By Neil Berry
Article Source
Twenty years ago, on Feb. 25, 1994 the American Jewish settler, Dr. Baruch Goldstein, burst into the Ibrahimi mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron, bent on a deadly mission. Brandishing a machine gun, he massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded more than 125 others before being beaten to death by survivors of his onslaught. The British monthly magazine, The Oldie, generally eschews earnestness, but its March issue acknowledges this grim anniversary with an unimpeachably serious article on Hebron by the celebrated Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy. Murphy paints a poignant picture of the ghost town that Hebron has become, with much of Old City now closed off by the Israeli Defense Force. If Goldstein’s massacre dealt a blow to the Oslo peace process, it also destroyed what had been one of the West Bank’s busiest souks that once employed thousands.
Last year, Dervla Murphy published an account of a stay in Gaza, A Month by the Sea, which was hugely eloquent about the agony of Gaza. The book evokes a place where ordinary men, women and children heroically cope with extraordinary pressures. All the more remarkable for being the work of a spry octogenarian, it received nothing like the attention that it deserved — in some part perhaps because Murphy does not start from the assumption that there is a moral equivalence between the Israeli and Palestinian causes. To her, it is self-evident that Israel has long been engaged in the systematic oppression of the Palestinian people, with the ultimate objective of driving them out of their historic homeland altogether. She is contemptuous of the premise on which the UK mainstream media operates – that the official Israeli point of view must be highlighted in any discussion of the Palestine-Israel conflict. If her writing on Palestine is welcome in The Oldie as it would not be elsewhere, it is because the magazine’s veteran editor, Richard Ingrams, shares her exasperation at a British journalistic consensus that this is a subject on which a meticulously even-handed approach must be pursued at all times. A long-standing critic of Israeli policy and of the tendency of the British political class and commentariat to fight shy of taking a moral stand over demonstrable Israeli infractions, Ingrams is possibly the only editor in Britain prepared to publish such a writer.
By giving hospitality to Murphy’s outraged account of Hebron’s fate, Ingrams risked causing particular offense to Zionists who believe that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, who are apt to be victims of slanted coverage at the hands of the British media. As it happens, one British Zionist, the renowned actress Maureen Lipman, has enjoyed a long association with him and The Oldie, a perhaps surprising circumstance considering what a voluble exponent she is of the view that Israel is persistently singled out for partisan attack by persons who wish to be seen as principled anti-Zionists but who are in truth crypto-anti-Semites. Goaded to fury by Murphy’s article, Lipman has wasted no time in breaking off relations with the magazine.
Maureen Lipman plainly thinks of herself as eminently reasonable and fair-minded but in a television discussion in 2006 she gave a hostage to fortune, exclaiming “Israelis do not hold life cheap” — unlike the “other side” with their suicide bombers. Yet what was Baruch Goldstein if not a species of suicide bomber — one moreover who stood for an insatiably land-grabbing Jewish settler movement whose actions have steadily eroded the possibility that there will ever be an independent Palestinian state and whose adherents include racist zealots soaked in the conviction that Arabs are barely human? “A million Arabs,” exulted the rabbi who presided over Goldstein’s funeral, “are not worth a single Jewish finger nail.” In focusing attention on the Goldstein massacre and its baleful aftermath, Richard Ingrams’ magazine has touched on features of the Zionist mindset that Maureen Lipman — in common with many other Jews who nurse a sense of their own moral decency — is perhaps loath to address and would rather society at large did not address either.