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"About suffering," Auden famously wrote in 1938, "they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ its human position; how it takes place/ While someone is eating or opening a window/Or just walking dully along." Yet the great crucifixion paintings of Caravaggio or Bellini, or Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican - though they were not what Auden had in mind - have God on their side. We may feel the power of suffering in the context of religion but, outside this spiritual setting, I’m not sure how compassionate we really are. Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat set off for his journey to Jerusalem in 1977, he announced to the world that he did not intend to live "among the pygmies". This was tough on pygmies but there was no doubt what it revealed about Sadat. He thought he was a Great Man. History suggests he was wrong. His 1978 Camp David agreement with Menachem Begin of Israel brought the Sinai back under Egyptian control, but it locked Sadat’s country into a cold peace and near-bankrupt isolation. He was finally called "Pharaoh", a description Sadat might have appreciated had it not been shouted by his murderers as they stormed his military reviewing stand in 1981.
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The atrocities of yesterday - the Beslan school massacre, the Bali bombings, the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001, the gassings of Halabja - can still fill us with horror and pity, although that sensitivity is heavily conditioned by the nature of the perpetrators. In an age where war has become a policy option rather than a last resort, where its legitimacy rather than its morality can be summed up on a sheet of A4 paper, we prefer to concentrate on the suffering caused by "them" rather than "us". The Middle East, of course, is awash with kings and dictators who are called - or like to imagine themselves - Great Men. Saddam Hussein thought he was Stalin - evil, unfortunately, is also for some a quality of greatness - while George Bush Senior thought Saddam was Hitler. Eden claimed that Nasser, when he nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, was the Mussolini of the Nile (though Mussolini was not Great, he thought he was). Yasser Arafat claimed that Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan, when he died, was Saladin, the warrior who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine. The truth was that the Israelis had driven the Hashemites from Palestine. But Hussein was on "our" side and the Plucky Little King, when he died of cancer in 1999, was immortalised by President Clinton who said he was "already in heaven", a feat that went unequalled until Pope John Paul II made it to the same location before his funeral this month.
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Hence the tens of thousands of Iraqis who were killed in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation, the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese killed in the Vietnam war, the hundreds of Egyptians cut down by our 1956 invasion of Suez are not part of our burden of guilt. About 1,700 Palestinian civilians from the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps - equal to more than half the dead of the World Trade Center - were massacred in Lebanon. I listened to much of the tosh uttered about this hopelessly right-wing pontiff when he was dying, and read a good deal of the vitriol that was splashed on him a few days later. I agree with much of the latter. But he was the one prominent world figure - being of "world" importance is not necessarily a quality for greatness, but it helps - who stood up against President Bush’s insane invasion of Iraq. With absolute resolution, he condemned and re-condemned the illegality of the assault on Iraq in a way that no other prominent churchman did. Good on yer, Pope, I remember saying at the time - and it would be churlish of me to forget this now. But a Great Man?
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But how many readers can remember the exact date? September 16-18, 1982. "Our" dates are thus sacrosanct, "theirs" are not; though I notice how "they" must learn "ours". How many times are Arabs pointedly asked for their reaction to 11 September 2001, with the specific purpose of discovering whether they show the correct degree of shock and horror? And how many Westerners would even know what happened in 1982? In truth, our world seems full of Little Men. Not just Sadat’s "pygmies". Gaddafi may be a "statesman" in the eyes of our Trot of a foreign secretary - this was just before the Libyan dictator was found to be plotting the assassination of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia - but anyone who can seriously suggest that a joint Israeli-Palestinian state might be called "Israeltine" is clearly a candidate for the men in white coats. Indeed, it raises the question: are there any Great Men in the Middle East?
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It’s also about living memory - and also, I suspect, about photographic records. The catastrophes of our generation, or of our parents’ or even our grandparents’ generation - have a poignancy that earlier bloodbaths do not. Hence we can be moved to tears by the epic tragedy of the Second World War and its 55 million dead, by the murder of six million Jews, by our families’ memories of this conflict - a cousin on my father’s side died on the Burma Road - and also by the poets of the First World War. Owen and Sassoon created the ever-living verbal museum of that conflict. And, are there any Great Men in the world today? Where - this is a question I’ve been asked by several readers recently - are the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Titos, the Lloyd Georges, the Woodrow Wilsons, the de Gaulles and Clemenceaus?
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But I can well understand why the Israelis have restructured their Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem. The last survivors of Hitler’s death camps will be dead soon. So they must be kept alive in their taped interviews, along with the records and clothes of those who were slaughtered by the Nazis. The Armenians still struggle to memorialise their own 1915 Holocaust of one and a half million at the hands of the Ottoman Turks - they struggle even to keep the capital H on their Holocaust - because only a pitiful handful of their survivors are still alive and the Turks still deny their obvious guilt. There are photographs of the Armenians being led to the slaughter. But no documentary film. Our present band of poseur presidents and prime ministers cannot come close. Bush may think he is Churchill - remember all that condemnation of Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement we had to suffer before we invaded Iraq? - but he cannot really compare himself to his dad, let alone our Winston. Bush Junior looks like a nerd while his friends - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest - actually look disreputable. Chirac would like to be a Great Man but his problem is that he can be mocked - see France’s equivalent of Spitting Image. Blair has a worse impediment. He has become a mockery of himself, slowly assuming the role of his clergyman namesake in Private Eye - to the point where the latter simply became no longer funny. Blair’s self-righteousness and self-regard would have earned him my Dad’s ultimate put-down of all pretentious men: that he was a twerp. And my Dad, I should add, kept Churchill’s portrait over the dining room fireplace.
