I DON'T WANT TO GO TO ISRAEL

Mark Steyn on the World
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Tuesday, 01 June 2010

From the June 7, 2010 issue of National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/

This Happy Warrior column was written before yesterday's news about the Gaza flotilla. I'm on the Continent at the moment, and, not having seen a full-court anti-Israel feeding frenzy in a couple of years, was startled by the naked hostility of the coverage. I think the headline of this Jonathan Kay column sums it up. In the European media, the loathing of the Jewish state is palpable - and alarming in its implications. Anyway, here's what I had to say in National Review:

“It is after considerable contemplation,” began the pop star Elvis Costello, sounding remarkably like Queen Victoria, “that I have lately arrived at the decision that I must withdraw from the two performances scheduled in Israel on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.”

Any particular reason?

“There are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung.”

Ah.

And as Mr Costello concluded: “I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel.”

So that’s that. Elvis has left the building, permanently.

In a Nov. 6, 2008 file photo singer Elvis Costello is photographed in New York. Costello is canceling two summer 2010 concerts in Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians.
(AP Photo/Jim Cooper/file)

I felt rather saddened by the news. It’s some years since I’ve seen the old rocker, but I enjoyed the conversation immensely: We discoursed on Sinatra concept albums, Vic Damone, the late BBC radio host Benny Green… Elvis Costello’s eclecticism-for-the-sake-of-eclecticism can get a little wearying (and didn’t do his wife Diana Krall many favors on her post-wedding album), but, on much of the stuff I dig, he knew whereof he spoke. Physically, he reminded me a bit of my old friend Lionel Bart, the East End Jew who wrote Oliver! But I guess he’s not. And it’s always sobering when someone you assume you’ve got a lot in common with turns out, in the most basic sense, to see the world entirely differently.

That somewhat banal thought used to occur to me whenever I’d be in a “moderate” Muslim state chatting up some westernized Arab hottie and, just at the point at which I’d be thinking we were getting along gangbusters, she’d say something utterly nutty, invariably involving Jews. These days, the thought is as likely to occur at London dinner parties. There’s no “incursion” or “disproportionate response” by Israel that prompted Elvis’ divestment from the Zionist Entity: These days, it’s just business (or lack of it) as usual. I wouldn’t say I exactly avoid the topic in English or French drawing rooms, and if it does come up I robustly defend Israel and eviscerate Palestinian “nationalism”. But no minds are changed – and these days the talk is less of the “occupied territories” and more of how the very creation of the Jewish state was a dreadful mistake. Once upon a time, a pro-Palestinian European would reluctantly concede the point if you brought up the Arabs’ refusal to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”. No more. Now Israel’s “right to exist” has as few takers among Europe’s “intellectual” class as it does on the Hamas executive board.

On the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state’s founding, a large number of British “Jews” - I use the term loosely (many of them would barely have qualified under the expansive definitions of Nuremberg) but their claim to the faith was felt to give them a special authority – wrote to The Guardian to say that they could not “celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people”. The most eminent signatory, aside from Harold Pinter, was Stephen Fry, best known to Americans as valet to Hugh Laurie in TV’s “Jeeves & Wooster” but a man of many other talents. Many a Saturday morning, years ago, I sat opposite him on a larky BBC show called “Loose Ends”. When I was flailing badly on a topical comedy quiz, he expertly rescued me with a deft penis joke.

But, among the British and European artistic community, the fetishization of the Palestinians and the consequent obsession with Israeli iniquity is indestructible - even as millions are murdered in the Congo, and hundreds of thousands in Darfur, and (less genocidally) as the High Administrative Court in Cairo contemplates stripping Egyptian men of their citizens for the crime of marrying Israeli women. At one level, the rampant zionhass is a mere reflection of demographic reality – what’s left of European Jewry is a community in steep decline; Muslims, on the other hand, are the Continent’s fastest growing population. But demographic reality is easier to accept dressed as a moral cause, and so the heirs to those western artists who two generations ago enthusiastically embraced the new Jewish state now boycott it and support its dismantling. I’m told that in Dutch grade schools The Diary Of Anne Frank can no longer be performed because certain, ahem, immigrant communities root for the Nazis. But I don’t think you could produce The Diary Of Anne Frank in the West End, either. Nor Fiddler On The Roof. No takers. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

In “Palestine”, only one side lives under continuous threat of extermination – now upgraded, in the face of western passivity, into nuclear extermination. The means change but not the desired end. And the ease with which the principal expression of contemporary Jewish identity has been delegitimized in the salons of the west is both pathetic, and awfully familiar. When I read the announcement by Elvis Costello, an old line from his fellow songwriter Alan Jay Lerner (whom I mentioned here a few weeks ago) sprang to mind. As Hitler's favorite composer, Franz Lehar was untouchable, but his Jewish colleagues weren’t so lucky. His librettist, Franz Lohner-Beda, died in a concentration camp in 1942, the same year Lehar conducted a production of their operetta The Land Of Smiles. To the end, Lohner-Beda expected his old friend to intercede, but he never did. “To this day,” said Alan Lerner, “when I am transported by the music of Franz Lehar, my glass of champagne is rimmed with aloes” – a fine operetta image.

I was never exactly “transported” by the music of Elvis Costello. But my glass of champagne is rimmed with aloes.