The other night I was watching a basketball game with friends at a bar near NYU when Jared Malsin stopped at our table and had a beer. Malsin is one of those young journalists for whom I have complete affection because they remind me of myself at that age. It’s a selfish feeling; I like to think I was once as smart and attractive and promising as they are now.
Malsin has an angular face and a dry wit, and he goes out to the Middle East a lot. But he can’t go to Israel or Palestine. He was kicked out of Israel in 2010 after being detained for eight days at Ben Gurion airport and interrogated for hours and hours by “manipulative, misleading, mendacious” officials about his writings critical of Israel.
“Jared, I’ve always wanted to ask you,” I said. “Did you use your brother’s passport?”
“I don’t have a brother.”
“Sorry, it was just something I heard back then, when we were all wondering why they were holding you.”
“Yes there were a ton of rumors about why it was happening.”
“Did that experience change your life?”
“Of course. I mean, I lost my job [he’d been working at Ma’an News for 2-1/2 years]. And my home in Palestine. I had to change my life completely.”
“I meant spiritually.”
“Oh. Yes. I feel like I got some empathy for the experience of detention and incarceration. Just a little. Like when I told this guy about it recently, he said, ‘Yes I know, I was in prison for four years.’ A tiny taste. Like a grain of sand.”
When I got home, I got down two books from the shelf. The first was a Henry Miller book containing his story about being deported from England in 1934, called “Via Dieppe-Newhaven.”
Miller was a poor writer in his 40s then, living in Paris. His first book was about to come out, Tropic of Cancer, but he was in a bad way. He’d broken up with his wife and the Chicago Tribune had lately fired him as a proofreader and he’d moved in with a journalist. His wife was starving and on his case and he rustled up some money to go to England. He was tired of hearing French and wanted to speak English.
“After turning round and round like a rat in a trap I got the brilliant idea of beating it myself. Just walk out on the problem, that’s always the easiest way…”
But he ended up giving most of the money to his wife, and on the boat across the channel he got drunk and bought beers for others and made the mistake of asking about cheap rooms in Paris. An official heard Miller, and when he got in the immigration line they asked him to show them his money. The questioning was humiliating.
“I see that you are a married man. Is your wife living with you — and your friend? Or is she in America?”
“I don’t see that that’s any of your business,” I said. “But since you brought the subject up I’m going to tell you something now. The reason I came away with so little money is because I gave the money for my trip to my wife before leaving…”
“Wasn’t that rather foolish to give your wife all that money and come to England penniless, or almost so?…You’re a writer, Mr. Miller?”
“Yes.”…
Couldn’t I give him the name of a magazine I had written for in the last year or two? I said no, I had been too busy writing a book… [W]hat were the names of the books?
“There’s only one,” I said. “It’s called Tropic of Cancer.”
At this I thought he would throw a fit. I didn’t know what had come over him for the moment. Finally he seemed to bring himself under partial control and, in the suavest, the most sarcastic voice imaginable, he said, “Come, Mr. Miller, you don’t mean to tell me that you write medical books too?”
In the end the English authorities put a cross on his passport and kept him in a jail overnight and then shipped him back to France the next day. Miller was glad to get back to France. He was filled with joy and understanding–that all life is voyage, “voyage within voyage.”
It’s a beautiful story. I’m not doing it justice on literary or philosophical terms. But my business here isn’t literary.
I got Miller’s book a year ago after I read George Orwell’s praise for it in this book. The two writers could not be more different. Orwell understood Miller as “a simple individualist who recognises no obligations to anyone else– at any rate, no obligations to society as a whole.” But he also recognized Miller’s outstanding gifts, his lack of shame and bold prose, and he found “Via Dieppe-Newhaven” moving on political terms:
I remember reading it just after Munich [1938] and reflecting that, though the Munich settlement was not a thing to be proud of, this little episode made me feel more ashamed of my country. Not that the British officials at Newhaven behaved much worse than that kind of person behaves everywhere. But somehow the whole thing was saddening. A couple of bureaucrats had got an artist at their mercy, and the mixture of spite, cunning and stupidity with which they handled him made one wonder what is the use of all this talk about democracy, freedom of the press, and what not.
Think about Jared Malsin’s story– the wanton destruction of a young foreign writer’s livelihood after days of detention and interrogation.
