Johann Hari

No. Dear God, no. As I marked the 40th anniversary of the crime against humanity that is the Sound of Music with a sad, mournful silence, the news came. Can it be true? Would Andrew Lloyd Webber really open a new production of this Holocaust-sing-song in the West End next year, and hold Pop Idol auditions to discover a new poisoned midget to play Gretl and the rest of the Von Tapp brats? Would he really dredge from the abyss a few of my least favourite things?

Christopher Plummer - the man condemned to history as Captain Von Trapp – called the movie The Sound of Mucus, and said working with Julie Andrews was “like being hit over the head with a huge Valentine’s Day card every day.” He was too generous. This is a film so sickly, so laden with treacle, that diabetics should be banned from watching it for the sake of their health. Every time my ex-boyfriend surrendered to the screeching gay stereotype and hosted a singalong Sound of Music party – why not hold it in a bloody closet? – my teeth would ache and turn brown in my mouth. I would pine for the ending to somehow, someway change so the Nazis could finally capture those insufferable singing midgets and make sure they had sung ‘Goodbye, Farwell, Auf Weidersehn, Goodnight’ for the last time.

It was the small details that would enrage me first. Is Lisl the most improbable sixteen year-old since Olivia Newton John first warbled about those summer nights? Why are the children’s favourite things – “brown paper packages tied up with string” or “raindrops on roses” – so rubbish? Why would Captain Von Trapp choose Fraulein Maria – a pillar of human valium wearing old curtains – over the classy, cruel Baroness, clearly one of the great shags of mid-twentieth century Austria?

But then the bigger picture provokes me. This is a movie that helped reinvent the image of Austria after the war as a land that greeted the Nazis with sad screechings of Eidelweiss and enraged rippings of the Nazi flag. In reality, the hills were alive with the sound of Austrians herding the Jews into deathcamps. The Catholic Church was not run by benign humanitarian nuns and cheeky Mother Superiors; their leader in the Vatican was busy earning his title as “Hitler’s Pope.” Believe me, I have Austrian relatives, and I have confidence that, while the Germans have become benign, repentant pacifists, Austrians have not confronted their fascist past – remember Jorg Haider? – and in some small, irrational way, I blame Julie Andrews and her bogus retelling of the Holocaust.

Worse still, the Sound of Music cheapens one of my genuinely favourite things: the musical. It provides a glib, brain-dead template for a thousand sub-Hammersteins to imitate, while just a few years later Stephen Sondheim would show that it can be just as profound and enriching as any other art-form. You wouldn’t know it from those malign imps howling “Doe Rae Me” for what seems like several ice ages.

Please, Andrew Lloyd Webber, I beg you: keep your Von Trapp shut.

As the world’s environmental ministers jet into Montreal to jaw-jaw about global warming, two peoples – from opposite ends of the earth – are trying to make their voices heard, above the petrol-scented denial and lame offers of “voluntary restrictions” offered by world leaders. The Inuit live, for now, in a melting Arctic. The people of Tuvalu live, for now, on a low-lying South Pacific island already disappearing below rising sea levels. Try offering them the rote cliché about global warming – that it is a danger to our children and grandchildren – and they will tell you: screw the grandchildren, this is ruining our lives, now.

Inuit spokeswoman Sheila Watt-Cloutier grew up in Nunavik, the Arctic end of Quebec, in the 1960s, hunting for seal and caribou as her ancestors have for thousands of years. She expected this lifestyle to continue for millennia more, until –as she puts it – “The Inuit suddenly found ourselves on the cusp of a defining event in the history of this planet. We found the Earth was literally melting beneath our feet.” Climatologists have known for decades that the Arctic would experience full-frontal global warming first, because (amongst other reasons) the Arctic has a thinner atmosphere. But for Sheila and her people, it came as a shock. “We used to have eight seasons, but suddenly they stopped,” she explained. “All our traditional knowledge on how to survive and thrive on the land is rapidly becoming useless because everything is changing, and changing fast. We cannot hunt. We cannot get our food. The species we live on are dying out. Our houses are collapsing as the permafrost melts. Everybody talks about how polar bears are an endangered species, but now we are an endangered species too.”

The 150,000 Inuit living on the Arctic are seeing their habitat collapse around them in the space of just a few generations. The sea-ice is now extremely fragile, and many hunters have died as once-safe ice collapsed beneath them. Storms and blizzards have become far more frequent, and last Christmas, the Inuit saw thunder and lightning for the first time in their lives. After studying the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment – complied by 300 of the world’s most distinguished climatologists – Sheila is in no doubt this is global warming: “We want the people of the rich world to understand that what you are doing on a daily basis is having a direct impact on a people, a culture and a way of life. The Inuit hunter who falls through the depleting and unpredictable sea-ice is connected to the cars we drive, the industries we rely on, and the disposable world we have become.” When a rich-world imbecile like Jeremy Clarkson boasts he has a carbon footprint 15 times larger than the average Brit, he is weakening the ice beneath Sheila’s feet. And she is no shrieking hysteric: even the Republican congressman John McCain said after visiting her home, “These impacts are real and consistent with the scientific predictions.”

Half a world away, the people of Tuvalu are watching their entire country disappear below rising sea levels. Tomasi Paupua, the Governor of Tuvalu, explains, “At no more than three meters above sea level, Tuvalu is particularly exposed [to global warming]. Indeed our people are already migrating to escape.” Successive waves of Tuvaluans are being forced to abandon their islands – the focus of their religion, and the only land they have ever known – and move to a foreign country, New Zealand. Their elected leader says he is “begging the international community” to take action against global warming, but he knows it is probably already too late. His people believe they have given birth to the last generation of Tuvaluans to ever know their homeland. The only question now is whether Tuvalu will die from a thousand small waves, or whether one of the increasingly-frequent extreme weather events will wipe it – and its people – out in one fell swoop.

We did this. The death of Inuit civilisation and the drowning of Tuvalu are the direct and predictable result of human action. They are part of a cruel pattern, where the people who have contributed least to global warming – the world’s poor – are suffering most from it. A village in Bangladesh uses less fossil fuels in a year than a British family uses in a day. But who is paying the environmental price? One fifth of Bangladesh is poised to disappear below sea levels this century, we Brits can build expensive flood defences like the Thames Barrier to save ourselves (for now). This is mirrored at the Montreal talks, where the poor countries are being forced to beg for the tiniest crumbs – please give us some cash to save the rainforests, massa – from the people who inflicted global warming on them in the first place.

In his must-read book ‘Ecological Debt’, environmentalist Andrew Simms proposes a new way to understand this scandal. Instead of seeing the poor world as owing us billions in cash borrowed by long-dead dictators, we should understand that, in fact, we owe a huge ecological debt to the poor. He writes: “Parts of the world like Britain and the United States became very rich by burning a disproportionate amount of humanity’s finite inheritance of fossil fuels, an act which has triggered climate change [and the destruction of the Arctic, Tuvalu, Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa]. If you take more than your fair share of natural resources, you run up an ecological debt. If you have a lifestyle that pushes an ecosystem beyond its ability to renew itself, you run up an ecological debt.”

