It’s new in that the barbarians now are not the unreformed outsiders, not the savages beyond the pale, not the six-shooters of the wild west, but firmly installed at the power centres of the western world with the pick of the world’s resources in their suit pockets… So, I hear you say, what’s new in that? Perhaps I’ve been naïve..

Seen from here, in occupied Palestine, Sharon’s Israel looms very large, its goods and army everywhere. But behind it, more forbidding still, stands the Bush United States. And in many horrid ways, each seems to project and mimic the other.

In the name of combating terrorism, both regimes flout every notion of natural and international law, their might becomes the only right. United Nations resolutions, Geneva Conventions, International Criminal courts are ignored, twisted, sabotaged, while both states extend and refine their own arbitrary powers – from economic hegemony and tax-rigging to nuclear weapons to extra-legal assassination and mass imprisonment.

Before 9-11, the bombing of the twin towers, I had imagined that ‘international capital’ could rule the world without the cruder forms of military coercion. With one or two glaring exceptions – like the Gulf and Falkland wars – I imagined that Western powers had moved on, that ruling elites had broadly learned the lessons of decolonisation, of the Vietnam and Algerian wars. For me, among others, the bombing of Afghanistan, the threat to reinvade Iraq and the Israeli assault on the West Bank and Gaza were a rude awakening.

That is why I am here. Though, given time to think, in the relative peace of Jerusalem, I still cant quite understand when leftwing friends represent the whole bloody business as a capitalist conspiracy. Why should corporate executives and oilmen support action that so obviously threatens supplies and markets in the Arab and Muslim world? Why must Israel be defended, extended against all odds? Why should an ‘industrial-military complex’ set so much store by a precarious colonial bridgehead when there are so many alternative bases around the Middle East and former Soviet Union?

If Iraq is a nuclear or chemical threat, why present Saddam Hussein with such an obvious pretext and target for such weapons? The more closely America and other Western governments align themselves with Israel, the more Saddam is transformed from pariah to hero in Arab and Muslim eyes across the Middle East and Asia – rather as we forgot Stalin’s atrocities when the Soviet Union stood with us against Nazi invasion. At the same time, here in Palestine, the brutality of the Sharon occupation is driving people who would otherwise look to a secular, politically measured resistance into the arms of Islamic Hamas. So the most moderate of Jerusalem Christians (far removed from the daily conflict of Gaza and the West Bank) can say to me ‘Believe me, we are all glad when there is a suicide bombing.’

Bush and Sharon seem to write each other’s speeches, building up the threat of terror – a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy – for their own electoral purposes and because they have nothing else to offer. But why do hard-headed financiers, CEOs and opinion-formers tolerate such obvious threats to the social democracy and ‘liberal’ market economy that have done them so nicely for so long? Or does it really come down to the central role of arms industries? Is it simply that the more arms than can be produced and consumed, the healthier the corporate cashflow in that very substantial sector?

Can that be the key? Or is it ‘the Jews’ – a defensive/offensive axis between the two great Jewish communities of Israel and the United States (with support from a neo-Zionist Christian Right)? Not that Europeans can afford self-righteousness: after the European holocaust, is it any wonder the survivors took refuge in Israel or across the Atlantic – the Zionist dream fired by the nightmare of the crematoria. That must never be forgotten, nor allowed to justify the horrors that stem from it here in occupied Palestine.

Anti-semitic? No, for one thing the Arabs are also semitic. For another, the Jewish opposition to occupation, in Israel and the States, is as central to the solution as the uncritical majority is to the problem. I work with anti-occupation Israelis here, a few hundred soldiers are refusing – and many more avoiding – service in the ‘territories’. Israeli Women in Black face vitriolic abuse each week on their vigils in central Jerusalem, volunteers help rebuild Palestinian homes demolished by the army, young Israeli Jews and Arabs combine in protest action, and yesterday more than 2,000, mainly US, Jews had a full page ad in the daily Ha’aretz - calling for peace-talks now, an end to occupation, withdrawal of Jewish settlements, compensation for refugees and a viable Palestinian state. There’s even a contender for the leadership of the Israeli Labour party – another former general, but still a rank outsider - who offers a similar prize.

(For me it is this minority, however small, that stops me slipping – despite all intellectual cautions – into racist prejudice. It was the same when, immediately after the New York bombings, the wife of a victim publicly demanded that there should be no retaliation in kind. These exceptions not only redeem their peoples, but, I feel, a part of my own humanity!)

