fugitive peace

I’m doing another “Correspondent’s Diary” for The Economist this week, like the one I did on the West Bank in October. This time it’s about language.

Saying what you mean across three continents

MOST foreign correspondents become obsessed with something in the end. It might be weapons systems, education statistics or the history of Caucasian hill tribes. In my case it’s languages.

Ten years on various continents have given me fluency, more or less, in Spanish, French, Russian and Hebrew (though most of them I didn’t start from scratch), plus a working knowledge of spoken Arabic and Portuguese. I confess to enjoying the awed looks on people’s faces when I rattle off this list, but I feel a little guilty. A gift for languages is really no different from perfect pitch or long legs, and it usually comes at the expense of something else. I have a terrible memory for names and faces-not good for a journalist.

Besides, Westerners, with their stable countries and solid borders, tend to forget that for much of the world (and indeed for much of Western history) being polyglot has been a necessity for survival. On the Ukrainian-Slovakian border, a region across which the borders of empires have swept back and forth like windscreen wipers, I met office assistants who were fluent in Ukrainian, Slovakian, Hungarian and Russian as well as German or English; nobody found this remarkable. Israel, where I live now, is still home to post-war immigrants from Europe who speak seven or eight languages. Amos Oz, the prominent Israeli novelist, writes in his autobiography of growing up in a house that had books in 16 languages on its shelves.

My obsession, on which I’ll be expounding this week, is how languages are constructed and the differences in how they express things.

To be honest, it borders on nerdiness. I spend spare moments wondering why a sexy outfit “gets attention” in English but “calls attention” in Spanish, or why a “working assumption” is rendered in Hebrew as an “assumption of work”. Had I stayed in England, I would surely spend weekends on platforms writing down train numbers.

Still, differences in idiom do teach us about culture and history. Where an English-speaker says “the die is cast”, a Mexican says “the rice is cooked”. The proverb “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” becomes, in Russian, “When there are no fish, even a crab is a fish,” which reveals a surprising amount about what survival once entailed for the typical Russian peasant. (I admit, though, to being baffled by the cruder popular version of this phrase, “When there are no birds, even an arse is a nightingale.”)

Languages also sometimes contain enigmatic archaeological clues. These come to light especially where languages of the same family diverge. For instance, Hebrew and Arabic share an essentially identical root for the verb “to write”: katav/katab. The verb spawns nouns: a letter (the kind you send by post) is maktuub in Arabic and mikhtav in Hebrew. But while a book in Arabic is kitaab, in Hebrew it is sefer, which comes from the verb for “to tell”; a story is sipur. In other words, in Arabic a book is something you write; in Hebrew it is something you relate.

Why? One explanation suggests itself to me. For the first phase of Jewish history, the Torah, the first five books of the bible, was handed down from generation to generation along with a separate “Oral Torah”, which was essential to interpreting the written version. Not until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70AD and the subsequent dispersal of the Jews was the Oral Torah written down, becoming the Talmud, which enumerates all the Jewish laws. In other words, for the ancient Hebrews, the book-the very first book-was a thing not only written, but also told.

Still, that’s just my speculation. And if that seems too cerebral, an entertaining pastime is to hunt for words that are either missing from a language, or unique to it. We’ve all chuckled over how only Germans could dream up Schadenfreude and how the English can’t say bon appetit because their cooking is so bad. However, I can tell you that not one of the languages I have studied has a word for “accountability”.

I went to many conferences in Latin America where, after a long discourse about corruption and bad governance, someone would inevitably declare, “Necesitamos accountability“. Unfortunately, the plea never produced discernible results.

Addition (March 25th): A friend points out that in the 2005 Barbican production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine” the Qur’an-burning scene was replaced with a general book-burning and various references to the prophet Muhammad were dropped — this for a play that was written over 400 years ago.

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I’m fascinated by the debate over whether Geert Wilders’s film “Fitna” about the “fascist ideology” of Islam should be banned in Holland. The Dutch foreign minister says that the potential risks to Dutch people, especially abroad, make it “irresponsible to broadcast this film.” The Dutch protestant church evidently agrees and the film’s website has been suspended by its ISP.It certainly proves the point Wilders is trying to make: that Islam and free speech are incompatible. But so what? Anyone who’s followed the Danish cartoon scandal knew that already.