How can this vast debt be repaid? Logically, they should be redeemed by our governments, but – as the paltry proposals at Montreal show – they are lying spaced-out in a corner, sucking on an exhaust pipe. But Sheila is not dissuaded. “We won’t sink with our ice. We are hunters and we will fight,” she says. The victims of global warming are increasingly looking past governments to the courts for justice. The people of Tuvalu are poised to challenge the energy companies in the international courts, while Inuit have lodged a complaint against the United States government with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) for “destroying our habitat”. Because the US is a signatory, if the IACHR finds against Bush the ruling will clear the way for massive class-action suits against energy companies within the United States itself. This could drive up the cost of petrol, and hopefully hold down use.

Far from being pie-in-the-sky, the oil industry itself is already extremely anxious about these lawsuits, holding the memory of the tobacco industry in its mind. Christopher C. Horner, a lawyer for a group of oil industry flunkeys called the Cooler Heads Colaition, told the New York Times, “The planets are aligned very poorly for us” on this issue. Friends of the Earth has calculated the personal liability of Esso alone as standing at 5 percent of all carbon emissions in the past 150 years. So could we be about to see the Roe vs. Wade-ing of global warming, as activists give up on feeble governments and save it for the judge?

Sheila stresses that court action is not enough, and her people are not the only ones walking on thin ice: “The Arctic is only an early warning system. This is coming for you too.” This Saturday, people from across the world will be marching to pressure their governments to introduce binding legal restrictions on CO2 before our climate spirals even further into chaos. (You can find details about the London protest at www.foe.co.uk). Are you going to leave the Inuit and the Tuvaluans to march alone?

I was recently interviewed by the journalist Matt Kennard for the Leeds Student newspaper. This is the transcript, with his write-up afterwards:

MK: One of the people you’ve engaged with critically in your work is Noam Chomsky. What do you make of him?

JH: It’s difficult with Chomsky. There’s a lot about Chomsky that is really valuable. One thing I think I’ve learnt from reading him is that having a kind of anarchistic temperament towards power is quite useful. Serially doubting what people in power are telling you, and assuming that they will only do good things if they are forced to by social movements, is a very sensible way of looking at the world.

The reason why I think a lot of people find it hard to understand where Chomsky’s coming from – a lot of people he would say are immersed in the ideological culture of capitalist society – is that he basically disputes the two major institutions of power in the world today: the nation-state and any institution of market capitalism. So in a sense, he is simply saying as a first premise: The world should not be in any way as it is now. I think that can be very valuable when you are looking at, say, the IMF and World Bank – completely illegitimate institutions of corporate fundamentalism that are just imposing on poor countries a completely failed economic model. Where it becomes problematic is that firstly the alternatives that Chomsky posits are unbelievably vague and, at times, incoherent; and secondly, when you look at his philosophy on markets – I’ll come back to this.

The alternatives he posits are voluntaristic, anarchist communities. Firstly, I have never seen him persuasively give a case for how that could work except on a very small scale. It’s interesting actually, he was interviewed about this and he was asked: Can you give an example of this type of thing? and he gave the example of the anarchist communities that sprang up during the Spanish civil war. They were indeed absolutely heroic models. So the interviewer said to him: But they were crushed precisely because they were anarchists and unable to mount a proper defence, so how do deal with that problem, do you say they should have an army to defend themselves, for example. And Chomsky just said, “I’m not going to get into that. These things need to be discussed in their individual context and I’m not going to generalize,” and I think that revealed a big flaw in his program. I think he is sincere in his anarchism but I think it can easily become an intellectual pose where you’re simply saying, “I’m in favor of a morally pristine world where there are no hard choices and if you don’t agree with me you are simply part of this evil structure”.

I think you have to acknowledge the implausibility of these voluntaristic, anarchist communities – I just don’t think that is possible in a world of 6 billion people with extremely complex sophisticated urban societies can be organized in that way. At some point you have to acknowledge that there will be some structure of power and, I agree, that they should be a damn sight more democratic, but you can’t say anybody who engages with power is simply an evil apologist for the system, and speak about them in the extraordinarily abusive way Chomsky does. Admittedly there is a tension in Chomsky’s work because sometimes he will say that people who engage with existing power structures are OK. For example, he voted for Kerry rather than Bush while acknowledging that Kerry was a profoundly terrible person in many ways, but less profoundly terrible than Bush, and I think he’s right about that. It’s better than, say, John Pilger, who refused to acknowledge any difference and basically said voting in America is pointless and you have to wait for the revolution. But too often Chomsky’s positions aren’t so nuanced.

Just to go back to the markets. He has used the word “bullshit” to describe the idea that markets in any way generate wealth. I believe markets are a tool need to be extremely tightly regulated – markets will have a tendency to do things that are completely unacceptable like abuse workers’ rights or trash the environment, and that’s why you need to have very strict, tight democratic regulations and strong trade unions. But nonetheless, within those regulations and checked strong trade unions, markets do actually do something very important: they generate wealth. Chomsky denies that, and I think, therefore, there is this really big hole in his interpretative framework.

You go back to 1800 and the average European lived on 90% of what the average African lives on today. Something happened in between now and then. And I agree that many things that happened between now and then, not least the rise of the democratic movements and the spread of the Enlightenment - but also, and just as important, market economies became much more efficient with the specialization of labour and so on. Chomsky denies that. So, for example, within Chomsky’s world-view there is no reason why, say, South Korea is wealthier than North Korea. I am not saying he supports the North Korean tyranny – obviously he finds it disgusting, authoritarian and wrong. What I am saying there is no explanation from him for why North Korea – a country with no markets – has 3 million people dying of famine in the 1990s and South Korea – a country with markets – doesn’t. If the state was the primary agent of generating wealth and markets were irrelevant, it would be the other way round.

I agree there are lots of other reasons why societies become wealthy, but markets are an essential ingredient. Obviously there are market fundamentists like the MIF who take this to an absurd extreme. I thought of a pretty lousy analogy to express this: if you want to make bread, you need yeast. But if you try to eat yeast alone and forget the other ingredients, you only have stinking fungus. The IMF and World Bank are ramming yeast down the throats of the poor – but Chomsky is chucking the yeast in the bin, and saying thata nybody who believes in yeast is a defender of the likes of the IMF and World Bank.

There’s another problem with Chomsky. I don’t want to get into sounding rude about him personally but there is a personality fault which is that he is completely incapable of admitting he is wrong about anything. A good example is when he said – “looks likes what’s happening in Afghanistan is a silent genocide” in 2003. That was an extraordinarily strong thing to say. Genocide is the ultimate crime – and it didn’t happen. The sensible thing to say now, given that there was no genocide, silent or otherwise, in Afghanistan perpetrated by the Americans is to say…

MK: I thought that was a quote from an aid agency though, wasn’t it?

JH: No. There were aid agencies that warned that if the invasion did not happen quickly, if it was unsuccessful, there would be starvation that winter in Afghanistan – that’s true. He would have a perfectly sound case if he said, “I listened to the warning of the aid agencies, and as an error of speech – an act of hyperbole - I located what they were saying in the present tense – I shouldn’t have done that, and thank god it turned out not to happen, thank God.” Then there would be no argument and we could engage with the serious point about the callous risk taken with Afghan lives. But instead a year later Chomsky was still saying it was “literally true” because “it did indeed look like a silent genocide was happening”, but it wasn’t literally true. And it really undermines his credibility when he won’t just admit he was wrong.