So where does that leave us Brits – B for British, Balfour, Beckham, Blair ? We – if that word holds, a generation later - bear responsibility as former colonial power for creating the state of Israel in 1948 (though events, or Jewish terror gangs, proved beyond our control!); and now, hand in glove with a new Anglo-imperialism, we follow every twist and turn of US anti-terror Terror. Here again, there are curious parallels, remarked by Palestinians as well as me. Just as Sharon has his emollient Labour sidekick Shimon Peres, Bush counts on our New Labour Tony Blair to glove his iron fist – or supplement the bone with brain. For one joker, the parallel was not Sharon/Peres=Bush/Blair; but Bush/Blair=Clinton/…Monica. (I don’t know, but I feel our Tone’s just thrilled to be up there with the Big Boys! His wife, by contrast, scored a hit here with her remark about suicide bombing and popular despair.) Meanwhile, the message I keep getting is ‘You got us into this mess, why don’t you help get us out of it?’

Sorry, I say, I’ll do what I can, at least to get the picture straight. Which is what I’m trying to do now. And I don’t mean balance, which loses its meaning when the scales are so tipped that the bar slides off the fulcrum. Imagine an approach to the holocaust which insisted on giving Nazis equal time, on balancing gas-chambers against failings of European Jews. Whoops, there’s no comparison, I hear it said. And of course the deportation and murder of 6,000,000 Jews under cover is NOT the same as the displacement/subjugation of three or four million Palestinians over half a century. But differences of scale and substance cannot be allowed to disguise the fact that both these histories – these parts of the same history – are self-evidently, intolerably unjust. The dead cant be revived, or history turned back, but Palestinians have an absolute right to redress: if not the return of refugees (now dead) to homes (now demolished) then compensation, new homes, a choice, and a state that is their own. One state or two, 1967 or 1948, Jerusalem divided or shared? That’s up to the parties to negotiate, without the weight of a US Big Brother to boulster inequality. And if the Palestinians are to forgo the literal Right to Return, then Israel had better forgo the right of every Jew in the world to settle in their promised land, and make of it a prison camp for Palestinians.

Reasonable? In a world of curfews and checkpoints, mass unemployment and poverty, shootings and beatings, detentions and demolitions… People get depressed, and yet manage to laugh, get on with life, even talk to me. I’m grateful, though I also get depressed, when I realise that the blood and rubble, ruined lives and homes, are quite banal. As an ITN man put it when I told him about half a dozen families having their their houses blown up without warning: ‘Less than ten dead, it’s not a story.’ So what’s the point of my telling it? Life’s cheap,who cares? The other day a boy of 14 told me that he and his mates always went for walks during curfew hours.
‘Why?’ I asked
‘If we’re killed, it makes no difference,’ he said, lightly, as if the words had been ‘for a breath of air.’

He also asked me what I could do to help. ‘Tell people,’ I said.‘That’s good’, he said, and I hope it is. Either I believe it, or my life here’s a waste of breath. Sometimes when people have asked me, as I ask myself, ‘But what’s the use?’ I can think of no quick fix, but then what’s the use of a bullet in the head? Everyone knows that an acceptable solution will depend on pressure from the outside world, and I mention a coming-together of people in Britain, across Europe, even in the United States. Not a majority yet, far from it, but perhaps a new sort of minority…

And now I’m talking to you, or myself, not earolling a Palestinian: since the discrediting of state-socialism, the movement on our side has been one of reaction, a complacent modernity masking ever growing inequality with fatuous celebrity, as in New Labour, a meritocracy bred of poverty and privilege. Against, or around, the ‘liberal’ economy, a fraudulent social democracy, we’ve had fragmented rainbow of separate-issue groups, each in its own little circle. Now, shocked into action, under this negative banner of Stop the War, something different may be beginning to happen: the demonstrations I have been on bring together groups I’ve never talked to, walked beside before: red and green, black and white, tough and fluffy, militant and pacifist, old and young, Christian, Muslim, Jewish. Still only a tiny minority, but one that makes me very happy, gives me some hope and pride I can pass on even if I cant explain.

‘We’re with you,’ is something I can manage in Arabic, if I feel the words are not quite empty. And here – not in Jerusalem, but in the hardest-hit cities - emergency committees have formed to clear the rubble, keep life going under curfew, share out food. These local groupings cut across divisions of faction, family and religion, keep working and joking against the tide of destruction and despair…

Odder than that, the other day, outside Nablus, several imams, elders from the mosque, were cheering on a group of leftist ‘internationals’ as they tried to break through an army roadblock. ‘Allah al-Akhbar!’ they shouted as the soldiers replied with gas grenades. And it happened that the wind blew the gas back into the soldiers’ faces.