The abuse of power
From The Rt Hon. the Lord Gilmour of Craigmillar Sir: The owner of hundreds of publications, Conrad Black is a powerful man more accustomed to obedience than criticism. So I was well aware that he would resent my reminding your readers that he had wrecked 'once a great paper' by turning the Jerusalem Post, in the words of the late Chaim Bennant, into 'one of the most rabid Jewish publications in the English language'. I did not expect, however, that his response to my letter would be quite so ill-informed, so intellectually lowlevel, and so scurrilously defamatory that, if it had been written by anybody other than their proprietor, no editor of the Telegraph Group would have dreamt of printing it. (Mr Black also abuses his position as proprietor by inserting an arrogant attempted reply underneath the letter of William Dalrymple, Piers Paul Read and AN. Wilson instead of, in the proper and decent way, sending a letter for publication the following week.) Mr Black has now accused Taki of being 'almost worthy of Goebbels' and me of being a `Jew baiter'. Shades of Julius Streicher, Hitler's Stormtroopers and Crystal Night! In fact, of course, if anybody is like Dr Goebbels, it is Conrad Black with his grotesque allegations against Taki and myself — except, of course, that the Herr Doktor, being a more intelligent man than Black, would have been ashamed to write anything so stupid.
Black's attempt to show that the proIsraeli lobby in the United States is not immensely powerful is absurd enough to make one wonder if it was intended seriously. Nobody has suggested that most of the media in America are 'controlled by people who think of themselves as Jews', but, according to Mr Black, that 'and the myth of the invincible [his word — nobody else's] Israeli lobby in Washington are merely lies agreed upon by Arab militants and their sympathisers to explain the continued existence of Israel'.
Well away from Mr Black's fantasy world, however, a number of American presidents and secretaries of state, including Truman, Dulles, Nixon and Reagan, as well as many other people, have complained at one time or another of the strength of the Israeli
lobby. For example, John Foster Dulles said in 1957: 'I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy [in the Middle East] not approved by' the Israeli lobby. And Richard Nixon, not one of my heroes but probably one of Mr Black's, complained of 'the unyielding and shortsighted pro-Israeli attitude in . . . Congress, the media and in intellectual and cultural circles. . . . "Many,' he added, 'saw the corollary of not being pro-Israel as being anti-Israeli, or even anti-Semitic.' (He might have had Conrad Black in mind.) Hence, if Mr Black is right, Dulles and Nixon and the other American leaders were either 'liars' themselves or the unwitting dupes of 'Arab militants' — neither of which seems very likely. And nobody, with the possible exception of Mr and Mrs Black, can believe that the pro-Israeli lobby is weaker now than it was 20 or 40 years ago. Indeed, on the very day that Mr Black published his diatribe. Ha'aretz, a very civilised Israeli newspaper — it is not owned by Black — pointed out that the most powerful foreign-issue lobby in Washington is the Israeli.
Conrad Black verges no nearer sense or truth in his contentions that 'the Palestinians are squarely to blame for the present impasse' and 'the present violence is the exclusive responsibility of the Palestinians'. Only somebody with Mr Black's 'Israel right or wrong' approach could believe anything quite so implausible. It ignores, among other things, the burdens and injustices of a seemingly interminable, brutal and ruthless occupation, Mr Sharon's visit to the Haram al Sharif, the Israeli army's largely indiscriminate shooting of Palestinian children, Israel's malicious destruction of hundreds of Palestinian olive trees, what Edward Said has called her 'pure punitive sadism', and the Israeli use of collective punishments, assassination and overwhelming force.
The Palestinians have seen Israel flout international law with impunity. They have experienced Israelis continually stealing their land in order to plant their illegal apartheid colonies, and they have seen that process speeded up, not ended, since the Oslo agreement of 1993 — the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank has nearly doubled since Oslo. How does Mr Black defend such blatant ill faith? How, too, does he defend an Israeli settler on the West Bank being given eight times as much water as a Palestinian to whom the water rightfully belongs? Does he really believe that most of those illegal Israeli settlers — many of them ranting ideologues and vigilantes — should be allowed to remain, splitting the West Bank into three separate entities, with settlers keeping the best land and most of the water? That would have been the result of Mr Barak's allegedly generous offer — assurning of course that he had abided by its terms; he was not noted for keeping his word.
As these questions cannot be answered by Mr Black and his fellow propagandists for Israel, they attempt to silence those who criticise Israel's behaviour by raising the canard of anti-Semitism, a device which has been triumphantly successful in the United States: it has made unthinking support of Israel's policies the reigning orthodoxy and has prevented the Palestinian or Arab case from being properly heard. But that disreputable strategy will not work over here. Too many people know the truth. In this country Mr Black's -McCarthyite' attempt to intimidate people from telling the truth by throwing around palpably false allegations of anti-Semitism is seen to be both silly and contemptible.
As William Dalrymple, Piers Paul Read and A.N. Wilson have already pointed out, both Telegraphs have been prevented from providing serious coverage of 'Israel's deadly methods of silencing Palestinian dissent', while acres of space have been provided for the pro-Israeli outpourings of Mrs Conrad Black. Sadly, Mr Black is now evidently intent on wrecking The Spectator as he wrecked the Jerusalem Post; he is turning 'once a great paper' into an engine of rabid Black propaganda and into the transmitter, in Tim Llewellyn's words, of its proprietor's 'oafish personal abuse'.
Ian Gilmour
House of Lords, London SW1
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