Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  Cardinal Carter had me to dinner with the visiting Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in 1990 at his home. Only the three of us and Cardinal Carter’s chancellor were present. Cardinal Ratzinger lamented “the slow suicide of Europe:” its population was aging and shrinking, and the unborn were being partly replaced with unassimilable immigrants. He thought that Europe would awaken from its torpor, but that there were difficult days ahead. Like other cardinals of my acquaintance (including our host), he was a far-sighted judge of important secular matters.

  IT WASN’T EASY TO MAKE these strategic points in serious circles in the United States. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was my great ally in Washington, urging that the U.S. compete with Europe for intimacy with Britain, invite the U.K. into the North American Free Trade Area, and not just wave Britain into the arms of the Franco-Germans. We testified together at the U.S. International Commerce Commission in 2002 that the United Kingdom should be invited to join the renamed and generally expanded North American Free Trade Area.

  The United States, through much of the Cold War and for a time after, tried to propel Britain by the scruff of the neck and the small of the back into Europe, understandably, to make better Cold Warriors of the Europeans. By sheer momentum, the U.S. continued to advocate this policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, oblivious of the fact that this was not in the U.S. national interest. The well-regarded U.S. ambassador in London, Raymond Seitz (who became a Telegraph plc director when he retired and will, unfortunately, re-enter this narrative), told me Britain should join Europe “to keep German troops out of Paris.” I suggested he was over-reacting.

  As with Ireland, I found myself refereeing internecine disputes between our editors. Max thought Europe essentially a good thing to be furthered, so long as it didn’t lead to higher taxes or more belligerent trade unions. Max was not very contemplative, enjoyed holidays in Italy, and was generally able to rely on his editorial entourage and his friendship with Douglas Hurd to reassure himself that the concerns of the skeptics were ill-founded. Charles feared the worst of the Brussels Euro-government and was frequently encouraged in this by Euro-spokespeople, who spewed out the thousands of insane directives purporting to regulate everything from lavatory manners in European boarding houses to the size of bananas and condoms.

  The head of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, formerly France’s socialist finance minister, poured gasoline on the fire by telling British labour audiences that whatever Margaret Thatcher had taken from them, Europe would restore. Improving relations between the European nationalities is a great and admirable development, but the official agents of it are often hard to take seriously. This was well before Europe’s current problems began to hemorrhage.

  THE TELEGRAPH AND ITS READERS were naturally very much involved with European politics. Germany remained the most formidable power, and through my friend George (Lord) Weidenfeld, German chancellor Helmut Kohl invited me several times to dinner with him in the Kanzlerbungalow, the quaint Bauhaus glass house on the east bank of the Rhine where the chancellor lived in Bonn.

  Kohl was very preoccupied with the Battle of Verdun, where several family members died in both World Wars. From my days as a teenaged summer tour guide in and around Paris, I was able to go verbally over the ground with him, from the Douaumont Fort, then the largest in the world, where Charles de Gaulle was taken prisoner when wounded, on March 1, 1915, to the monument to André Maginot, to the Ossuary, where there are the remains of 180,000 French combat dead.

  Kohl allowed that it had been one of the great frustrations of his career that he had made so little headway with Thatcher in alleviating her anti-German attitudes. (I have often thought that one of the major strategic errors of the German air war was bombing Grantham, Lincolnshire, where Margaret Thatcher was growing up. She has spoken of it angrily for more than sixty years since.)

  A stroll around the forest of building cranes of Berlin induced the feelings that disquiet Helmut Kohl. There is something of the national teenager in the unfocused muscularity of great and proximate monuments of the official architecture of successive failed regimes in Germany’s tortured history, in layers like those of a tree from Prussian times to the fall of the Wall. There is great strength and attractiveness, and even occasionally charm, but also the uneasy feeling of awkwardness and lack of discernment and judgment. Frederick the Great’s Brandenburg Gate, Bismarck’s Reichstag, soon the Hohenzollerns’ restored schloss, remnants of the Third Reich including Hitler’s sealed bunker, and Stalin’s gigantic East German embassy are all within a few hundred yards of each other. Kohl feared these lacunae and developed a policy of Euro-federalism as an antidote. I am convinced he sincerely meant “a European Germany, not a German Europe.”

  Charles Moore, our foreign editor, and our Berlin correspondent and I visited Kohl’s successor, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The government had moved from Bonn to Berlin. The Brobdingnagian new chancellery was not ready, so we visited Schröder in his temporary office, formerly occupied by Ulbricht and Honecker, in a Stalinist Socialist Realist building in East Berlin. With wooden floors and stained-glass windows and Spartan furniture, it looked more like the refectory of an underfunded religious order than the office of the leader of one of the world’s greatest nations. Where Kohl felt passionately the dangerous currents of German history, Schröder seemed to me a modified Bill Clinton; none of the policy wonk but all of the good-time Charlie with a twinkle in his eye.

