Hitchamorphosis

The Hitch bits that once clogged my mailbox have steadily, mercifully, fallen away, as most of those who wanted me informed of every Hitch outburst have honored my plea to desist. But a few items still come through, the majority of which I immediately delete, for reasons long-ago stated. Yet every once in a while, a certain Hitch bit will grab my attention, especially those that highlight a new phase of his ongoing political and analytical deterioration. A fresh bit received yesterday decidedly meets that criteria.

In the final spasms of our friendship, Hitchens and I exchanged numerous emails about his apparent lack of interest in the continuing woes of Palestinian life. At that time, Hitchens was consumed with all things Iraq, trying to get others (like me) to share his lust for war and for brutally wiping out whoever Hitch deemed an enemy of civilization. He droned on and on about the "debt" we owed to the Iraqis for once backing Saddam, and how duty-bound we were to invade their country and spread some of our high-minded ideals their way. After listening to him play this same tune again and again on his battered accordion, I asked him if we owe that much to the Iraqis, and Kurds, that we must directly enter their lives via military force, then what did we owe the Palestinians, whose fate we helped seal long before Saddam rose to power in Iraq? If you applied Hitchens' rationale for war in Iraq to the issue of Palestine/Israel, then we should have immediately deployed troops to Gaza and the West Bank in order to liberate our Palestinian brothers and sisters from the oppressive Israeli boot. Of course, that would never happen, which led me to suggest to Hitch that perhaps all the high-minded rhetoric about "liberating" Iraq wasn't so sincere to begin with. That maybe his once-keen anti-imperial eye was fogged with romantic nonsense. Hitch would hear none of it. The US, he insisted, was no longer imperialist, but now used its military to further freedom. This was the New Radicalism, and by insisting that the US remained imperialist, I was doomed to be on the wrong side of history. Couldn't I see that the likes of Ahmed Chalabi and Halliburton contractors were today's Mandelas?

And so on.

Amid all this bluster, Hitchens never really answered why he was largely silent on Palestinian suffering. He'd pipe up now and then in interviews here and there, but his main focus was the glorious war unfolding in Iraq.

Recent events have forced Hitchens to return to the topic for which he was once renowned and often cited. He appeared on Hugh Hewitt's reactionary radio show on July 12 to talk about Israel, Gaza and Lebanon; and while Hitch showed that he still remembers the basic argument, doubt and trepidation emerge:

HH: Do you think they're morally equivalent, Christopher Hitchens, Hamas, Hezbollah and Israel?

CH: No. I couldn't say that I did, but you can hear the reluctance in my voice as a yes/no question. No, it seems to me that especially the suicide bombing campaign that took place, for example, against Jewish old people's homes in Natanya, on the Israeli coast on Passover, quite clearly suggests that these people...no one blows themselves up for a compromise.

HH: Exactly.

CH: And that has, of course, helped to ruin everything. But the Israelis have supreme power, locally, politically. They have supreme power economically. They've, for a long time, had absolute supreme power militarily. For them not to say where they think their border should be, and to keep fooling us and building strange walls that go outside the perimeter of any likely state, makes the moral equivalence thing a little harder to decide with an absolute.

Instead of going "on the one hand" route, Hitchens might have mentioned the fact that Israel, through its brutal divide-and-rule policies, made Hamas and Hezbollah practically inevitable. Make a serious, just and lasting deal with a moderating PLO in the late-1970s, and an emerging Hamas lacks traction with the Palestinian people, especially if it's not helped along by Israel itself (which it later was). And if Israel had made a serious, just and lasting deal with the PLO at a time when Fatah was regarded as the main Palestinian voice, there probably would've been no invasion of Lebanon, and thus no extended occupation of the Shi'a south, and thus no Hezbollah, at least as we now know it. Hamas and Hezbollah didn't appear out of the clouds, something that Hitchens understands better than most, or at least understood. His hemming and hawing with imperialist pal Hewitt showed that perhaps his grip on these and other related facts was slipping faster by the day. But it's in his July 18 essay for the Wall Street Journal where Hitch's grip appears lost for keeps.

Titled "The Politics of Sabotage," the piece exposes a part of Hitchens that he's been trying to suppress or explain away, namely, giving the Israeli state the benefit of the doubt when it's engaged in full-scale aggression. I thought this would arrive sooner than later, but arrive it has. While Hitchens notes the effects of Israeli violence, "As the misery and wreckage mount in Lebanon . . . Rafik Hariri airport in Beirut is being cratered, and the Palestinians have to endure yet another collective punishment," he doesn't really fault the Israelis for what they're currently doing, certainly not like he did back in the day. Indeed, Hitchens finds that Israel's "blowing up of the bridges and the other interruptions of all air and sea traffic possess a certain grim rationale" -- in this case, trying to prevent Hezbollah from smuggling the two captured Israeli soldiers out of Lebanon to become "anonymous meat in some dungeon run by Bashar al-Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad." Hitchens might also have noticed that Israel is bombing a lot more than just bridges and the airport, targets and people who have little if anything to do with Hezbollah, so it would be interesting to know how this element of the violence is keeping the IDF POWs in country, or even alive. Hitchens doesn't say. Nor does he mention the 8,500-10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the conditions of which are not terribly cozy, either. Given that Gaza continues to get slammed (and where Israeli soldiers have used civilians, children among them, as human shields), and that most parties are linking those attacks to the onslaught of Lebanon, you'd think that when mentioning the brutality of the region's prisons, Israel's might also come up. But then, he's writing for the Wall Street Journal's editors, and I suspect that he wants to continue writing for outlets like Murdoch's Weekly Standard. Going after Israel as though you're writing for the Nation or Harper's won't endear you to those with the right and powerful connections.

This assumes, of course, that Hitchens is being cynical here. Perhaps he truly does believe that Israel is the one getting yanked around by the "proxies" of Syria and Iran. That's certainly the argument he's making in this piece: "[T]o an alarming degree, the nihilists and jihadists and death-squad sponsors appear to be able to call the tune, and in a weird way to determine Israel's actions." That would be "weird," if it were true. So committed is Hitchens to this premise that he writes "the former Israeli fans of Vladimir Jabotinsky are saying in public that Israeli colonization of Arabs is demographically impossible and morally wrong."

These former Jabotinsky fans are part of Kadima, the Israeli party started by Ariel Sharon and like-minded others, including current Prime Minister Olmert, who tired of inner-Likud struggles and wanted to once and for all deal with Palestine's growing "demographic bomb." The initial pull-out from Gaza was part of this strategy, since Israel really doesn't need that poverty-ridden patch of ground (though the IDF keeps Gazans locked in, which helps when bombing them). But to say that Kadima has renounced colonization is simply false, as continued settlement of the West Bank (establishing "final borders")immediately shows. And at last look, I've seen no indication that Kadima plans to give up East Jerusalem. Israel may not be able to colonize all of the Arabs within its reach, but it still has significant say in their fate, as well as overwhelming force to punish them if necessary, as we currently see. That Hitchens blames Hamas and Hezbollah for derailing something that doesn't exist -- de-colonization -- and that he confuses political pragmatism and necessity for state morality (another phantom concept), merely deepens his deceit, whether intentional or unconscious. Hitchens may not see himself becoming an Israeli state apologist, but after reading this piece (which I'll send to anyone who wants to read it), I can see why the Wall Street Journal might happily differ.