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And here the compassion begins to wobble. Before the 1914-18 war, there were massacres enough for the world’s tears; the Balkan war of 1912 was of such carnage that eyewitnesses feared their accounts would never be believed. The Boer war turned into a moral disgrace for the British because we herded our enemies’ families into disease-ridden concentration camps. The Franco-Prussian war of 1871 - though French suffering was portrayed by Delacroix with stunning accuracy, and photos survive of the Paris Commune - leaves us cold. So, despite the record of still photographs, does the American civil war. Sacrifice obviously has something to do with it. To get bumped off for your good deeds - preferably "making peace", although many of those at work on the "peace" project seem to have spent a lot of time making war - is clearly a possible path to Greatness. Thus Sadat does have a chance. So does Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. And so, through sickness, King Hussein and - in more theatrical form - the last Pope, although my Mum died of the same illness with much less drama and pomp. Those who successfully fight their countries’ occupiers get a look in; de Gaulle again, Tito again, maybe Ho Chi Minh but not, apparently, the leaders of the Algerian FLN and most definitely not the lads from the Lebanese Hizbollah. And we all know how Arafat went from being Superterrorist to Superstatesman and back to Super-terrorist again.
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We can still be appalled - we should be appalled - by the million dead of the Irish famine, although it is painfully significant that, although photography had been invented by the mid-19th century, not a single photograph was taken of its victims. We have to rely on the Illustrated London News sketches to show the grief and horror which the Irish famine produced. In the Middle East, I do have a soft spot for President Khatami of Iran. A truly decent, philosophical, morally good man, he was crushed by the political power of his clerical enemies set up by Ayatollah Khomeini. Khatami’s "civil society" never materialised; had it blossomed, he might have been a Great Man. Instead, his life seems to be a tragedy of withered hope. I mention Khomeini and I fear we have to put him in the list. He lived the poverty of Gandhi, overthrew a vicious dictatorship and changed the history of the Middle East. That his country is now a necrocracy - government ruled by and for the dead - does not, sadly, change this.
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Yet who cries now for the dead of Waterloo or Malplaquet, of the first Afghan war, of the Hundred Years’ War - whose rural effects were still being felt in 1914 - or for the English Civil War, for the dead of Flodden Field or Naseby or for the world slaughter brought about by the Great Plague? True, movies can briefly provoke some feeling in us for these ghosts. Hence the Titanic remains a real tragedy for us even though it sank in 1912 when the Balkan war was taking so many more innocent lives. Braveheart can move us. But in the end, we know that the disembowelling of William Wallace is just Mel Gibson faking death. Yet this raises another dark question? Why do we stop only a generation or two ago? Why stop at the First World War? Where now, we might ask, are the Duke of Wellingtons and the Napoleons, the Queen Elizabeths, the Richard the Lionhearts, and yes, the Saladins and the Caesars and the Genghis Khans?
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By the time we reach the slaughters of antiquity, we simply don’t care a damn. Genghis Khan? Tamerlane? The sack of Rome? The destruction of Carthage? Forget it. Their victims have turned to dust and we do not care about them. They have no memorial. We even demonstrate our fascination with long-ago cruelty. Do we not queue for hours to look at the room in London in which two children were brutally murdered? The Princes in the Tower? Oddly, the list of Great Men doesn’t usually include Gandhi, whom I would think an obvious candidate for all the right reasons. He was palpably a good man, a peaceful man, and freed his country from imperial rule and was assassinated.
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If, of course, the dead have a spiritual value, then their death must become real to us. Rome’s most famous crucifixion victim was not Spartacus - although Kirk Douglas did his best to win the role in Kubrick’s fine film - but a carpenter from Nazareth. And compassion remains as fresh among Muslims for the martyrs of early Islam as it does for the present-day dead of Iraq. Anyone who has watched the Shia Muslims of Iraq or Lebanon or Iran honouring the killing of Imams Ali and Hussein - like Jesus, they were betrayed - has watched real tears running down their faces, tears no less fresh than those of the Christian pilgrims in Jerusalem this week. You can butcher a whole city of innocents in the Punic War, but nail the son of Mary to a cross or murder the son-in-law of the Prophet and you’ll have them weeping for generations. Nelson Mandela would be among my candidates for all the obvious reasons (his objections to Bush not being the least of them). Nurse Edith Cavell - "patriotism is not enough" - who was shot by the Germans in the First World War, and Margaret Hassan, the supremely brave and selfless charity worker butchered in Iraq, must be in my list - proving, of course, that we should also ask: where are the Great Women of our age? Rachel Corrie, I’d say, the American girl who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in its path to protect Palestinian homes in Gaza. And how about Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower?
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What worries me, I suppose, is that so many millions of innocents have died terrible deaths because their killers have wept over their religious martyrs. The Crusaders slaughtered the entire population of Beirut and Jerusalem in 1099 because of their desire to "free" the Holy Land, and between 1980 and 1988, the followers of the Prophet killed a million and a half of their own co-religionists after a Sunni Muslim leader invaded a Shia Muslim country. Most of the Iraqi soldiers were Shia - and almost all the Iranian soldiers were Shia - so this was an act of virtual mass suicide by the followers of Ali and Hussein.

