Israel and Palestine

Whereas Tony Klug’s analysis of recent books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (September 6) is fairly balanced, there are a few elephants in the room that are not mentioned in order ultimately to put the onus on Israel to resolve the current conflict. To perceive the situation as a purely territorial issue is and has always been misguided. This is a religious war, proclaimed daily by Hamas and its main supporter, Iran. The West ignores this at its own, and especially Israel’s, peril.

The West’s obsession with peace deals and cease-fires is an aberration that does not reflect reality. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria have never talked about a two-state solution. They don’t want a two-state solution. They do not want a peace deal. They want only one thing: the elimination of Israel. Jews are religious enemies to be eliminated. No wonder the Grand Mufti was an admirer of Hitler and emulated his propaganda rhetoric in the 1930s. That rhetoric of extermination still prevails. No one is talking about creating a peaceful Palestinian state. Only us.

There is ample proof of this. When Ariel Sharon removed all Jews from Gaza, the Palestinian citizens had an opportunity to build a prosperous little state living peacefully side by side with Israel. There was a real opportunity to show Israel what a two-state solution could be like. What happened? A majority voted in as their leaders Hamas, whose sole agenda, then and now, is the destruction of Israel. Hamas spent the next seven years turning Gaza into a military base, armed and financed by Iran, with hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, purposely using the population of Gaza as a human shield for all their operations. This has led to the October 7 massacre, which has in turn led to Israel’s moral obligation to protect its citizens by destroying Hamas and making sure it cannot rearm itself in the future.

This is a tragedy for both the Gaza population and Israel, but what is the alternative? Hamas knows very well that western public opinion will turn against Israel, and some western media and campuses (as well as the UN, some of whose employees at UNRWA have been accused of involvement in the October massacre) have become Hamas’s effective allies. Hiding in the Gaza tunnels, waiting for Israel to get more blame for what is going on, is the strategy: that is the plan that Hamas thinks will ultimately allow the destruction of Israel.

All this is pure antisemitism. The Jews are always to blame. The Jewish deaths are at best always minimized or at worst “justified”. Whatever the outcome of this impossible conflict, it will probably be awful.

Daniel Biro
London NW11

Refugee academics

John Lavagnino (Letters, September 6) is quite right to point to the difficulties encountered by Jews seeking to emigrate from Nazi Germany to other countries. But one can argue that refugee academics, the group to which Freud and Einstein (named by Lavagnino) belonged, were considerably more fortunate than others. The Academic Assistance Council, founded by William Beveridge in 1933 and renamed the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning in 1936, was responsible for bringing to Britain hundreds of academics removed from their positions by the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of April 1933. Some found posts here, while many others were placed in universities in the US. The key figure in a mission that saved an incalculable body of intellectual talent was Esther Simpson, a private and enigmatic figure whose life and career have been expertly illuminated by John Eidinow.

My old university, Oxford, was in the van here, taking on more refugee scholars than any other university except London. My old college, Christ Church, took on two distinguished classical scholars, Felix Jacoby and Paul Jacobsthal. Einstein himself was due to take up a temporary Studentship (fellowship) at Christ Church, but was prevented from doing so by the events of 1933; the money thus saved was used to fund a position at Corpus Christi for the renowned classicist Eduard Fraenkel.

When I was at Christ Church in the 1960s, the historian Peter Pulzer, a refugee from Vienna who had arrived in Britain aged nine in 1939, speaking no English, and ended his career as Gladstone professor of government at All Souls, was teaching politics on the PPE course. The values that he embodied, of tolerance and courtesy towards others, of outward-looking internationalism, of adherence to the principles of liberal democracy and, not least, of reconciliation with postwar Germany, might have earned him a place in Richard Davenport-Hines’s study of historians at the House.