For example, I think the thing he did say to Emma Brockes that was genuinely shocking was that Living Marxism was “probably right” about the Serb concentration camps, which they said were concotions of the media. I assume he doesn't know this, because elsehwere he has said he believes they did exist. There was a huge high court test case about that – their claims were completely untrue.

That is one of the other problems with Chomsky – when you are applying an anarchistic interpretation to your own power structures obsessively, but failing to apply that interpretation equally to other power structures. Not deliberately, but kind of by accident. I think he is right to say we have more of responsibility for our governments and our states than what, say, the North Korean government does – so even though the crimes in North Korean unimaginably worse than, say, the return of internment in Britain, I have more responsibility to talk about internment in Britain than I do about the concentration camps in North Korea – that’s true, it’s the right analysis.

The problem with that argument is that he then becomes very fixated. You end up having a kind of trick of the light where people are trying to make comparisons between your own power structure and someone else power structure, you end up – unwittingly probably in Chomsky’s case – downplaying the crimes of the other power structure. So I think the Serb thing is a very good example. What he says about Milosevic – he’s not pro-Milosevic, it would be ridiculous to say he is – but what he ends up doing is saying, “Why are you talking about these crimes they aren’t so bad: look at this”. And the statement “They aren’t so bad” – well they are bad. There will be some instances when they aren’t as bad and I agree Milosevic’s worse crimes are still not as bad as, say, what Reagan did in Nicaragua. But the problem is when you become so abusive and mocking towards the people who are trying to expose these crimes, saying, “Why are you talking about this? This is small beer compared to X, Y or Z”. The things he’s said about Samantha Power or Susan Sontag for example – really good decent center-left people – are absurd. It sounds like I have a personal thing but I think calling me a “Stalinist” and calling me “beneath contempt” is over the top. I disagree with Noam Chomsky, I respect him – I disagree with him. I can’t think of anyone Noam Chomsky disagrees with who he doesn’t say is a evil lying tool of the far right.

MK: Do you think he is very clever in how he plays his public persona, then? When he is doing interviews he always says, “I don’t have a monopoly on the truth; I’m not especially clever.”

JH: No I don’t actually don’t think that is a pose. I think he means it.

MK: Then why does he become so tyrannical when he’s questioned? It seems like a contradiction.

JH: Look, I understand that Chomsky has been libeled in terrible ways by people. The fact that there are seriously people who say that he is a Holocaust denier – that is disgusting. No one who looks at what he did during the Faurisson affair could think that – it’s just dishonest. Or the idea that he was in favour of the Khumer Rouge: he did belittle the crimes of the Khumer Rouge – in that article in the Nation he did, because of the trick of the light I was talking about where he looks only at our crimes and barely looks at the oithers, but insists on making comparisons anyway. But the idea that he is pro-Pol Pot is just unbelievably stupid and willfully dishonest – you have to be deliberately misreading him. So I appreciate that you get a siege mentality. If you are constantly being attacked in unbelievably abusive and libelous ways, you get a siege mentality where you think anyone who’s criticizing you – you just think, “Fuck you”. But I think he’s taken that too far and in a way stopped listening to what people say. I think there are instructive comparisons between Chomsky and Pilger as well.

JH: In fact, I’ll just get something from a book [he gets out a book by Alexander Cockburn]. There is this absolutely astonishing bit that I marked because it astonished me so much. This is when Vaclav Havel came to speak to Congress just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Chomsky wrote to Cockburn describing Havel as the “the most illuminating examples of the total and complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture.” He described his address as “silly and morally repugnant”. And he actually describes Havel, who dedicated his life to protesting against Stalinism, as a “Stalinist”! He describes his “supreme hypocrisy and audacity to clothe his praise for the defenders of freedom with gushing about responsibility for the human race.” He compares him to the writers for Pravda and this is a man who went to prison for fighting against Stalinism and to have this extreme contempt for this man is astonishing. And this absurd hyperbole: “the Western intellectual community at large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third World peasants and Stalinist hacks”. Stalinist hacks oversaw the murder of 30 million people in the Soviet Union. I agree there are huge death tolls from the things that the Western intellectual community supports, but to say that they are “vastly below” that of Stalin hacks just undermines your credibility. And it’s especially ironic seeing that he was writing to Alexander Cockburn who was literally a supporter of the Soviet Union. To attack Havel as a Stalinist while writing to your Stalinist friend is extraordinary.

An anarchistic critique of your power structure is useful, but when it gets to a situation where there are two competing power structures and one has to choose between them, Chomsky’s argument completely falls apart. Afghanistan is a good example. I can’t think of a worse regime in modern times than Taliban Afghanistan: half the population - women - enslaved, gay people decapitated, torture routine, music was banned. And Chomsky’s reaction to the overthrow of that regime for reasons that, I agree, were nothing to do with altruism or human rights or anything like that, was to accuse the people who overthrew it of genocide and to not at any point weigh these competing power systems and say, one is bad but the other is worse. Were there are two competing power structures – very bad in both instances – instead of throwing up your hands and saying you must wait for a better world. I think you need to try to find out what ordinary people on the ground want. Did Afghans prefer and Anglo-American invasion to the Taliban forever?

And on Iraq. I obviously want a world where the choice is much better than George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. But it’s a very long-term project to make a world that is better than that and confronted with that choice you do have to make hard decisions. And Chomsky would say that the minute you try to make that hard decision - the Taliban versus Bush, or Ba’athism vs Bush - you are making a concession to the fact that the world is already full of these illegitimate power structures -- and its true to extent you are. But I just think if anyone tries to find their way through that moral complexity, he will just say, “You’re evil”; “You’re a Stalinist”; “You’re supporting this power structure”. Oxfam did really important opinion polling in Afghanistan a year after the fall of the Taliban and something like 80% of Afghans said their life was better. There are still unbelievably awful problems – there are still whole parts of Afghanistan that are still effectively run by Taliban warlords. But if you have a situation where a year after the invasion 80% of the people their lives are better and yet Noam Chomsky is still saying that it was “literally true” that they were subjected to a genocide, then something has gone wrong in his interpretative framework.

MK: But what do you think about his purely empirical analysis of power. Take his book “Hegemony or Survival?” which has less of a world-view and is more just fact laying and juxtaposition of facts…

JH: I think on two issues American hegemony is profoundly damaging for the world – and potentially lethal. The first is Global Warming – I actually think we should stop calling it Global Warming because it sounds quite benign. We should call it Destablising The Planet’s Climate or Climate Chaos which is what Greenpeace have started calling it. On the question of Climate Chaos, it is undoubtedly the case that if we carry on with America’s government – effectively owned by oil corporations – not only basically denying Climate Change but also vandalizing any attempt to prevent the destruction of our own habitat, then that will lead to a disaster for humanity.