Well, there have been many other cases like that. Israel denied entry to Noura Joudeh, a teacher from Texas, and destroyed her job at a school in Ramallah earlier this year after she came to the border on two occasions, and they asked her endless questions about Palestinians she has talked to. Frank Barat, human rights activist and writer, got thrown out last month after four hours of interrogation, including going into his email account. The great Noam Chomsky and his daughter couldn’t get in from Jordan after “multiple interrogations” in 2010 (“I was invited by [Birzeit] university, by the philosophy department to give several lectures on topics I work on, American foreign and domestic policy. Perfectly straightforward, I do it all the time, in many countries,” he told Al Jazeera). Sandra Tamari got deported after eight hours of questioning and demands to look at her email, and the US Embassy went right along with it. Poet and therapist Lillian Rosengarten is barred from going to Israel for ten years. She was on a boat trying to visit Gaza. Soldiers tased a crewmember, trampled poor Reuven Moskowitz’s harmonicas, and then deported Lillian and Reuven and two other artists. The scholar Norman Finkelstein wanted to visit a dear friend in Hebron. Before he was deported, he was held for 24 hours and asked questions about his connections to Al Qaeda and how he intended to finance his trip, treatment his lawyer compared to “the behaviour of the Soviet bloc countries.”
They had Jared Malsin at their mercy, and they destroyed his job.
Look at all that wreckage, and Henry Miller’s moving ordeal– and you know: George Orwell would hate Israel.
Israel manipulates, subverts, and outright destroys in some cases, aspects of Palestinian society.
Just as Israel de-developed the Gaza economy through the years of occupation and colonialism (and no doubt as it has done so in the W. Bank).
Preventing Palestinians and internationals to go to Palestine is one way Israel attacks Palestinian agency and self-determination.
It’s all under the bullshit guise of ‘self-defense’ and ‘security’. And the only people who buy it are Zionists themselves.
Orwell saw through ideological horseshit. Zionism is the last of the political ideologies of the 40s still going. Now it is in the denying reality stage. Lilian may make it to al quds for the fairuz concert before her sentence is up.
Phil ‘projecting’, among other things, that he’s a kindred spirit to Henry Miller and George Orwell.
Of course, Phil has never been deported and he’s never picked up a gun and got shot in defense of liberty like Orwell did.
Maybe another reason Orwell would hate Israel is because he was an admitted anti-Semite.
http://forward.com/articles/160496/was-george-orwell-an-anti-semite/?p=all
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side” (“Notes on Nationalism,” 1945 ).
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/orwell-s-insights-on-israel-1.461079
“With his loathing of propaganda and state coercion, George Orwell would have excoriated Zionist efforts to sanitize Israel’s past. Nor is it hard to imagine how trenchantly he would express himself on the subject of a state that endlessly exhorts the world to remember the sufferings of Jewish people yet whose own memory is so singularly selective” – Neil Berry/George Orwell, Jewish People and State of Israel:
http://www.arabnews.com/columns/george-orwell-jewish-people-and-state-israel
Orwell was critical of Zionism in his day and had some understanding of its negative consequences. That’s according to his colleagues on “The Tribune,” It wasn’t something Orwell wrote much about — not when Hitler was still around or a recent memory.
In his “Notes on Nationalism” Orwell described Zionism as a “direct” rather than a “transferred” nationalism, “because it flourishes almost exclusively among the Jews themselves.” He missed the phenomenon of Christian Zionism, which was present in his day in Britain, though not as strong as it is in today’s America. It also looks like he missed the fact that many of the most passionate Zionists, then and now, had no desire to settle in Palestine or Israel.
The distinction between direct and transferred nationalism is important, but the line is fuzzy. Diaspora politics or diaspora nationalism — the attachment of emigrants and their descendants to a homeland they don’t have a desire to return to, a familiar phenomenon in American life — was something Orwell was aware of, but not something he looked into very deeply.
The concept of “transferred nationalism” — in spite of Orwell’s own caveat — is relevant to the study of Zionism. Latching onto a foreign country or people and investing it with positive emotion and idealizing it, makes it possible for someone “to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.” That’s true of other political enthusiasms as well, but it does bring to mind Americans who feel more attached to Benjamin Netanyahu than to their own elected officials.