Passion and redemption were probably essential parts of our parents’ religious experience. But I believe it would be wiser and more human in our 21st century to reflect upon the sins of our little human gods, those evangelicals who also claim we are fighting for "good" against "evil", who can ignore history and the oceans of blood humanity has shed - and get away with it on a sheet of A4 paper.


http://www.sisde.it/sito%5CRivista19.nsf/servnavig/5

definizione hezbollah



È l’11 Giugno 2002 quando, ad ovest di Jenin, viene posata la prima pietra del muro dell’Apartheid. Un progetto di lunga data, teorizzato anni prima dal laburista israeliano Ehud Barak, prende forma proprio qui a Jenin, una delle zone di lotta palestinese più in fermento. Un muro che forse, in un primo momento, poteva essere visto solo come uno strumento di divisione e non di annessione. «Il muro all’origine, è stato proposto dalla sinistra israeliana, dai settori più moderati - racconta padre David Jaeger, esperto di questioni mediorientali - L’idea rispondeva alle esigenze di sicurezza in Israele per fermare gli attentatori e nello stesso tempo il muro doveva demarcare la frontiera tra Israele e Palestina e passare lungo la cosiddetta Linea Verde. L’idea laburista incorporava il riconoscimento del diritto dei palestinesi ad uno Stato indipendente e portava con sé il ritiro dalla maggioranza dei territori occupati».