Anthony Grenville
London NW6

Twain and the vernacular

Craig Raine (Afterthoughts, September 13) quotes a description of a thunderstorm in Huckleberry Finn as an example of the sheer expressive potential of vernacular English, before going on to point out how easily such a voice can slip back into the “literary” and “authorial”. Tom Paulin also begins the introduction to his Faber Book of Vernacular Verse with a passage from Huckleberry Finn. Huck’s “limber prose”, he writes, “a spoken prose … natural and informal”, has a visionary quality he “still can’t fathom”. But, unlike Raine, Paulin argues that “vernacular” is an altogether broader term than “dialect”. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy admired the dialect poetry of William Barnes, for example, and learnt not so much from his use of dialect words or regional accent as from his way of employing language as “speech process”. Hopkins’s sprung rhythm serves most importantly, Paulin argues, as a bridge between everyday speech and the language of poetry. Paulin’s purpose is not to gather a collection of “homey, self-conscious accents”, but to show instead “something of the intoxication of speech, its variety and crack and hilarity” – something all writers are after.

Andrew McCulloch
Marple Bridge, Greater Manchester

Book prices

Your fascinating correspondence about how much money the Oxford University Press charges for the books it publishes (Letters, August 23/30, September 20, etc) could profitably be extended to take in how little money it pays the authors who write or contribute to them. I was recently invited to supply a 4,000-word essay for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Asking what sort of fee was on offer, I discovered that it consisted of book vouchers redeemable against the OUP’s catalogue. Unhappily, the freelance literary life is unsustainable on these terms.

D. J. Taylor
Norwich

Eco and Verne

Ann Lawson Lucas (Letters, September 13) seeks a record of the discussion between Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa that Irina Dumitrescu attended at the 92nd Street Y in 2008 (Afterthoughts, August 23/30), hoping to expand on her admittedly “hazy memory” of the writers’ debts to popular literature and shared passion for Jules Verne.

The audio of that PEN event (at soundcloud.com/penamerican/conversation-umberto-eco) seems, alas, to be Verne-free. Eco saluted the paired père of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, who, like many others, conjured up alternate worlds that enchant, transport (and transcend thereby the shaggy, sometimes paid-by-the-word prose thus alchemized), to which Rushdie then added such “good ‘bad’ books” charming the great public – and in need of pruning – as The Last of the Mohicans and the Harry Potter series.

Such Dumas-scene conversions had their rehearsals. As Rushdie recalled in 2021, prior to their original 1996 Paris match at the Louvre, each had lanced in print at least one of the others – Eco vs Vargas Llosa’s rightism, Vargas Llosa vs Rushdie’s leftism and Rushdie, in the Observer in 1989, months after the Ayatollah’s fatwa, swinging Foucault’s Pendulum back at Eco with an Eyre-borne thrust: “Reader: I hated it”.

So it was a surprise to find that when they met “we all got on like a house on fire” – their Louvre triangle had commenced with the Italian hugging him and proclaiming: “Rushdie! I am the bullshit Eco!” Amid the occasional reprise in London and New York, recalling the Three Tenors, Rushdie suggested they style themselves “the Three Stooges”. The Italian insisted instead on “the Three Musketeers” – “because first we were enemies and now we are friends”.

Scott Lahti
Marquette MI

Apples

Two points arising from Isaac Nowell’s review of Sally Coulthard’s The Apple (September 20). Long before Milton, the fruit that brought about the Fall had been identified as an apple in the fifteenth-century poem “Adam lay i-bowndyn” (“And al was for an appil, / an appil that he tok”); the “Cydonian apples” are well known to be quinces.

Leofranc Holford-Strevens
Oxford

The Queen’s favourites

Reviewing Craig Brown (September 20), Miranda France says that “Elizabeth II’s favourite companions were dogs, horses and her husband, roughly in that order”. And her children? From November 1953 to May 1954, the new Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh toured the Commonwealth; Charles (born 1948) and Anne (born 1950) were left behind.

Trevor Pateman
Brighton

Baudelaire

A small point about the line from Baudelaire (September 6 and Letters, September 20). The original reads “Je préfère au constance, à l’opium, au nuits”, and continues: “L’élixir de ta bouche où l’amour se pavane”. The constance and the nuits are both wines (as well spotted by Peter Cogman), both masculine, both singular; the opium is opium; and the lover’s lips are more delightful than all three.

Shaun Whiteside
London SW12

Dorothy Wordsworth

I am preparing a collected edition of the poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth for Cambridge University Press and would be grateful for any information relating to manuscripts held in private collections, libraries, record offices and book dealers’ inventories. Please contact j.fay@bham.ac.uk.

Jessica Fay
University of Birmingham

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