  The two issues that caused me the greatest controversy were my views on Israel and America. These issues were never a formal part of my later troubles, but the intensity of antagonism among much of the British media and chattering classes levelled against Israel and America was notable – and noted by American commentators in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. I was not on the acceptable side of the street as far as these two matters were perceived in London society, politics, or the media. When my troubles began, it was payback time, reflected in the heightened hostility of much of the U.K. press. This hostility was eagerly picked up by both the Canadian press and Murdoch’s New York Post, though neither shared the anti-Israeli sentiment. But the repetition of these damaging stories made dampening Hollinger’s corporate strife that much harder. This steady stream of stories in New York, London, and Toronto, accompanied by the most irritating photos or cartoons, contributed to a confected atmosphere of received contempt for us that grew like Topsy and held that we were crooks, and nasty self-important crooks at that. This had to be grappled with sometimes, to prevent it from becoming accepted conventional wisdom.

  IT WAS ALLEGED THAT UNDER the saturnine Hebraic influence of Barbara, I was a Zionist propagandist. There is no truth to any of this. Barbara is unwaveringly proud of her Jewish heritage but not a particularly peppy Zionist, and finds the State of Israel difficult and often unreasonable. She believes that, having been established, it should not fail, and particularly not at the hands of those who would cheerfully kill all the Jews. Nor does she understand why Israel should be held accountable for a level of behaviour that no other country in the world – least of all its neighbours – must meet. I share her view and did long before we were together.

  The antagonism toward Israel in the U.K. and much of Europe was and remains intense. In December 2002, we held a dinner at our home in London for then Spectator editor Boris Johnson, after his election to parliament as Michael Heseltine’s successor in Henley. The guest list came from Boris, and among those he invited was the French ambassador, Daniel Bernard, whom I knew quite cordially. He was a protegé of Chirac’s and a fairly integral Gaullist in his foreign policy view – one that included championing Quebec’s independence, which he now privately acknowledged was a lost cause, and truckling to the Arabs while disparaging Israel.

  Bernard maintained the customary Gaullist facade for his position by claiming to be opposed to anti-Semitism and not to be poorly disposed to the Uni
ted States, except when that country was manifestly in error, which is at practically all times when it is not engaged in assisting France. He spent most of his energies, as the Quai d’Orsay has since de Gaulle’s return to office in 1958, harassing and obstructing the elaboration of American foreign policy. Bernard was rather accessible to the Arab interpretation of Middle East peace issues.

  He and I were seated at the same table, and at one point he volunteered that most of the problems of the world were now the fault of “that shitty little country Israel.” I expressed some incredulity and asked in French if I had heard him correctly. He assured me that I had and repeated the same words in French, adopting “shitty” as an anglophone might adopt coup d’état or savoir faire. I mentioned the episode to Barbara, who was writing a column on the acceptability of anti-Semitism in polite society. Barbara referred to this incident and to some other social utterances of the same general tenor in her column but carefully wrote only of “the ambassador of a prominent EU country.” Other newspapers began phoning around, and Bernard’s staff unwisely put their hand up and admitted that their man was the author of the remark. The French embassy then began the casuistical process of redefining the phrase, claiming that the ambassador meant only to say that “Israel was a small but not undistinguished country.” This was enough for someone to put a sign on one of the editorial lavatory doors at the Telegraph: “A place for the Performance of Small but not Undistinguished Activities.”

  A considerable furor ensued throughout Europe. Some suggested that Barbara had breached etiquette by printing remarks made at a private dinner at her home. Many were outraged at the ambassador’s inelegant and undiplomatic remarks, and many were also amazed that a prominent French ambassador would be so stupid as to confess to such comments. Bernard wrote the Telegraph a letter for publication claiming that he had said nothing of the kind. I told the editor that he should advise the ambassador that we would run the letter but would put beside it a refutation by the other people at the table, and that he might prefer something that would improve appearances somewhat. He did, and wrote a tasteful and not evidently mendacious letter that we printed without comment. I called upon him and we agreed that the incident was now closed. He was soon transferred to Algiers, far from a promotion, and unfortunately died prematurely a couple of years later.

  I don’t find that anti-Semitism in Britain goes much beyond people looking down their noses at “Jew” matters and the occasional act of vandalism by Muslim thugs or non-sectarian skinheads. But there is room for a less quiescent interpretation, and those moments sometimes occurred in the pages of the Spectator. My friend Taki Theodoracopulos, one of my staunchest supporters in my recent problems, wrote a piece in early 2001 that effectively stated that the United States Air Force was commanded by the Mossad in the Israeli interest and that the Israeli Defence Forces, as a matter of blood sport, impaled and otherwise killed Palestinian youth. I came home to find Barbara in tears over the piece. She found the level of Jew-baiting in London perfectly tolerable, but to see it in one of our own publications written by a man she both liked and admired hurt her deeply.