Ma nel 2002 le cose sono diverse, Ariel Sharon guida lo Stato d’Israele e anche i timidi progetti laburisti vengono travolti. «Il piano - spiega il ministro della Sicurezza interna Uzi Landau - non si propone di tagliare in due Gerusalemme, ma solo di impedire l’ingresso di terroristi palestinesi provenienti da Betlemme e da Ramallah. L’indivisibilità di Gerusalemme e la sovranità di Israele sull’intera città, capitale eterna del popolo ebraico, è fuori discussione». E pure i permessi di passaggio del muro sono chiari nella mente dei suoi ideatori. Ne saranno istituiti tre tipi. Uno, detto «intelligente», permetterà il libero passaggio degli israeliani ma non dei palestinesi, un altro permetterà il veloce ingresso delle truppe dello Stato ebraico, un terzo sarà utilizzato dagli agricoltori israeliani.

Una struttura difensiva, secondo gli israeliani, non un confine geo-politico. Quindi, nessun pregiudizio a possibili negoziati. Ma, commenta il ministro dell’Informazione dell’Anp, Yasser Abed Rabbo, «l’obiettivo degli israeliani è di frantumare i Territori, trasformando la Cisgiordania e la Striscia di Gaza in altrettante enclaves circondate da “zone cuscinetto” e intensificare la colonizzazione». E i palestinesi non sono gli unici ad opporsi al Muro. Per differenti ragioni, anche i coloni israeliani non sono d’accorso con Sharon. «Quel Muro intende indicare il confine politico di Israele e quello dello Stato palestinese. Uno Stato del terrore che non dovrà mai nascere perchè rappresenterebbe una minaccia mortale per Israele». A parlare a nome degli oltre 220mila coloni che risiedono negli insediamenti in Cisgiordania e nella Striscia di Gaza, è Benny Lieberman, presidente del Consiglio degli insediamenti di Giu dea e Samaria. Originariamente, secondo la prima mappa del Muro, presentata nel settembre del 2002, la barriera sarebbe dovuta essere lunga in tutto meno di 200 chilometri, ma le proteste dei coloni hanno convinto Sharon a estenderla, per includere in Israele anche gli insediamenti. Nel marzo del 2003, una nuova variazione del percorso include i villaggi di Ariel e Immanuel e prevede l'attraversamento della valle del Giordano.

In un anno, gli israeliani completano la "prima fase" del muro, 145 km che attraversano i distretti nord della West bank, Jenin, Tulkarem e Qalqilya. Una barriera che rinchiude in terra israeliana 210mila palestinesi, un muro che mangia 120 ettari di terra che ora sono definiti "zona di sicurezza". La confisca della terra, la distruzione di edifici e le limitazioni agli spostamenti si stima provocheranno la perdita di circa 6500 posti di lavoro. Secondo ordinanze militari israeliane, tutte le terre ad ovest della "prima fase" sono da considerarsi "zone cuscinetto". Di fatto si tratta di una vera e propria annessione di territorio.

Un esproprio che provoca perplessità anche negli Stati Uniti, i miglior alleati del governo Sharon. Ma il ministro degli Esteri israeliano Silvan Shalom tranquillizza gli umori, spiegando che con gli Usa è successo un «malinteso che deriva da un’insufficiente conoscenza dei particolari del progetto». Il timore di rottura del feeling americano, nasce da un incontro a fine luglio 2003 tra Abu Mazen, numero due dell’Olp e il presidente Bush. In questa occasione, il presidente americano aveva affermato che la costruzione della «recinzione» costituiva un «problema». Ma, alla fine Ariel e George W. «si sono trovati d’accordo su quasi tutto, e su quel poco su cui erano in contrasto hanno convenuto di non convenire». Potere della diplomazia. La costruzione del Muro va avanti e, assicura Sharon, «ogni sforzo sarà fatto per ridurre al minimo le difficoltà che creerà alla popolazione palestinese». Non si sa quale sia la nozione di “minimo” nella testa del premier israeliano.