It’s also true that if we carry on with nuclear proliferation in the way we are. The hegemonic power has destroyed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), developing mini-nukes, and is actually accepting and encouraging the proliferation across the world like they have just done with India. Not only are they not doing what they are meant to do under the NPT which is dismantle their own nuclear arsenal – they are building up their own nuclear arsenal and encouraging some other select client powers to do the same. That is catastrophic. If we carry on like this, sooner or later these weapons will be used.

MK: So how do we stop it?

JH: Chomsky’s right on this, in part. You need to challenge the legitimacy of that power structure. It is not legitimate that these people hold power over the world. That all oil companies with their wealth buying democratic structure – that is not legitimate and the only way you change it is the way you change any kind of illegitimate power structure: enough people challenge it and enough people say, “Hang on, this isn’t right” and I agree this is very difficult.

And there’s another element of Chomsky’s thought which is very important which is his analysis of the media. I was initially skeptical of it but I think there is some truth in it.

MK: You write in the mainstream media.

JH: So does Chomsky, obviously.

MK: Do you feel pressure? Do you think if you said certain things your editors would mention something?

JH: No. It doesn’t work like that. I think Chomsky is right again that is doesn’t work like that.

MK: It’s unspoken?

JH: Yes. What he would say is you internalize the norms and there are certain things that you don’t say. I think that is how it works; it doesn’t work as self-censorship. But in terms of the Independent, I’m very lucky. I got some people saying to me after I started at the Independent, understandably in some ways, that they must have chosen me because of my views on Iraq. Actually the editor didn’t know my views on Iraq before I started there. I appreciate the Independent is exceptional. I think that I could literally say anything; there are very few limits. If I turned round and said “the Holocaust didn’t happen” or something like that, my editors would probably ask what the fuck I was going on about. But short of saying something that was transparently insane I can’t imagine that at any time the editors would say, "You can’t say that." But then I am lucky – the two parts of the media that I have worked in are owned by comparatively benign billionaires rather than the vast majority who are disgusting and foul billionaires. I think trusting one of the most important institutions in a free society – the media – to the benevolence of billionaires is pretty dodgy.

MK: How else do you structure it though? You can’t have it under state control can you?

JH: Well that’s the problem and again Chomsky doesn’t have an answer to this and I don’t think that’s his fault.

MK: He’s into independent non-corporate media though isn’t he? But that’s hard to get off the ground.

JH: The Guardian is a good example but he would say that is corrupted by the fact they have to take advertising from corporations which is probably true. On this issue I don’t think anyone should dismiss Chomsky’s analysis – I think it is analysis is important and to a significant degree right. I don’t know the solution and nor apparently does Chomsky but I do think it is very tough. It is a manufacturing of a common sense that people do absorb. I’ve seen it most clearly on things like asylum.

MK: Do you feel like you personally have a lot of power?

JH: No. I think I am incredibly lucky. There was one time I’d been doing the job for about six months and I was invited to have lunch – as you are sometimes – with this Labour MP, very nice, very intelligent Labour backbencher. For the first half an hour I was thinking there’s something not quite right here. We were having this conversation, it was really interesting and suddenly it occurred to me: You’re treating me like I’m more important than you, why are you doing that? You’ve been elected, you’ve done something. I haven’t done anything; I don’t know any of these things. Why is the power balance wrong here?
And you really see that. I don’t go to a lot of mediaish things – I think journalists that hang out with journalists are asking for trouble, it warps your worldview. But I was at a Christmas party for a television programme and I was talking to talking to Melanie Phillips and another columnist and this cabinet minister came up to us and was incredibly kind of solicitous and acted like we were important and I just wanted to say “Stop it! You know more stuff than us, you are doing the important job.” I thought something has gone wrong here.

Norman Finkelstein.

MK: I interviewed Norman Finkelstein in America recently. He said to me that the Israel-Palestine conflict was “extremely uncomplicated”. He’s quite dogmatic. Israel always seems to be the bad guy…

JH: Well I would preface it by saying: I love Norman Finkelstein; I think he is incredibly unboring and I like him a lot. I don’t know him as a person but as a writer he is a brilliant voice to have out there. What he has done in exposing Joan Peters who is a fraud and liar was amazing. And he exposed a wider intellectual corruption that actually you still get people citing Joan Peters long after it’s been show absolutely conclusively that she’s a liar. That’s incredible. I think he is now doing the same thing with Alan Dershowitz. I think it is very valuable.

I love what he says about Elie Wiesel. I hate the mystification of the Holocaust and the attempt to turn it into a kind of quasi-religious thing. I love – partly because Finkelstein has the unimpeachable moral authority of having two parents who survived the Holocaust – he can say this in a way that if other people said it you would instinctively be more suspicious of it. Elie Wiesel says things like “the Holocaust cannot be comprehended by human beings.” That is a ridiculous thing to say. It was one of the worst crimes of the 20th century. It was unbelievably evil but it is comprehensible and actually if you set it up as being incomprehensible you increase the chances of happening again. It is comprehensible and it is amenable to human reason and I would say actually it is not the worst crime of the 20th century. If you compare to Mao’s crimes, for example, where the new Jung Chang biography, I think quite credibly, says that 70 million people were murdered which dwarfs even the crimes of Hitler.

MK: Do you agree with Finkelstein that the Holocaust serves an ideological purpose?

JH: Of course. And I think Finkelstein is right about another thing. What he does and what a lot of Americans don’t do is see it from the Palestinian perspective. The Palestinians are living in a country – or rather a series of imperial colonies – and they have this fairly peaceful agricultural existence and people from another country come along, ethnically cleanse 800,000 of them, build a state on most of the land, and shunt the refugees into the remaining bits. Then less than 20 years later after a war to reclaim that land they then take even the remaining scraps and occupy them. The primary victims here are the Palestinians. How would we react if the Kurds invaded Cornwall and ethnically cleansed it, and explained nicely that they were deprived of a state and needed somewhere to live? I doubt many people here would be understanding. How would Americans feel if the Native Americans expelled everybody else from California and established an Iriquois homeland?

Where I think Finkelstein is wrong is that he never sees the Israeli perspective. Isaac Deutscher the great leftist historian gave a really good analogy for Palestine. He said, “A Jewish man jumps out of a burning building and he lands on a Palestinian. And it’s very easy to understand why the Palestinian to say “why has this guy landed on me and broken all my limbs?” But the logical person to blame is the person who set fire to building. The Jews were fleeing a burning building – they were fleeing a Europe that tried to systematically eliminate them from the face of the earth.

MK: But after landing on the Palestinian you don’t start punching him in the head…

JH: Yes, that’s a very good extension to the analogy – I think that’s true. I think the crimes of 1948 are terrible – they’re horrific crimes – but I can understand why they happened. The Palestinians did nothing to incur them and I think it’s terrible and wrong but I don’t know what I would have done if I was Jew in those times – I don’t know with the position I would have taken, but if I’d been a Palestinian I would have tried to resist it, obviously. But I think those crimes can be understood. The crimes after 1967 can’t. They have been counterproductive for so many reasons. I find it slightly strange that people say it’s “anti-Israeli” to want to end the occupation – I have lots of Israeli friends and lots of Palestinian friends so one of the reasons why I believe very strongly in a proper democratic Palestine on all of Gaza, all of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem is precisely because I want my Israeli friends to be safe as well as the Palestinians.