Like Theo van Gogh, who was killed in 2004 for his film Submission about violence against women in the Islamic world, and like Pim Fortuyn, who was also killed for his anti-Muslim views, Wilders is a provocateur. Wilders and Fortuyn in particular built their careers by stirring up popular fears about Islam and immigrants. Nobody deserves to be killed for it, of course. But exploiting public feeling on this to make a name for yourself makes you no different from the imams who wilfully whip up Muslim sentiment over cartoons.

Nor can Wilders reasonably claim that he’s defending the principle of free speech. Every Western country curtails free speech and other liberties if they clash with what politicians decide is the national interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch politician who made Submission with van Gogh and then had to flee the country because of death threats, certainly isn’t concerned about the principle of free speech: she believes in closing Muslim schools in the West to stop them teaching children anti-Western values. Her argument is that the only way to maintain a society broadly based on those values is to infringe them when it comes to Muslims.

So it’s a matter of pragmatics, not principle, and the pragmatics are based on whether you believe, as Hirsi Ali does, that Islam is such a threat to the West that it has to be kept at bay. She at least has an excuse, given her own experience of Islam. Wilders is a pure rabble-rouser.

None of which is to say that there isn’t a real dilemma here. Showing the film could set off social unrest and attacks on Europeans abroad. Does that justify banning it? Not showing the film could send a message of capitulation to extremism. Does that outweigh the risks of showing it? There isn’t a simple answer. You have take it case by case. In this case I would ban it, but I can’t say what I would do about Submission, for instance.

This takes me back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a European diplomat in Tel Aviv, just after the Danish cartoon scandal had re-erupted and set off a new wave of anti-European protests across the Middle East. His colleagues in Arab countries were pleading for their foreign ministry to give them some mollifying messages to transmit. The ministry didn’t seem to care.

The disconnect isn’t surprising. From where the diplomats are, it’s in the country’s best interest to maintain good relations with the rest of the world. For the politicians, the country’s own national values and the views of domestic voters are paramount. Which way you lean between defending Western values and soothing the friction with Islamic ones depends on where you’re standing. And these kinds of dilemmas are going to be more and more frequent in the years to come.

A small but important lesson about opinion polls.

Three weeks ago Ha’aretz’s pollster, Camil Fuchs, published a poll showing that 64% of Israelis favour holding talks with Hamas in order to get a ceasefire and release Gilad Shalit, the captured soldier. Today the Tami Steinmetz Centre has issued the latest monthly Peace Index. It says that only 25% of Israelis and just 17% of Israeli Jews favour negotiating with Hamas.

Puzzled? So was I. I reported on the Ha’aretz poll a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Israeli opinion is shifting towards talks with Hamas. So I called Ephraim Yaar of the Steinmetz Centre for an explanation, and it turns out to be simple.

The Ha’aretz poll asked people if they supported talks with Hamas: yes or no. The Steinmetz poll asked them the best way for Israel to deal with the Qassam rockets from Gaza: (1) talks with Hamas; (2) a relatively restrained military response (though Israel’s idea of “restrained”, I should point out, still means several Palestinians killed every week); (3) a bigger but still limited response (ie, like the ground incursion that killed 110 people or so earlier this month); (4) a massive ground operation to reoccupy Gaza; (5) another option of your choice; (6) don’t know.

When you put the question like this, more Israeli Jews support reoccupying Gaza than talking to Hamas (see the table below).

So which poll is “right”? What does the Israeli public actually think about talks with Hamas?

I asked Fuchs. “When you include other options, you’re cognitively giving legitimacy to them,” he says. “What you’re doing is hinting to the person that there are other people who prefer these options.” When there’s only one option on the table, on the other hand, you’re asking them to choose between doing that and doing nothing.

In short, what the two polls taken together say is that if the people could run the government, and had a range of options for dealing with Gaza, more of them would go with a military option. However, if the government says it’s going to talk to Hamas, 64% of the public would support it (though Fuchs thinks the number now would be a little lower than three weeks ago).

Question 1: Should Israel conduct talks with Hamas towards a ceasefire and the release of Gilad Shalit?

Yes	64
No	28
Don’t know	8

Source: Ha’aretz/Dialog

Question 2: What is the best way for Israel to prevent rocket fire on the south?

Option	Israeli Jews	Israelis in general
Talk to Hamas	17.1	25.1
Relative restraint	5.6	6.6
Limited ground ops	32.7	28
Reoccupy Gaza	25.9	21.9
Other	10.8	9.5
Don’t know	7.8	9.0

Source: Tami Steinmetz Centre

It’s official. They’ve failed. A poll today from Khalil Shikaki’s polling outfit, PSR, says that Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh would beat Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas in a Palestinian presidential election.

