An insider's view of Israel's early political leaders

I have just finished reading Yehuda Avner's The Prime Ministers, all 700 closely printed pages of it. It took me a while, but I found it riveting. It is an insider's account of four of Israel's founding Prime Ministers, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin,  Avner worked with all four as speech writer, secretary, and adviser. Begin used him to Shakespearize his speeches. He got to know all of them well, and attended many of the crucial meetings that shaped the history of Israel, meetings with Henry Kissinger, Presidents Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, and Egyptian Prime Minister, Anwar Sadat. He was particularly close to Menachem Begin, whom Avner, as a religious Zionist, admired for his uncompromising stand on his Biblical vision of Jews, the Jewish people and their destiny. However, reviewing, describing or summing up the book would  do it an injustice. It is vivid anecdotes and personal insights that stay in my mind: Levi Eshkol, an efficient minister of agriculture and economic manager being unsure about his duties as a Prime Minister when the position was suddenly thrust upon him, and his calm stance in face of the threats Israel faced on the eve of the Six Day War; Gold Meir lecturing the Austrian Prime Minister, Bruno Kreisky on his disloyalty to the socialist cause and abandoning Israel, a fellow socialist country, Yitzhak Rabin torn by the choice of negotiating with the hijackers of the Air France plane that was flown to Entebbe, Uganda, or authorizing a risky rescue operation with possibly large number of casualties. But the most memorable account is that of Menachem Begin, about half of of the book,  his meeting with President Reagan, his meeting with Sadat and the personal friendship they forged, his decision to drive the PLO out of Lebanon, the death of his wife, and his ultimate retirement and life in seclusion. Avner's quotes of Begin's speeches are full of Biblical references to Jewish fate and history: Balaam's prophecy, the Jewish people as an  eternally abnormal nation within the family of nations, a people that dwells alone, a concept that flew in the face of the Zionist belief that Jews, with their own land and state, would be like all other nations. It is with this vision in mind thatBegin was not prepared to relinquish any part of the West Bank, Judea and Samaria. 

Avner spent a lifetime writing and editing speeches, writing letters to Presidents and Prime Ministers, expounding government policy. He was a seasoned writer, and his book is a very vivid account of fifty years of Israel's history, so vivid that although you, the reader knows what happened in the end, reading about the Entebbe rescue, about the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the peace treaty with Egypt, or about the war in Lebanon, the book captures the tension, the drama at the time. It is like reading history as it happened. 

Where have all the tuis gone?

We had a large tree just on the other side of our back fence. Although we never saw their nests, a large number of tuis made their homes there. The tree was alive with bird noise in the morning. We saw many tuis in our garden. They particularly liked our plum tree, but they were everywhere. A few weeks ago the tree was cut down. Infill housing makes good town planning sense. The two houses backing on to our section have been removed, one, is actually on trailers right now ready to be moved, The sections have been cleared, Five townhouses will be built on the site. But the trees are gone, and so are the tuis. We have blackbirds, sparrow, but no tuis any more. I wonder whether the tuis just migrated  elsewhere, rebuilt their nests there, quite elaborate complicated nests, or perished. Relocating, finding a new place where their can be at home, appraising possible new threats, accommodating to other birds, can't be easy for tuis any more than it is for people who are dislocated.

Labour leader's dog whistle

What's wrong with politicians? How could Andrew Little, leader of the New Zealand Labour Party believe that there is political traction to be gained by advocating a restriction on the immigration of chefs. Let's assume that ten or twenty chefs with skills to cook ethnic food, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Indian, French or Italian, or Hungarian for that matter, are excluded. Would that solve the Auckland housing crisis, or make a dent in the unemployment rate, which is anyway, not high by international standards? He also attacked banks? Why not go the whole hog and advocate nationalising them? Earlier this year he happened to notice that many people who bought houses in Auckland had Chinese names? So what, you might say. But Little and the Labour Party is deliberately fueling xenophobia. This is now very unfashionable in a New Zealand context. Is he learning his political strategy from Donald Trump? Fortunately I believe that Donald Trump would be laughed out of court in New Zealand. With policies like this, it may be the end of the New Zealand Labour Party. There are already people who think that Labour has lost its way and the Greens are the only genuine opposition on the left to the National Party. Perhaps the demise of the Labour Party would not be a great loss. The various faction within the present National government, Bill English on the left, John Key in the pragmatic, opportunist middle, and Gerry Bronlee, Judith Collins and some others on the right, might provide enough opposition for the country to be democratically governed.

