The Other Israel

An editorial last month in the English-language Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz commented on Israeli reaction to a French parliamentary vote giving the Armenian genocide the same status as the Holocaust, to the extent of making denial of the atrocity a criminal offence.

Armenians have long pleaded for recognition of the 1915 slaughter of a million and a half by Turkish troops as a crime against humanity. In response, Turkish governments have insisted that the allegation is a foul libel and determined its foreign relations according to other States’ attitude on the issue.
Relations with Turkey have been high on Israel’s foreign policy agenda. Turkey is the most populous country in the region, the only majority-Muslim member of NATO, and an ally of the United States. Plus, there’s the Zionist claim that the Holocaust gives Israel a unique moral status, entitling it to see any condemnation of its treatment of the Palestinians as synonymous with hatred of Jews.
For these reasons, Israel has traditionally denied the Armenian genocide.
The Ha’aretz editorial focused on a shift in the Israeli attitude in response to the reaction of the Turkish government to the May 2010 killing of nine Turkish citizens by Israeli commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara, part of the Gaza flotilla, in the Mediterranean. Israeli politicians, including members of the cabinet, now urged that Israel, too, should declare it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide.
Said Ha’aretz: “Israel had plenty of opportunities to demonstrate its solidarity with the Armenian people when Jerusalem-Ankara relations were good. But at the time, Israel chose moral silence, and even used its friends in the US Congress to keep it from recognising the Armenian genocide.
“Israel, one of the last countries in the world to occupy another nation and to deny the memory of the Palestinian Nakba [the ‘Disaster’] cannot wrap itself in the flag of morality now, while the embers of political account-settling burn beneath it. No special Knesset deliberations are needed in order to teach the Armenian genocide – or the Nakba – in Israel’s schools; the education minister has the authority to make these decisions without creating a circus of hollow morality.
“The approximately 1.5 million Armenians who were murdered or driven out in death marches in 1915 deserve international recognition of the holocaust they suffered... But for Israel to make this recognition at a time that is politically convenient to it, as part of a tit-for-tat and as a means to provoke Turkey, is light years away from the recognition the Armenian people deserve.”
The use of the word “holocaust” there is highly significant in itself.
We can see the Middle East, not inaccurately, as a bubbling sea of poisonous hatreds, with Israel’s toxic ferocity towards its neighbours as the main source of rancid gunk. But it isn’t that simple and there is another side to Israel.
 
A young relative was given a puppy for Xmas which has been pissing and shitting and tripping up everybody in the house ever since. The parents who purchased the mutt now curse their stupidity. But their own fault. They had ignored my annual reminder that while Jesus is only for Xmas, a puppy is for life.
 
You must remember this, A kiss is just a kiss. Or not.
I once stumbled turning a corner in the Tate in London and, reaching out to steady myself, placed a firm palm on the thigh of the woman entwined forever with her lover in Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’. Agog and aghast, I stood still-as-marble for lengthy seconds while 50 people accusingly stared.
Rodin’s depiction of the kiss is widely regarded as the perfect image of passionate love.
But is any more affecting or alluring or more exquisitely composed than Joshua Mann’s photograph of Marissa Gaeta and Citlalic Snell embracing in the rain at Virginia Beach in Vermont on December 22 just gone?
Petty Officer Gaeta had won a lottery for the first on-shore kiss of any crew member when the USS Oak Hill docked after 80 days at sea. This was the breakthrough same-sex first kiss following the end of the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Snell, too, is a naval officer, who had been on leave from her guided missile destroyer, the USS Bainbridge.
The picture captures the joyous rapture of reunited love, the fitted-togetherness of a couple just made for one another. At the risk of seeming risible, I think it’s as perfect an image as Rodin’s.
The lifting of the ban on same-sex relationships, plus the fact that there are now 200,000 women in the US military, obviously represents an advance towards gender equality. But it’s an advance that many will, at the least, feel conflicted about.
Then again, 63% of women in the US military believe that the Iraq war was not worth fighting. 54% believe the same about Afghanistan. These are much higher figures than for their male colleagues. The more women, the less warlike the military?
At any rate, nobody who kisses like that can have a hard heart. So I choose to think.
 
Date for Dublin diaries: Martin Smith, secretary of Love Music, Hate Racism across the water, author of books on Coltrane and Sinatra, speaking at the Clifton Court Hotel at 8pm January 15 on: “Music and the struggle for black freedom in the US”.