This is the same Hamas that America, Europe and Israel have been variously boycotting, bombing and generally trying to exterminate for the past two years. The Annapolis peace process was meant to make Abbas popular; the economic stranglehold on Gaza was supposed to make Hamas hated. Failed, failed, failed.

Maybe this is why Olmert has said not once but twice this month that he wants to talk to Syria. Whenever the “Palestinian track” looks like it’s on the rocks, Israel revives the idea of peace talks with the one neighbouring country that it has had almost no actual friction with since 1973.

Could Olmert be serious this time? For a while this week I thought so. This month, Israel’s security services gave the cabinet their annual intelligence estimate. According to the reports, the Mossad and military intelligence agree that if America and Israel offer Syria a good enough deal, it would be ready to cut ties with the people Israel and America don’t like — Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran.

Why this is interesting is because the Mossad used to think otherwise. Perhaps it now believes that after Israel’s mysterious air strike on Syria in September, and after the assassination of Hizbullah’s man Imad Mughniyeh there last month — which Israel denies, but everyone assumes it did — the Syrians are now more scared and readier to talk. Last month Israel seemed to make use of that momentum by warning Damascus that if Hizbullah attacks Israel again, Israel will strike Syria.

In other words, with your eyes half-closed it could look like Israel is threatening Syria with consequences for bad behaviour while offering it a carrot for good behaviour — trying to lower Syria’s price.

And if you really read into the subtle nuances, Olmert seems to be lowering Israel’s price. Alon Liel, an Israeli diplomat who held back-channel talks with a Syrian expat from 2004 to 2006 (and who leaps on any sign of an Israeli-Syrian thaw), pointed out to me that Olmert has floated Syria talks about 10 or 15 times in the past 10 months. Often, he’s added the condition that Syria break its “Axis of Evil” ties first. But the last couple of times he’s said that negotiations could “lead to” Syria’s breaking those ties, a hint that he’s not so concerned about the preconditions any more.

The trouble is, a lot of senior Israelis are sceptical that Syria will simply turn its back on its old allies even if it gets back the Golan Heights and peace with Israel in return.

And outside Israel there’s even more scepticism. Recently various Western high-ups have been saying how disappointed they are with Syria. We heard it from a senior British official who came to Jerusalem last week; Angela Merkel said it today (German); Nicolas Sarkozy said it in December; George Bush says it every Monday and Thursday. Syria policy, Josh Landis says, is “the last red meat for the ‘freedom agenda’ crowd in the Republican Party” and is run by the last remaining neocons in the administration.

And Olmert, even if he wants to, can’t go against the American administration.

So don’t expect the talk of peace with Syria to come true. Take it, instead, as a sign of just how hopeless the Annapolis process has truly become.

“Hello? Is that Gideon Lichfield?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good morning. This is Helena Bonham-Carter.”

Well, not Helena, as it soon became clear, but her mother, Elena, who had got my number from a mutual acquaintance and wanted to know whether Jerusalem was safe to visit after last week’s attack at a yeshiva that killed eight people. For a moment I weighed up whether the blood of the mother of one of the world’s most famous actresses would be on my hands. Then I shrugged and said, “of course it’s safe.”

She and assorted relatives showed up this week for a ceremony at Yad Vashem in honour of her father, Eduardo Propper de Callejón, a Spanish diplomat stationed in Paris who issued an estimated 1,500 Spanish visas in the summer of 1940 to help French Jews escape the approaching Nazis. Having disobeyed foreign ministry instructions, he was demoted and lived out the rest of his career in minor posts, dying in 1972. However, the visa registry from his time in Paris went missing and people whom he had saved proved hard to trace. Not until last year did his children manage to gather enough evidence to satisfy the examiners of Yad Vashem that he merited “Righteous Among the Nations” status.

It was a sweet ceremony in the gardens of Yad Vashem, attended by a flush of aristocratic-looking, besuited Spaniards and various branches of the Propper family (which now lives in five countries, including Israel). It was marred only by the hopeless inability of Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, to pronounce the honoured man’s name; he stumbled and hesitated and finally came out not with “Ca-ye-khon” but “Cal-khe-yon”. This, coming after his speech about the 22,000-odd other “righteous gentiles” honoured at Yad Vashem, left the distinct impression that he was simply too busy to devote time to any of them.