution, even though it was Persians not Arabs, because Americans don’t
see that distinction. (We should never forget that we have a Republican
dominated Congress, half of whom do not own a Passport and see ignorance as a
virtue.)The Israelis were seen as innovative and benign, people who made the
desert bloom. To this was added the growing and ironic support from the US
religious right who saw the route to salvation as the Israeli defeat of the
Arabs leading to a second coming of Christ. (Of course, we Jews would have to
convert to Christianity to survive the second coming.) 9-11 amplified the
American antipathy to the Arab world. Seeing the delight throughout the Arab
world at the fall of the twin towers did not endear the Arabs to the American
people. We can add Saddam, Khaddafi and Osama Bin Laden to the pantheon of
iconic American villains. The UN is no longer seen as legitimate and almost
always acting against US interests.
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So my generation and most of
today’s American leadership grew up with the Israeli’s as heroic good guys
and Arabs/Persians as greedy bad guys. The younger generation, my son Ben’s
age (24) have a much more balanced view. Israel’s behavior in their youth,
the last two decades, has destroyed whatever moral standing the Israeli’s had
with them. In addition the pro Israeli lobby in America has been very
effective in the political arena and their Arab counterparts have been
counter productive. So our leaders who group up with noble Israel and evil
Arabs and supported by Jewish political contributions are unequivocally pro
Israeli while young people are more divided as is at least some of the Jewish
community. Eventually demography will win out as a new more skeptical
generation comes to power, a generation for whom Israel will not carry the
same moral weight as it did for their parents.
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I don’t think there is any
honor to go around here. Israel has lost its way and commits horrors in the
interest of their own survival. And the Arabs and Persians perpetuate a
conflict ridden neighborhood with almost no exceptions, fighting against each
other and with hate of Israel the only thing that they share.
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It is also worth noting that
the largest Muslim populations are not Arab and the largest, Indonesia is
fairly peaceful. So it is not about religion. The Arabs have been engaged in
tribal conflicts for centuries that have been from time to time quelled by
Imperial powers like the Ottomans and strong men like Saddam and Ibn Saud.
And in those wars they have committed horrors on their own people. Observe
the genocidal destruction of Homs by Hafez Assad just to point to a recent
example. The Zionists brought another tribe to the war. It is of course a
tribe that is also divided, like the Arabs, in to factions, some of which are
fanatical and war like and others more moderate. The comments about the
racism of the Zionists are fair, but the Arab world does not lack for similar
attitudes. One need only see how the vast number of South Asian, Philippine
and African near slaves are treated even in the more benign countries like
the UAE.
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So given that history and
current reality and even though I believe the creation of Israel was a
historic disaster, I am a member of the tribe, (perhaps its more pacifist,
atheist wing) I find objectionable the unique singling out of Israel for
condemnation. So if we are prepared to boycott, condemn, shame, etc, the
Saudis, the Qataris, the Iranians, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Russians,
the Nigerians, the Taliban, the Venezuelans, the Zimbabweans, the Sudanese,
the south Sudanese, the Central African Republicans, and lets not forget the
Americans and the British, all of whom are as guilty as Israel, then I will
join the demonstration. (Two small things that might help would be if the
rich Arab states provided some funding and development assistance for the
Palestinians and if the Palestinian government didn’t steal all the aid.)
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We find ourselves at a
historic impasse. There is no way back. Israel will do whatever it takes to
survive. They will not leave. And the Arab identity has become opposition to
Israel. It will be centuries, if ever, before they accept the existence of
Israel. So both sides will always rightly feel threatened. There will be no
other state there but perpetual tribal war with an occasional truce. And in
that perpetual state of tribal war there be ample opportunity for horrors on
both sides. We can only hope to lower the level of violence, but true peace
will remain illusive.
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Peter Schwartz
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