One thing that astonished me when I went to the Occupied Territories was not just how brutal it was because I expected that, but how unbelievably stupid and counterproductive it was for Israeli’s. I remember going to Rafah and it just looks like – and this is being only slightly hyperbolic – Hiroshima. It’s just been destroyed, a city of 100,000 has just been destroyed and people living in absolute terror and going to cities where whole towns were under lock down. I went to Hebron where the settler, Barach Goldstein, did that massacre, there are 100,000 Palestinians and I think there’s about 2,000 settlers and the 100,000 Palestinians are literally on lock down in their homes - which are smaller than this flat - for half the year so these settlers can move around.

MK: Do you think the “Gaza disengagement plan” is moving in the right direction? Do you think ostensibly what the Israeli government is saying about the plan is true? Finkelstein was saying that the aid agencies, and even parts of the UN, still say that the occupation continues because Israel still control the water, airspace etc…

JH: They control the water, the airspace and the borders. The “Gaza disengagement plan” is a good thing in two senses. One, because obviously internally for the people of Gaza it is slightly better – they don’t have checkpoints, they are running themselves, they don’t have Israeli soldiers and settlers patrolling. Obviously that’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing because it demonstrated to Israeli’s that you can uproot settlers and the sky won’t fall in. It was an important psychological threshold for Israeli’s if it’s taken forward but the problem is that’s not why it was done. And Ariel Sharon’s adviser Dov Weisglass said explicitly that they were withdrawing from Gaza precisely so they could consolidate control of the West Bank. They were withdrawing to defuse the population time bomb where you would actually have within a generation more Arabs between the river and the sea than you would have Jews, which would turn Israel into an apartheid state.

No-one wanted Gaza – it didn’t have any religious significance – you’ve got to be a real nutcase to be Jewish and want to live in Gaza, you’ve got to be completely mad to want to be a settler in Gaza. I found it genuinely bizarre when I went there: Why would these people do this?

MK: It’s a biblical thing though isn’t?

JH: But Gaza, as I understand it, isn’t in the Bible. The West Bank is – they call it Judea and Samaria. I would stress that biblical justifications to land are ludicrous in any circumstances. I am not for a second saying that the West Bank people are in any way justified but at least there is some internal logic, no matter how deranged the West Bank settlements are. But the Gaza settlements – it’s just bizarre.

MK: So it’s not part of “Eretz Israel”?

JH: Depends what you mean. The biblical borders of Israel, which I would stress are a preposterous guide to anything, but look at the biblical map of Israel it includes bits of Jordan, even Egypt. Even the most crazed of religious fundamentalist settlers doesn’t actually believe in the biblical boundaries – you just couldn’t, you’d have to be mentally ill. The Gush Emunin, and the absolute hardcore religious groups, are not that crazy about Gaza. They were worried only because they could see that it established a precedent. But the real religious nutcases, they all go to the West Bank.

Another thing to bear in mind about the settlements is that the religious maniacs are actually a minority, even of the settlers on the West Bank. There is amazing analysis that shows that around 60% of the people who live in the settlements have been subsidized by the Israeli government because it is cheaper to live there. So you have actually got this situation where you have imported some of the Israeli poor for these completely counter-productive reasons in a situation that means that other Israeli poor people who are dependent on the Israeli transport system end up getting blown up for it. It’s just completely mad.

I would also say something about another consequence of the settlements. Palestinian identity has gone through three distinct waves. There was no distinctive Palestinian identity before Zionism. Sometimes people say this as if to say that Palestinian identity isn’t real, which is daft. In 1870, the year Italy was reunified, according to Dennis Max Smith, one of the main historians of the Risorgimento, found that only 10% of Italians knew what the word “Italy” meant. But no one would now say that Italy isn’t a real country, or the Italians are somehow faking it. All nationalisms are invented at some point – most of them are fairly recent inventions. Palestinian identity didn’t exist before Zionism. But then it had this early phase which was a kind of pan-Arabism where they instinctively appealed to the rest of the Arab world to rescue them. And that obviously dies on the battlefields in 1967 along with Nasser’s general project. But then you get this more parochial kind of nationalism that was much more recognizable to us – attachment to the peasants, romanticism of the land. It’s much more like a European nationalism in its early formation.

What you have had since the 1980s is a really disturbing further shift where they are moving away from Palestinian nationalism and towards Islamism - and that has been caused partly by the intensification of the occupation. People often say why didn’t the Palestinian’s protest peacefully? Well, they did – it was called the first Intifadah, and they were beaten for it – Yitzhak Rabin said, “Go and break their bones”, when he was Chief of Staff. One thing that is not appreciated enough – and I didn’t appreciate enough until I went there – is that the generation who are becoming suicide murders now are the people who are the children of the first intifada who saw their parents protest peacefully and saw them having the shit kicked out of them for it. I don’t say that to in any sense to justify suicide murder – targeting civilians is the most terrible thing you can ever do. No matter what your resistance struggle and no matter how legitimate it is, it's never legitimate to walk into a pizzeria and blow up children.

What you are seeing now is an evolution of Palestinian identity beyond, or beneath nationalism, into Islamism. That is going to be a disaster – and it’s actually promoted by Israeli policies. A majority of Palestinians are still nationalists rather than Islamists. But if what happens is that the Palestinian identity becomes distinctively Islamist, which hasn’t happened yet – you still have about 40% support for Hamas and 60% support that Fatah - but once the Islamization is complete that is a disaster. Not only for any prospect of peace - it’s much harder to deal with Islamists - it’s also a disaster for Palestinians internally because what you are seeing is all the things that come with Islamism: liquidation of the limited freedoms that women already enjoyed, for example. You have in Gaza, which is much more Islamist than the West Bank, this crazy thing that I understand has now ended since the Israeli troops withdrew, where they forbade women from going into the sea! I mean bizarre, cruel. It would be very bad for Palestinian society if it becomes Islamist. You are seeing it in patches: there are women who don’t leave their houses, which is a new thing in Palestinian society.

MK: Did you encounter much anti-Semitism when you went to the Occupied Territories? In terms of the political agenda of most Palestinians, is there still a belief in “pushing Israel into the sea”?

I interviewed people who were trainee suicide bombers – one was were Islamic Jihad, two were for Hamas – and even they said, “we would never accept a two-state solution morally, but if we had all of Gaza, all of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem we are not going to fire over the border. We would get on with building up that society.” But I understand why some Israeli’s would be reluctant to take them at their word, obviously.

In terms of anti-Semitism, what you have got in the Occupied Territories is a society of people that have been driven mad – they have been driven absolutely crazy and it’s not hard to see why. One of our stringers in the West Bank – really brilliant, intelligent guy – quoting me chunks of Edward Said and reading James Joyce – very sane, in favor of peace settlement and everything – I was talking to him late one night in Ramallah and for some reason I had to pay for something with some American currency and he said “you know about this 20 dollar note don’t you?” and I said “No what do you mean?” He started folding this note in a very elaborate way, like origami, and said “Look at this – do you see what this looks like?” so I said “No I can’t see what you’re getting at,” and he said “Look - it’s the twin towers being destroyed and underneath is the Star of David.” And the way he folded it look very slightly like one tower. So I said to him “look at the back: this note was printed in the 1950s. Are you suggesting that not only are the Jews so cunning, fiendish and evil that they predicted the destruction of the World Trade Centre – they also predicted the building of the damn thing, and hid the plan on a twenty dollar bill?” And he said, “They are clever. Fiendish.”

