Hitch-22: A Memoir

by Christopher Hitchens

  In those days, though, an adherence to Arafat was at least compatible with the Algiers declaration of the PLO, which Edward had striven to bring about. To remember this agreement now is to recall an almost-vanished moment: the PLO was to renounce the clauses in its charter which either called for the demolition of the Israeli state or suggested that Jews had no place in Palestine to begin with. At Algiers, Edward’s reasoning prevailed and the “Left-rejectionist” alliance, of George Habash and Nayef Hawatmeh, after stormy and emotional debate, lost. Morally, I felt that this deserved more praise than it received: Edward and those others who had left the land of pre-1947 Israel now in effect gave up their ancestral claim to it, in order that the generations dispossessed or expelled or occupied after 1967 could have a chance to build a state of their own in at least a portion of “the land.” This self-denying renunciation had a quality of nobility to it.

  But in those days the Palestinian “rejectionists” were secularists and leftists. Here was another moment, then, when one was witnessing the death of a movement rather than the birth of one (also, the birth of a movement based on death). There came a day I can’t forget when I was in Jerusalem with my old comrade Professor Israel Shahak. This honest and learned old man, a survivor of the ghettos of Poland and the camp at Bergen-Belsen, had immigrated to Israel after the war and later become the loudest individual voice for Palestinian rights and the most deadly critic of the Torah-based land-thieves and vigilantes. Shahak it was who had introduced me to the life-giving work of Benedict (formerly Baruch, until he was excommunicated and anathematized) Spinoza. One of the great unacknowledged moral critics of our time, Shahak did not save his withering reproaches only for the Zionists. I wish I could replicate his warm Mitteleuropa gutturals on the page:

  Christopher, you have maybe followed this new debate in Gaza between forces of the Hamas and of Islamic Jihad? You have not? Then I must tell you: it will much repay your interest.

  Here was the ominously emergent great subject (we are speaking of the late 1980s and early 1990s). The “Islamic Jihad” forces in Gaza were saying in their propaganda that the whole of Spain, and not just Andalusia, was land stolen from Islam and that its immediate return should be demanded. The Hamas strategists were responding that, full as the Palestinian plate currently was, this might not be the moment to call for the Islamization of the entire Iberian peninsula. Perhaps for now, just the return of Andalusia would do. However, and almost as if not to be outdone, the Hamas website did feature the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic fabrication originally perpetrated by the Christian-Orthodox right wing in Russia which (because a forgery after all is at least a false copy of a true bill) it is wrong to describe even as a forgery. At around the same time, my friend Musa Budeiri, a professor at Birzeit University on the West Bank, told me that religious Muslim students were coming to him and announcing that they would no longer be studying for the humanities course that he taught because it required that they take instruction in Darwin…

  As I later found on revisiting Gaza, I was being given by Shahak and Budeiri a premonitory glimpse of the new form that paranoid militant Islam was beginning to adopt. Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of “Caliphate” imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight’s move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had “really” been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn’t work, well, hadn’t the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn’t automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel’s unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews?

  I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say “unsettling”—precedent). The usual national-security “hawks,” like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward’s apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara (who incidentally told me that Israel Shahak had been the best and the kindest professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he had studied) was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

  There came an awful day when I picked up the phone and knew at once, as one does with some old friends even before they speak, that it was Edward. He sounded as if he were calling from the bottom of a well. I still thank my stars that I didn’t say what I nearly said, because the good professor’s phone pals were used to cheering or teasing him out of bouts of pessimism and insecurity when he would sometimes say ridiculous things like: “I hope you don’t mind being disturbed by some mere wog and upstart.” The remedy for this was not to indulge it but to reply with bracing and satirical stuff which would soon get the gurgling laugh back into his throat. But I’m glad I didn’t say, “What, Edward, splashing about again in the waters of self-pity?” because this time he was calling to tell me that he had contracted a rare strain of leukemia. Not at all untypically, he used the occasion to remind me that it was very important always to make and keep regular appointments with one’s physician.

  The rather striking thing was that, from then on, he actually became much less sorry for himself. He would often tell quite stoically of soul-devouring doses of “chemo”—he eventually put himself in the hands of some very advanced physicians at Long Island Jewish Hospital—and there were days when it was upsetting to see him so thin, as well as times when it seemed unnatural to see such an elegant man become so bloated. One evening he asked me if it might be a good scheme to talk to Susan Sontag about the metaphors of illness on which she had herself become so toughened an expert. I thought definitely yes, if only because they would have so much else to discuss. I know they did have the dinner but the only “metaphor” that I ever distilled or derived from Edward’s eventually lethal sickness was this. Very soon after he found that he was ill, he resigned his position on the Palestine National Council, and telephoned me quite happily to tell me so. It was almost as if the intimation of mortality had emancipated him from the everyday requirements of party-mindedness and tribal loyalty. (I have sometimes noticed in other people that a clear-eyed sense of impending extinction can have a paradoxically liberating effect, as in: at least I don’t have to do that anym
ore.)

  Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as “the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.” But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward’s moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about “The Chairman” was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father’s Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. “The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it’s such a great idea, why isn’t Said signing off on it?” When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. “The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.” Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?

  I did my best even so to get a hearing for Edward’s reservations, and at his request I even wrote an uninspired introduction to his little anti-Oslo book Peace and Its Discontents, but my heart was not quite in it. The second so-called Palestinian intifadah, organized or incited in response to one of Ariel Sharon’s staged provocations at the Al Aqsa mosque, reeked to me of racist and religious demagogy and of that dull, sinister “sacrificial” incantation that has since become so nauseating on a world scale.

  Worse than that, in retrospect it cheapened and degraded the previous Palestinian appeals for solidarity. If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it’s already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in “Judaea and Samaria,” let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it’s flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable “solution.” There’s that word again… *

  If a difference of principle goes undiscussed for any length of time, it will start to compromise and undermine the integrity of a friendship. I was aware by 2001 that some of our conversations had become just very slightly reserved, and that we were sticking to “safe” topics. The political distance between us had widened much faster than our personal relations would yet have shown: I had urged The Nation to publish Kanan Makiya’s work on the Saddam Hussein regime, and when Edward rang the editors to complain, he was at first quite unaware that it had been my idea. His immediate riposte was vulgar in the extreme, containing the innuendo that Kanan was a paid agent, even a traitor.** Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of “ending” the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication.

  I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward’s health had anything to do with this, and I don’t say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him “on his deathbed.” He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of “Orientalism” in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward’s revised edition, I decided I’d suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.

  Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as “racist.” The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice… I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that’s “it” as it were. I didn’t say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. “Racist” is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn’t go to, and wasn’t invited to, his funeral.

  Here is something of what I feel about friendship, and about the way in which it is a potent symbol of other things. In Martin Amis’s enviably written memoir Experience, in the pages of which I am proud to appear several times, there is an episode about which people still interrogate me. Martin offers a slightly oblique and esoteric account of a trip on which he took me in 1989, to visit Saul Bellow in Vermont. On our buddy-movie drive up there from Cape Cod—he’s almost word-perfect about this bit—he made it clear that I wasn’t to drag the conversation toward anything political, let alone left-wing, let alone anything to do with Israel. (“No sinister balls,” which was our colloquialism for a certain kind of too-easy leftism.) I knew I was being greatly honored by the invitation, not just because it was a huge distinction to meet Bellow but because, second only to an introduction to his father, it was the highest such gift that Martin could bestow. I needed no telling that I should seize the opportunity to do more listening than talking.

  And yet it’s true, as he reports, that by the end of dinner nobody could meet anyone else’s eye and his own foot had become lamed and tired by its under-the-table collisions with my shins. How could this be? Now comes the chance for my own version of Rashomon.

  Bellow had greeted us and given us drinks, and if I say so myself I had justified Martin’s confidence during the predinner stage. Our host made an inquiry about Angus Wilson to which I happened to know the answer, and also a question about his own past with Whittaker Chambers to which I could at least suggest a hypothetical solution.* Bellow in turn had read to us from some of his old writi
ng about, and correspondence with, poor, mad, smashed John Berryman. Everything was shaping well enough. But right on the wicker table in the room where we were chatting, there lay something that was as potentially hackneyed in its menace as Anton Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece. If it’s there in the first act, in other words, the plain intention is that it will be fired before the curtain comes down. All you must do is wait. It was the only piece of printed matter in view, and it was the latest edition of Commentary magazine, and its bannered cover-story headline was: “Edward Said: Professor of Terror.”

  I hadn’t completely wasted my time in dubious battle at New York and Washington and Chicago dinner parties, and I thought I knew when to raise my weary old dukes and when to keep them in my lap, but it was slightly nerve-straining to have to wonder in advance when and how this loaded barrel would be discharged. Dinner was by turns genial and sparkling, but the point came where Bellow made a sudden observation about anti-Zionism and then got up to fetch the magazine and underline his point. Indeed, I think he’d previously underlined some passages of the article as well. It was, even when tested against the depraved standard of polemic that had been set by Norman Podhoretz’s editorship, a very coarse attack on Edward. I sat through Bellow’s disgusted summary for a while until it calmly came to me that I couldn’t say nothing. Conceivably, if Martin had not been there, I might have held my peace. But then, if he hadn’t been there, neither would I have been. No, what I mean is that Bellow didn’t know that I was a close friend of Edward’s. But Martin did. Thus, even though I knew he wanted me to stay off anything controversial, I couldn’t allow him to see me sitting there complicitly while an absent friend was being defamed. For all he knew, if the company was sufficiently illustrious, I might even let the cock crow for him. That would surely never do. So I said what I felt I ought to say—it wasn’t that much, but it was more than enough—and the carefully planned and delightfully executed evening of my very dearest friend was straightaway ruined. He suffered more agony than he needed to, because Bellow as an old former Trotskyist and Chicago streetfighter was used to much warmer work and hardly took offense at all. He later sent me a warm letter about my introduction to a new edition of Augie March.