Middle East
Death of a poet
Martin Short
On their raid into Beirut last week the Israelis stopped to fire ten or twelve shots into the mouth and jaw of one of their victims. This was more than just the gleeful act of vengeance it seems, for the man they did it to, Kamal Nasser, was not a gunman or a leader of gunmen. He was the spokesman for Al Fatah, the voice of the idea of Palestine. His broadcasts rammed home to his dispossessed fellow countrymen the belief that they had rights, that they could respect themselve: and that there were some people around who were going to get them back to their homeland.
A man of such wit, style and poetry must be far more infuriating for the Israelis than mere Kalashnikov-toting guerrillas. It is, of course, the very idea of Palestine which ultimately they have to assassinate. They can always kill ill-organised, freelance groups of Arab gunmen, but the notion of a Palestinian people and an articulated Palestinian consciousness is in the long term far more worrying for Israel. It is not just the ghost of Banquo at the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Feast. In the Middle East the pen is not mightier than the sword — otherwise the Arabs would have won this conflict a long time ago — but Kamal Nasser, with all his swaggering bravura, has probably stoked up more trouble for Israel than all the arms in Arabia. His death should be seen as part of a pattern which includes last year's assassination of the PFLP ideologist, Ghassan Khanafani, and the news this Monday that the Israelis have arrested the editors of an Arab Jerusalem newspaper for a black-edged issue in mourning for the Beirut dead, which had not been submitted first to the Military Censor. Dangerous things, ideas.
The other thought provoked by Kamal Nasser's death is that he was a Christian, indeed an Anglican. The Arab cause in this ever more sickening Middle East conflict is often portrayed in the West as an aberration of the Moslem mind — to which no Christian could possibly subscribe — just the•wild sla verings of some schizophrenic Bedouin visionary. Such a character does exist in the patchwork of Arab politics, but for many centuries the Palestinians have been blessed, or cursed, by the missionary zeal of the West. And whether they are Latin Catholic, Greek Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran or Church of England, their experience and opinions of the conflict scarcely differ from those of their Moslem countryside.
So this son of Canterbury, Kamal Nasser, took up with the Palestine Liberation Organisation soon after the Israeli occupation of his home town in 1967. He was soon kicked over the Jordan, as was his brother-in-law — an Anglican priest but not a member of the PLO — who had spoken out robustly from the pulpit against the Israeli invader. And what have such men felt about the stance of their church princes on the Middle East conflict? Dismay and disillusion. The sight of the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, appearing to support terrorism in Southern Africa, while condemning it in the Palestinian arena, must have struck not only Arabs as an example of' double-think, even if the man genuinely sees any difference in the conflicts. More conscious, perhaps, of the long overdue need for reconciliation between Christians and Jews in Great Britain than of the feelings and emotions' of his lost sheep abroad, Ramsay has shown little sign that he even knows there are any Arab Anglicans. Last September he conducted an impressive service for the Israeli victims of the Munich affair.
Let us hope he manages now to say a tiny prayer for the soul of Kamal Butros Nasser.
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