MK: It’s understandable in a way…

JH: I would go insane in that situation and I hope I wouldn’t do anything but I can understand being driven completely barking mad. But to understand is not to forgive racism, obviously.

MK: I personally find anti-Arabism a lot worse and more prevalent than anti-Semitism these days…

JH: Oh sure, the prejudice against Arabs is astonishingly rife in Western society. No one would be surprised in London if you got a taxi and they said, “I think we should blow up all these Arabs.” Almost everyone would be astonished if someone said, “I think should blow up all these Jews.” I think they are both despicable things to say, obviously, but one is far more common than the other.

Part of the problem is that it is very hard to build alliances across both parts. What we’ve seen since 9/11 in this country is a very significant spike in anti-Semitic attacks and Islamophobic attacks. The Mosque just up the road has been attacked loads of times. It’s very hard to build that solidarity against both – because those two communities so despise each other, or at least significant parts. Actually I’m not sure how true that it is – there is a very large liberal part of the British Jewish community and a growing liberal part of the British Muslim community that actually do believe in reconciliation.

George Galloway:

MK: I agree with you that Galloway is a bit of a psychopath, but he is one of the few mainstream anti-war voices which I think is very important….

JH: I do agree with Christopher Hitchens on this. He’s not anti-war: he’s on the other side. George Galloway talked about the “glorious martyrs” who were launching “140 operations a day” in Iraq. Well, what are these operations? Lets have a look at them. These are people who are overwhelmingly targeting innocent Iraqis for suicide murder. Going into market squares and blowing up Iraqi’s – that’s not anti-war.
Hitchens is also right about how disgusting it was to see Galloway chumming up to Cindy Sheehan when he’s just described the people who killed her son as heroic. It’s just bizarre.

MK: Yeah, I went to the debate between Hitchens and Galloway in New York and I found myself cheering both of them. Galloway would say something like “The US and UK supported Saddam all through his worst crimes” and I’d clap. Then Hitchens would say “But didn’t you spend Christmas with Tariq Aziz?” and I’d be clapping again….

JH: There is a need for voices – I very strongly believe this – who are pointing out that British and American governments not only supported and armed Saddam – indeed more so after Halabja, not less so – and that sanctions were profoundly evil. I always thought about the war that there were two credible positions. There was a credible left position which was saying getting rid of Saddam militarily through an invasion will cause more trouble than its worth and we can’t trust these people to bring democracy afterwards anyway – indeed we have good reason to distrust – so what we should do is lift sanctions and hope the Iraqis rise up. I don’t think that would have happened without a massive bloodbath, I think it would have been incredibly hard. Some people were very naïve – like Chomsky and Medialens – to say, “They could have got rid of him and it would have been fine."

MK: Their argument is that it happened to people like Suharto who had been supported by the West.

JH: Yeah, but the idea that Saddam Hussein or Uday or Quasay would ever have just allowed people to rise up and overthrow them without ordering 1991 style massacres seems to be fantastical. I have never met a single Iraqi who believes that, and I’d be amazed if they could find one. Anyway, there is that credible argument: get rid of sanctions and just hope the Iraqis become stronger, even just getting rid of the sanctions if it meant Saddam without sanctions/ Even if you’re living under a tyranny, you’re better off living under a tyranny and not being denied cancer medicines and so on.

Then there is the second credible left-wing position, saying you have neither sanctions nor Saddam by invasion. That was my view. What I never thought was credible was the Robin Cook line, or the line taken by a lot of Liberal Democrats which was: the status quo’s working fine, sanctions are working – that was a really evil thing to say. Madelaine Albright said it was a “price worth paying” that all these people were dying.

There is an important place for these voices – for voices against the war, against the occupation - even if I don’t agree with them entirely. But George Galloway is in no position to voice opposition to either of those things. Galloway is in favor of movements that are psychopathically murderous. To go to Syria and say the Syrian people are “very lucky” – those are the words he used – to have a Ba’athist dictator... I’ve been to Syria and I’ve seen how frightened people are. It’s one thing to say, “If he was overthrown what would come next? Would they be even more crazy?” You can have that conversation. But that’s just not what Galloway saying. He is saying they are “very lucky”.

Then there’s this ridiculous thing he says about his saluting of Saddam Hussein. He says, “I wasn’t saluting Saddam Hussein, I was saluting the Iraqi people.” Just read the paragraph of that speech. He says, “I’ve just been to Palestine and they are naming babies after you.” They weren’t calling them “Iraq”, they were calling them Saddam. Galloway is crazy, and he is also extremely conservative. I find it bizarre that so much of the left has thrown in their lot with him. This is a man who says we need a “much tougher war on drugs”, for example.

MK: Anti-abortion, nostalgic about the Soviet Union.

JH: Yeah. Brags about opposing gay adoption. This is a really ugly conservative figure. Because I live here (Bethnal Green and Bow) I saw what happened in this community when he was running this campaign. It was run as a reactionary campaign from the right. His canvassers were going to my Muslim neighbours and saying, “Did you know that Oona King was in favor of downgrading cannabis?”

This was not a left-wing campaign. It is bizarre to see these people who see themselves on the left going out and stumping for someone who is aligned with these horrific reactionary forces.

MK: It’s happening a lot with the Left. John Pilger and Tariq Ali are supporters of the resistance.

JH: My friend Nick Cohen who I think is a brilliant writer and a brilliant person has gone very big on this with the idea that all of the left is pro-the Iraq resistance. I don’t actually think that’s true. There are parts of the far-left that are.

MK: Pilger is.

JH: Pilger famously said, “You can’t be choosy”. Arundhatni Roy said “look, I can wait until there is a feminist, pro-gay resistance in Iraq or I can support what’s already there.” I don’t think that is morally justifiable. What’s ironic and horrible actually is that there are parts of Iraqi society that are resisting both the occupation and Islamism – really heroic people – they are resisting the horrendous IMF-ing of the Iraqi economy, they are resisting the mass privatization, the mass unemployment it brings, and they are resisting these crazed Islamists who want to bind women in these burqua’s and so on. Not that much of the left is supporting them. The Basra oil workers went on strike to make sure that far more of the oil profit was going towards Basra and they succeeded. And yet these Islamists are beheading those trade unionists, and Galloway describes these people as heroes and martyrs with their “140 military operations a day”.

I wouldn’t want to exaggerate the percentage of the left that has done that. I think most of the left is not like that. There is a part of the left that is deluded about Islamism. When Foucault went to Iran during the revolution he described it as this great liberatory voice, and that has been a recurring delusion on parts of the left. I think it is something that postmodernists are particularly prone to because they have got into this mind-set that the Enlightenment is this evil system of control. Foucault was quite mad before that – he said things like lynch mobs are better than juries because they are closer to instinctual responses – I mean it is disgusting. I think there is a small part of the left that believes Islamism is some kind of revolutionary force.