Risale al 21 ottobre 2003 la prima risoluzione dell’Assemblea Generale delle Nazioni Unite che chiede a Israele di "fermare e smantellare il muro dell'apartheid". L’Onu dichiara testualmente che «quella barriera di sicurezza è contraria alle leggi internazionali» e che Israele deve «porre un termine alla costruzione del muro nei territori palestinesi occupati, inclusa Gerusalemme Est, e rimuovere quella parte della barriera già edificata». Il parere dell’Assemblea- 144 i voti a favore (tra cui quelli dell'Unione Europea), 4 i contrari (Usa, Israele, Micronesia, Isole Marshall), 12 le astensioni – non è giuridicamente vincolante, ma ha una valenza simbolica di grande portata. Ma nemmeno così, nessuno dei bulldozer che devastano i villaggi palestinesi ha smesso di lavorare.

L’Assemblea dell’Onu chiede anche che la Corte penale internazionale che ha sede a L’Aja, apra un fascicolo riguardo al «Muro della discordia». Ma le autorità internazionali paiono non preoccupare assolutamente Sharon. Nel febbraio 2004, Israele fa sapere che «non si farà processare dal Tribunale dell’Aja». Non parteciperà alle udienza convocata per il 23 febbraio, non riconoscerà la competenza del foro internazionale a pronunciarsi sulla legalità della barriera perchè si tratta «di una questione che investe il diritto fondamentale all’autodifesa di Israele». Ma nonostante tanta ostentata indifferenza, Sharon teme il responso dei giudici internazionali, e dà avvio a una forte attività diplomatica. E le sue parole convincono Usa, Russia e Unione Europea. I tre giganti, pur criticando il tracciato della barriera, si dichiarano contrari a un intervento della Corte dell’Aja nella vicenda, perchè non esiste una «via giudiziaria» alla pace. Così come, aggiungiamo, non dovrebbe esistere una «via militare» alla pace. Ma forse, la quiete è l’ultima delle cose che interessano ad Ariel Sharon. I suoi convincenti discorsi, insomma, fanno sì che solo 13 Stati, per lo più musulmani, intervengano all’udienza dell’Aja, accanto all’Anp, alla Lega Araba e all’Organizzazione della Conferenza islamica.

E mentre all’Aja si lavora per trovare soluzioni, in Cisgiordania il cemento continua a mangiarsi case e terreni. Il 23 febbraio 2004, le ruspe dell’esercito israeliano iniziano a spianare un’area vicino a Beit Surik, nella Cisgiordania nord-occidentale, da dove partirà il nuovo troncone del «muro», lungo circa 96 chilometri. Per chi non l’avesse capito, «nessuna Corte al mondo potrà mai mettere in discussione il nostro diritto di difesa, del quale la barriera è parte fondamentale», ribadisce Dore Gold, consigliere diplomatico del premier israeliano.

La sentenza della Corte, seppur non vincolante, è perentoria: quel Muro crea danni «ai diritti dei palestinesi e le violazioni derivanti dal suo percorso non possono essere giustificate da alcuna esigenza militare o da richieste relative alla sicurezza nazionale o all’ordine pubblico» d’Israele. Perché il Muro «costituisce una violazione da parte di Israele di diversi obblighi relativi alla legge umanitaria internazionale ed agli strumenti dei diritti umani».