Vladimir Putin's surprise

Vladimir Putin surprised the world when he sent in his troops to Syria, and surprised the world again when he ordered their withdrawal. He could make such surprise moves because he is not heading a democratic government where every move of the government is scrutinized and because of the confrontational nature of democratic government, criticized. With the circus of the American presidential election process, with the ridiculous collapse of the consensus within the British (and indeed, the New Zealand Labour Party) it is hard to argue the superiority of Western style democracy over the Russian oligarchic system of government. Spies as politicians would not normally be my preferred choice, but lining them up against egocentric billionaires, or even heirs to political dynasties, perhaps I would trust spies more. Putin is walking in the shoes of blood-thirsty monsters, and he is a tough man, proud of his physical and mental toughness, but he is not a Stalin, not an unscrupulous mass murderer. In a world that is not ruled by a sense of moral right and wrong, where democratic states are quite prepared to compromise with ruthless regimes and sell out their allies for the benefits of big busienss, moral compasses that should point to choices of right and wrong keep wobbling.

Gratitude

My twenty-third grandchild, my twelfth grandson was born this week. It behoves me to count my blessings. Both I and my wife, Judy come from families that were gradually dying out. I had only one cousin, Judy had four, yet all our grandparents came from large families. When our parents were young people didn't want children, certainly not in Central Europe. Some didn't marry, some lost their husbands or fiances during the Holocaust. So now, a generation later I count our blessings, six children, three boys, three girls, all happily married with families.  Counting my blessings is an expression that I can't quite explain.  I grew up in a liberal European tradition. I cannot believe in a God up above, who takes a personal interest in my welfare. Nor can I believe in the luck of the draw, fate, good things, just as bad things, just happen. All that I can do is to acknowledge my great good fortune and not take it for granted. Somewhere between not taking things for granted and fervently believing in a divine being that pulls the strings lies faith.

The composer Douglas Lilburn, musical tradition, and I

Michael Brown, the Curator of the music collection at the Turnbull Library gave an interesting talk about Douglas Lilburn and his musical tradition. Lilburn said in his lecture, A Search for a Language [p.72] ¹ 'I was not born into a musical family and had no proper musical training before a late age of 17'. Michael Brown disputed this claim. The Lilburns, were a Scottish family, they often sang Scottish songs, Douglas Lilburn was steeped in traditional Scottish melodies. This Scottish heritage is reflected in his music, pentatonic melodies, dotted rhythms, pedal notes echoing bagpipes, and melodies developing within a limited compass. So why did he saiy that he was not born into a musical family? Why did he belittle his Scottish musical heritage? To understand this we have to see Lilburn in context as one of the New Zealand artists who worked on forging a New Zealand tradition, a breakaway from the prevailing British tradition. These artists included the poets Allen Curnow, Dennis Glover and their contemporaries, the painters Rita Angus and Toss Wollaston and others who all worked within a general climate nascent nationalism. They looked down on those who preceded them, and their contemporaries who worked within an older, perhaps Edwardian idiom. They did not consider that they excluded from such a New Zealand tradition composers such as Richard Fuchs and Georg Tintner, artists like Frederick Ost, and writers like Karl Wolfskehl, and indeed they excluded people like me and all others who are in every respect New Zealanders, but carry their own personal cultural baggage, including in my case Hungarian gypsy and café music as well as a wealth of classical music. I don't hold this against Douglas Lilburn; he grew up in a different time, when New Zealand was much more mono-cultural, if we ignore Maoris, Dalmatians, Chinese and other minorities who had lived in New Zealand as long as British settlers. He lived at a time when New Zealand culture, with all its limitations, blossomed. And personally, I had great respect for Douglas Lilburn. He and I marched side by side, along with hundreds of others, from the Wellington Town Hall to Parliament to protest against the Vietnam War. We talked, had a conversation, but to my regret I can't remember what we talked about, I only recall the pride I took in being in the company of such a celebrated yet modest composer.

1Lilburn, Douglas, A Seartch for Tradition & A Search for a Language, 2011, Wellington

TPPA and my usually uninformed thoughts

Let us be honest, the government and the proponents of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement tried to foist on us a deal that is meant to be about free trade, but is in reality about the rights of international corporations, Big Business, to exploit the vulnerable. There are already no borders for Big Business. They shift profits from countries with higher taxation regimes to countries with no or less taxation. They lean on governments for concessions, threatening to take their business away if they don't get the special deals they demand. Free Trade deals are done between countries, as it was done between New Zealand and China, and is getting done between New Zealand and other Asian countries. These may, or posibles may not, have huge economic benefits for the countries involved. The China deal helped to keep the New Zealand economy afloat. We don't need 11 countries to agree to the same deal, which might impact on each country differently. New Zealand certainly didn't get the deal expected, and the benefits are still to be assessed. The power of Big Business, international corporations to influence New Zealand policies in the interest of corporate welfare and not the people of New Zealand is also yet to be assessed. Yet I believe that New Zealand has no choice but go along with the TPPA Agreement. New Zealand can't afford to be excluded from a deal that ties down its trading partners. Once Roger Douglas and the Third Labour Government bought into free market, free trade, libertarian capitalism, there was no turning back.