MK: Isn’t it just more that at this present moment they are opposed to America. Galloway is a Catholic, doesn’t he just do anything to further his agenda. I don’t know many leftists who believe Islam is a liberatory voice but at the moment there is no one else fighting the American military….

JH: I think there are a lot of places that are opposing American hegemony that are not beheading trade unionists, gays and women. Chavez in Venezuela, for example – there are profoundly democratic movement across the world – not least in Iraq itself - who are opposing American hegemony and Islamism.

MK: Muslims I speak to don’t believe this is “Islamism”, they say these are just fascists…

JH: You have to distinguish between Muslims and Islamists. The vast majority of Muslims in the world do not support this psychopathic interpretation of Islam. And with good reason, because they are the first ones up against the wall when these people take power In Algeria, when Islamists nearly came to power 100,000 people died – and those 100,000 people who were killed, they weren’t people like you and me, they were Muslims. As Peter Tatchell says very well, who are the victims of Islamism across the world? They are gay people, their women, gay and female Muslims. The victims of the Ayatollah Khomieni – it’s a different strand of political Islam because it’s Shiite – but they were Muslim. I accept there were Christian and gay and atheist victims as well, of course, but they were a minority.

MK: So then wouldn’t it be better to say that the left is getting involved with fascism, rather than Islamism?

JH: Well, that is what Hitchens would say. I think it’s true: it’s a strand of theocratic fascism. I’m reluctant to get into this game of saying, “this is true Islam, and this false Islam and these people are just perverting Islam”. I’m an atheist – I think it’s all wrong. I don’t think there is a true Islam underpinning the Koran anymore than I think there is a true Christianity underpinning the Bible. The Koran, like the Bible, like the Torah, like all religious texts, is a contradictory, often nonsensical work of human beings and there is no true essence underpinning it. There are Muslims who have a more liberal interpretation and there are Muslims who have a more crazy interpretation and obviously I hope the Muslims who have the more liberal interpretation prevail. But I am not going to say they’re right and the other lot are wrong. My argument is that they are all wrong if they think their morality should be derived from a 1,000-year-old book written by people with profoundly different ethics to our own.

MK: My problem with your work is that you supported the war in Iraq even though everyone predicated that it would quicken the rise of radical Islam. They see themselves as a vanguard and they want to appeal to the pool of young Muslims and obviously invading a sovereign Islamic so controversially – it’s still dubious whether it was legal, I don’t think it was…

JH: I think it probably wasn’t legal, I don’t think I ever thought it was – probably on balance it wasn’t.

MK: But it just inflamed it and watered the seeds…

JH: That was always one of the drawbacks to it.

MK: Your argument would probably be that getting rid of a genocidal dictator should be a matter of principle.

JH: What I always thought was: you are confronted with two power structures, both illegitimate and deeply flawed – one was the Bush administration, the other was Saddam Hussein. My feeling about the war was – given a choice between these two things – obviously I want to see a world with much better choices than that – but given that was the choice we were confronted with, the best way through it was to try to find out what Iraqis prefer. Would Iraqis rather take their chances with an Anglo-American invasion with all the risks that took, or with the near certainty of Saddam and his sons forever? And the evidence I had from going to Iraq, from the opinion polls and from meeting as many Iraqi exiles as I could, is that Iraqis would rather take their chance with the invasion than with Saddam and his sons for as far as the eye could see. That did turn out to be true: all the opinion polls showed that Iraqis – they thought the Americans were doing this for oil and Israel and they hate Bush – but they still preferred that option to the option of Saddam and his sons for as far as the ye could see.

MK: Aren’t a majority of Iraqi’s now in favor of withdrawal?

JH: Yes, a majority now is in favor of withdrawal. What I have tried to do, for what it’s worth, all the way through, is to try to side with what Iraqis want for their country. What Iraqis wanted was for Saddam to be removed, quick elections – there was no way people had to wait two years for elections, it was ludicrous that it took that long – it took 6 months after the fall of communism. And even Robert Fisk says, I think rightly, if they’d held elections in the first six months there would not have been anywhere near as much violence as there’s been.

MK: This is different to Hitchens because when I interviewed him he said obviously it’s important what the Iraqi’s want but he really what they want is “irrelevant”. He says that Saddam has flouted UN resolutions etc…

JH: You see I disagree with that. I never thought it was about UN resolutions. I never thought there were Weapons of Mass Destruction like Christopher did. I always thought that was a ridiculous piece of nonsense and I said it all along – I thought it was transparently untrue. Indeed, if there had been WMD’s it would have been a very good reason not to invade because they would have used them! Of course, with Iraq it is perfectly possible I was wrong.

MK: Having seen what’s happened now, would you support an invasion if you could go back?

JH: If I’m honest, I don’t know.

MK: Reading you, Hitchens and Nick Cohen there obviously is a humanitarian case for the war.

JH: I think I would find it very hard to go to my Iraqi friends who are out there now when they are trying to organize women’s organizations and democratic organizations and seeing the people they are organizing being shot. When I try to talk to them about this they say, “Look, we don’t want this argument, we want to talk about what is happening now.” They don’t regret the invasion, but then, for obvious reasons they are worried about much more immediate things. They were in favor of the war and I think it would be very painful for them to admit that if things could have become so catastrophic and bad that even the horrors of Saddam might have been preferable. I don’t know. I find it very hard to feel that Iraqis would have been better off if Saddam would have been left in power. But I can see the opinion polls suggest now that the majority of Iraqis think the war has done more harm than good and they certainly show that a majority of Iraqis want the troops to leave now – and I agree with them certainly on the latter point.

I think in a way the left has been saying: I don’t think it’s a matter of troops out, or stay the course – I think there is a very simple solution: have a referendum, and just say to the Iraqi people, “Do you want the troops to stay?” Obviously that’s not going to happen because the huge factor in this is that the Americans are not motivated by siding with the Iraqi people. And I never though they were. Some of the pro-war left seem to have convinced themselves that the US army is like the armed wing of Amnesty International. I always thought that was ludicrous, but what I should have put a higher premium on at the time was realizing that the fact they were doing this for deeply the wrong reasons was going to have a much bigger effect on what they did afterwards. And given they haven’t supported democracy – they have actually tried to destroy it in many places, not least Venezuela in 2001 – and given that only two years before they had tried to destroy a democratic regime with the support of 77% of the Venezuelan people, was it naïve to think there would be anything like democracy in Iraq? That they would tolerate it, on top of some of the largest oil resources in the world?

This is why it’s all very well to advocate a referendum but are the Americans going to abandon all that oil after investing all this? Probably not.

MK: Also, how much good will leaving do for the Iraqis?

JH: Well again the best people to assess this are Iraqis – it’s their country. There are two arguments. There’s either the argument that the Americans being there is preventing a civil war – they are holding off the jihadists, they are holding off the Ba’athists and so on. I would point out just as a clause to that they are doing that by building their own centers of torture, by having tens of thousands of people disappearing into the Iraqi prison system, many of who are going to be innocent. And by using terrible weapons like depleted uranium.