  Tears or not, the piece was too much for me. I took recourse to the standard practice in rebutting anti-Semitism since the time of Dreyfus and Zola, with a J’accuse response. I advised Boris Johnson that it was on its way, catching him on a Saturday evening on his cellphone, as he explained, at the top of the “hardest, steepest piste in Gstaad, staring into the face of death.” Shortly after the fracas with Taki, Piers Paul Read, A.N. Wilson, and William Dalrymple, three competent writers of high position and reputation in British journalism, and Charlie Glass, a former correspondent and hostage in Beirut who fell in love with his guards and captors, wrote a letter to the Spectator decrying my ownership of the Jerusalem Post and comparing the newspaper unfavourably to the Jerusalem Report, which in fact we also owned. Through leaks from their chums at the Spectator they learned of their error and tried to withdraw their letter. But I would not allow it to be withdrawn. (I had banned Dalrymple for a time from the Telegraph after he published a fictitious account of Israeli desecration of Christian religious sites.) The fierce firefight that bubbled on in the pages of the Spectator was a moderately entertaining read.

  THE OSLO ACCORDS IN 1994 opened up the fissures within our newspapers, especially the Jerusalem Post, over the Mid-East peace process. The accords committed Israel to handing over Gaza and, in sequence, most of the West Bank, and committed the Palestinians to ending terrorism, assisting the Israelis in rounding up designated terrorists, expunging the anti-Israel clauses from the Palestine National Charter, and maintaining a police force of twenty-eight thousand lightly armed officers. Yasser Arafat never honoured any of this. Instead, he developed a heavily armed, quasi-military police force of forty thousand, provided no co-operation at all in combating terrorism, and unctuously blamed other Palestinian elements for the continuation of terrorism. The National Charter remains un-amended more than fifteen years after the Oslo Accords.

  Editor David Bar-Illan attacked the Oslo settlement in the Jerusalem Post. I wrote a piece for the Jerusalem Post, the Daily Telegraph (which endorsed Oslo), and some of our other newspapers, offering the most tepid endorsement of Oslo but urging ratification by the Knesset (parliament). I thought it would be disastrous for Israel’s credibility if the Knesset repudiated Rabin and Peres. Bar-Illan took civilized issue with me in the Post, while the publisher, the militant Colonel Yehuda Levy, who on occasion attended the office in his battle fatigues (though claims that he brought his Uzi machine gun with him are untrue), and the former acting editor, David Gross, wrote fulminations against me, in the usual contentious Israeli manner. This was a dust-up of rare proportions as the general public made their views known on our letter pages and in competing media. I was attacked in Israel, Britain, and Canada by the Arabists and the general ranks of pacificators of all ethnicities as being insufficiently enthusiastic about this Nobel Prize–winning breakthrough for peace. And in Israel and in some circles in the United States, I was rounded upon with equal fervour for approving the sale of Israel down the river to its enemies.

  I have always understood the Arab view that the terrible things that were done to the Jews in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were not done by the Arabs and that the great powers had sought to expiate their own indifference to the plight of the Jews by giving them Arab land. But it was not Arab land. There has been a continuous Jewish presence in what is now Israel for thousands of years, and the land that is Israel has never been governed by Arabs; the Romans were replaced by the Byzantines, then the Turks, then the Crusaders, the Turks again, the British, and finally the Jews.

  The existence of Israel is symbolic of the Arab decline in general over many centuries, and Israel is not the cause of that decline. The answer to the decline is for the Arabs to govern themselves more intelligently, to become a factor in the world for reasons other than the exportation of oil and terror, and to add the cubit to their own stature necessary to end the unnatural obsession with Israel. They are surely capable of it. Much of the preoccupation with a return to 1967 borders with Israel is also humbug. Most of the militant Arabs, when questioned closely, do not accept those borders; they are merely a waystation on the trek to the total occupation of Israel by an Arab majority. The demand for a return to the 1967 borders presumes that those borders had an unbreakable legitimacy, and it assumes that the initiation of aggressive war and response to it, and victory and defeat in that war, are interchangeable positions. The Arabs unleashed the 1967 war, and Israel won it, though Israel made serious strategic errors after that war.

  The Arabs were never going to be pushed out, and they were never going to become contented citizens who would prefer a good Jew to a bad Arab as a leader. This had effectively been the contention of Jerusalem’s splendid fourteen-term mayor, Teddy Kollek. But the 1967 borders had severely divided Israel, leaving the West Wall in Muslim hands and reducing Israel to nine miles in width as its narrowest po
int. The outline of a durable peace emerged in the discussions that Ehud Barak had with Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. The Palestinians would have a state. Whatever the doubtfulness of their claim, being an indistinct nationality with an ancient and inexact name, they had been dispossessed, and the Israeli argument that they had departed voluntarily in 1948 is sophistry.

  At the Telegraph, the divisions between those who tended to note perceived Jewish particularities and those who didn’t were easy to notice. We had a group of well-connected Englishmen, for whom “Jew” matters caused them to look as if their fish were off a bit.

  Princess Margaret, who took a drink and was frequently a rather entertaining woman, used to exclaim: “Oh, that is Jew!” On one occasion, she distinguished between two lyrical variations of Frank Sinatra and Barbra Streisand, saying “Sinatra is Sicilian; Streisand is Jew.” (The fact that they were both Americans was deemed superfluous.) This practice reminded me of some rabidly partisan U.S. Republicans (starting with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy) who always refer venomously to “the Democrat Party.”