Israele cerca conforto tra gli amici e chiede agli Usa di esercitare il diritto di veto per bloccare in Consiglio di Sicurezza qualsiasi risoluzione Onu sul muro. I palestinesi esultano per la vittoria politica. «Nessuno può imporci questo muro dell'apartheid, il suo smantellamento è ineluttabile: il muro di Berlino è crollato, e il muro di Sharon lo seguirà», queste furono le parole di Yasser Arafat.

Nel luglio 2004, è un altro tribunale a bocciare il Muro. Questa volta, però, è la Corte Suprema israeliana. E Sharon è costretto a fermare i bulldozer. Peccato, solo per trenta chilometri, giusto quelli che i giudici hanno ritenuto inopportuni. Uno spostamento di 30 km di «muro» a nord di Gerusalemme, una bocciatura certamente parziale ma significativa: "Il percorso del muro – nel villaggio di Beit Surik (ndr) - danneggia gravemente gli abitanti e viola i loro diritti, sanciti dalla normativa internazionale. Lo Stato dovrà trovare una soluzione alternativa che dia meno garanzie di sicurezza ma pesi di meno sulla popolazione locale". Considerazioni che potrebbero calzare a pennello anche ai restanti 700 km di muro.

Il 20 luglio 2004, una nuova risoluzione dell'Assemblea Generale dell'Onu (150 voti favorevoli, 6 contrari - tra cui Usa e Israele -, 10 astenuti) chiede ai paesi Onu di "non riconoscere la situazione illegale scaturita dalla costruzione del muro nel territorio palestinese occupato, compreso all'interno e intorno a Gerusalemme". Per Israele è un voto «vergognoso». Per la direzione palestinese è «la decisione più importante per la nostra causa dal 1947». Ma nemmeno questo parere è vincolante, e non c’è da sperare che le orecchie di Sharon vogliano ascoltarlo. Anche se stavolta, nemmeno l’Unione Europea lo ha appoggiato. «Siamo delusi - dice Sharon - per il sostegno massiccio di tutti i Paesi dell’Ue, che non ha tenuto in alcun conto del terrorismo di cui Israele è vittima».
And yes, all the humble folk - little people, if you like - who did what they did, whatever the cost, not because they sought Greatness, but because they believed it was the right thing to do.

Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat set off for his journey to Jerusalem in 1977, he announced to the world that he did not intend to live "among the pygmies". This was tough on pygmies but there was no doubt what it revealed about Sadat. He thought he was a Great Man. History suggests he was wrong. His 1978 Camp David agreement with Menachem Begin of Israel brought the Sinai back under Egyptian control, but it locked Sadat’s country into a cold peace and near-bankrupt isolation. He was finally called "Pharaoh", a description Sadat might have appreciated had it not been shouted by his murderers as they stormed his military reviewing stand in 1981.

The Middle East, of course, is awash with kings and dictators who are called - or like to imagine themselves - Great Men. Saddam Hussein thought he was Stalin - evil, unfortunately, is also for some a quality of greatness - while George Bush Senior thought Saddam was Hitler. Eden claimed that Nasser, when he nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, was the Mussolini of the Nile (though Mussolini was not Great, he thought he was). Yasser Arafat claimed that Hashemite King Hussein of Jordan, when he died, was Saladin, the warrior who drove the Crusaders out of Palestine. The truth was that the Israelis had driven the Hashemites from Palestine. But Hussein was on "our" side and the Plucky Little King, when he died of cancer in 1999, was immortalised by President Clinton who said he was "already in heaven", a feat that went unequalled until Pope John Paul II made it to the same location before his funeral this month.

I listened to much of the tosh uttered about this hopelessly right-wing pontiff when he was dying, and read a good deal of the vitriol that was splashed on him a few days later. I agree with much of the latter. But he was the one prominent world figure - being of "world" importance is not necessarily a quality for greatness, but it helps - who stood up against President Bush’s insane invasion of Iraq. With absolute resolution, he condemned and re-condemned the illegality of the assault on Iraq in a way that no other prominent churchman did. Good on yer, Pope, I remember saying at the time - and it would be churlish of me to forget this now. But a Great Man?

In truth, our world seems full of Little Men. Not just Sadat’s "pygmies". Gaddafi may be a "statesman" in the eyes of our Trot of a foreign secretary - this was just before the Libyan dictator was found to be plotting the assassination of Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia - but anyone who can seriously suggest that a joint Israeli-Palestinian state might be called "Israeltine" is clearly a candidate for the men in white coats. Indeed, it raises the question: are there any Great Men in the Middle East?

And, are there any Great Men in the world today? Where - this is a question I’ve been asked by several readers recently - are the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Trumans, the Eisenhowers, the Titos, the Lloyd Georges, the Woodrow Wilsons, the de Gaulles and Clemenceaus?

Our present band of poseur presidents and prime ministers cannot come close. Bush may think he is Churchill - remember all that condemnation of Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement we had to suffer before we invaded Iraq? - but he cannot really compare himself to his dad, let alone our Winston. Bush Junior looks like a nerd while his friends - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest - actually look disreputable. Chirac would like to be a Great Man but his problem is that he can be mocked - see France’s equivalent of Spitting Image. Blair has a worse impediment. He has become a mockery of himself, slowly assuming the role of his clergyman namesake in Private Eye - to the point where the latter simply became no longer funny. Blair’s self-righteousness and self-regard would have earned him my Dad’s ultimate put-down of all pretentious men: that he was a twerp. And my Dad, I should add, kept Churchill’s portrait over the dining room fireplace.

Sacrifice obviously has something to do with it. To get bumped off for your good deeds - preferably "making peace", although many of those at work on the "peace" project seem to have spent a lot of time making war - is clearly a possible path to Greatness. Thus Sadat does have a chance. So does Yitzhak Rabin of Israel. And so, through sickness, King Hussein and - in more theatrical form - the last Pope, although my Mum died of the same illness with much less drama and pomp. Those who successfully fight their countries’ occupiers get a look in; de Gaulle again, Tito again, maybe Ho Chi Minh but not, apparently, the leaders of the Algerian FLN and most definitely not the lads from the Lebanese Hizbollah. And we all know how Arafat went from being Superterrorist to Superstatesman and back to Super-terrorist again.

In the Middle East, I do have a soft spot for President Khatami of Iran. A truly decent, philosophical, morally good man, he was crushed by the political power of his clerical enemies set up by Ayatollah Khomeini. Khatami’s "civil society" never materialised; had it blossomed, he might have been a Great Man. Instead, his life seems to be a tragedy of withered hope. I mention Khomeini and I fear we have to put him in the list. He lived the poverty of Gandhi, overthrew a vicious dictatorship and changed the history of the Middle East. That his country is now a necrocracy - government ruled by and for the dead - does not, sadly, change this.

Yet this raises another dark question? Why do we stop only a generation or two ago? Why stop at the First World War? Where now, we might ask, are the Duke of Wellingtons and the Napoleons, the Queen Elizabeths, the Richard the Lionhearts, and yes, the Saladins and the Caesars and the Genghis Khans?

Oddly, the list of Great Men doesn’t usually include Gandhi, whom I would think an obvious candidate for all the right reasons. He was palpably a good man, a peaceful man, and freed his country from imperial rule and was assassinated.

Nelson Mandela would be among my candidates for all the obvious reasons (his objections to Bush not being the least of them). Nurse Edith Cavell - "patriotism is not enough" - who was shot by the Germans in the First World War, and Margaret Hassan, the supremely brave and selfless charity worker butchered in Iraq, must be in my list - proving, of course, that we should also ask: where are the Great Women of our age? Rachel Corrie, I’d say, the American girl who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in its path to protect Palestinian homes in Gaza. And how about Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower?

And yes, all the humble folk - little people, if you like - who did what they did, whatever the cost, not because they sought Greatness, but because they believed it was the right thing to do.

mace (last edited 2008-06-26 09:53:48 by anonymous)