Or there’s the other argument: that the presence of the American troops is itself aggravating the situation and that Iraqis are better off fighting these jihadists on their own. And in a way – just like when confronted with Bush vs. Ba’athism my argument was what do Iraqis think – in this situation you are confronted with that and again I think Iraqis know better than me: it’s their country, they’re on the ground, they are the people taking these risks, they are the people facing this. And the opinion polls suggest very strongly that that Iraqis think they would be better off fighting these jihadists and Ba’athists on their own, than they would fighting them with American troops who probably aren’t doing any good and bring with them a terrible cost.

The American occupation has bought with it a program of extreme neo-liberalism – far more extreme than anything tried in any democratic country, just like the one imposed on Russia. When I interviewed Joseph Stiglitz about this he said “The way they are acting in Iraq suggests they think what they did in Russia after the fall of Communism was a great success,” when in fact it saw the country slide back towards fascism which is basically where it is under Putin, and slide back to some of the aspects of the old regime. And they have imposed exactly the same thing on Iraq.

The brutality of the military occupation has been fairly well covered in the media like the Independent and I think that’s been right. What’s been really underreported it how catastrophic the economic occupation of Iraq has been. The economic program they have imposed on Iraq has created, according to economists at Baghdad University, 70% unemployment in most of the country. If we had 70% unemployment in Britain – even with a history of fairly stable democracy – we would have riots and mass violence and catastrophe. Germany and Japan would not have become democracies if they had extreme neo-liberalism imposed on them immediately after the fall of fascism.

Part of the problem is that any aspiration towards nation building is completely undermined by this crazy economic agenda that they have imposed and, worse, that they have ensured will be imposed on Iraq for a very long time. Again, one of the things that has been really under-reported is that Saddam left Iraq with a vast amount of debt, and lots of us were arguing well this should just be cancelled immediately: it’s an odious debt, the Iraqi people didn’t incur – it’s ridiculous for the Iraqi people to pick up the tab for their own torture and murder. What happened is that in Paris the G8 countries were reported to have cancelled the debt. That sounds great and wonderful, but actually what they agreed to do was agreed to cancel the debt if Iraqis let the IMF and World Bank basically run the economy. So if they chuck out the IMF and World Bank or break the extremely neoliberal rules imposed by bankers in Washington with no reference to the Iraqi people at all, they get Saddam’s debt bought back down on their head. I think the economic occupation is very problematic and one of the things that is very frustrating is that there are Iraqi’s fighting against that economic occupation like the Basra oil workers and what are people like the SWP and Galloway doing? They are cheering on the people who are beheading the people resisting it – the genuine democratic resistance. The Alliance for Workers Liberty who are quite opposed to the SWP but are a kind of Trotskyite group have been doing a lot of good work exposing this.

Christopher Hitchens:

MK: In your interview with Christopher Hitchens you said you felt like he had “slumped into neo-conservatism”. When I spoke to him he still had all the left-wing rhetoric and talked about all the Enlightenment ideals he still holds dear…

JH: Well I would preface anything I say about Hitchens by saying I love him. He is a hero for me. The thing that made me want to be a writer was reading his book about Mother Theresa, “The Missionary Position”, which is amazing. I read that when I was 14 after I’d seen the documentary on Channel 4 and I just though that is the most amazing book. Just taking something that seems to be taken for granted - that this women was a saintly benign humanitarian – and exposing that it was a complete lie: she was a crazed, disgusting religious fundamentalist who preferred pain and poverty to alleviating it. Amazing. I remember reading this and being blown away. All his work I just think is worth reading.

MK: He’s gone off the boil now hasn’t he?

JH: Well I think anything he says or does is worth engaging with. His take on everything that has happened since September 11th has to be broken down into three readings, along with Nick Cohen’s. There’s a reading of Islamism, there’s a reading of the left, and there’s a reading of neo-conservatism. I think you have to break them down because there are bits that are right and bits that are wrong.

Let’s start with their reading of Islamism. They have got one thing absolutely right which is that Islamism – which is not Islam, obviously, rather jihadism or whatever you want to call it, a very particular interpretation of Islam – is a totalitarian movement akin to fascism and communism. There are a hell of a lot of people who have not understood that, who have wanted to see it as just a by-product. I remember some people saying to me after 9/11 “yeah it’s bad but look what the Americans did to Vietnam, look at what they are doing with Kyoto – who can blame these people?” But these people are not protesting against Vietnam and the Kyoto treaty, they are protesting about the existence of Jews and gays, against the existence of liberated women, and so on. You get people who say: “Al-Qaida is terrible but poverty is terrible and they are protesting about poverty.” Hitchens is absolutely right to point that these people prefer poverty, it’s not they are against poverty, they think poverty is better – it makes you more spiritually pure. Actually it’s a weird kind of patronizing attitude towards these Islamists to assume that they are simply the mirror image of whatever we’ve done. They are a movement of their own; they have their own arguments. I have met Islamists in Syria, in the Finsbury Park mosque, around here [in the East End of London] all the time, in the Occupied Territories – they have their own arguments and they mean what they. I don’t think people should patronize them.

I think Hitchens and Cohen are right to say Islamism is a totalitarian movement and we are to understand that. There’s another half to that equation that I think they got wrong. Totalitarian movements do not emerge in vacuums. It is in no sense excusing them to say that there is a context in which this occurs. The context for Nazism – not an explanation for it, not a justification for it or anything of the kind – was the humiliation imposed by the Versailles treaty. Everyone agrees with that, no-one thinks that’s not true and no one thinks that anyone who says that is in any way soft on Nazism. In the same way, the context for this psychopathic, totalitarian ideology is what has been done to the Arab world over the last 60 years.

When Hitchens and Cohen say, “It’s a psychopathic movement” – yes, that’s true but psychosis rarely occurs in a vacuum. The reason why this psychotic movement has developed in the Arab world – and they don’t command the majority of support in the Arab world, but they developed in the Arab world and emanate out from there – is that for the last 60 years Western governments and their proxies have systematically murdered all the liberals and democrats in those countries. When there was a profoundly democratic movement in Iran in the 1950’s what did we do? We arranged a coup to get rid of the democratic person and installed a sub-fascist dictator – the Shah. My family lived in Iran under the Shah and they could see anybody who thought maybe they should have elections, was killed. So when you kill all the democrats and you kill all the liberals - not out of madness because they wanted a stable access to oil – you set up problems.

The story of our relationship with the Arab world for the past 60 years has been two deals. The deal is “you give us oil” and then the second deal is “you go home and do what you want but just make sure you’re stable”. It’s not apologizing for Islamism or acting as though Islamism is interested in democracy or freedom - which it manifestly isn’t, any more than Nazism was – to say look at the at the context in which it emerged. For an even more powerful example look at Chechnya. Look at what happened in Beslan – murdering and torturing school children – you just think this is incomprehensible psychosis, and on one level obviously it is. But look what’s happened with the Chechens over the last 40 years. The entire population of Chechnya was deported by Stalin to Siberia – half died on the way there, half died on the way back. When the Soviet Union fell, quite understandably they wanted to be independent of this country that had done this to them and had been committing crimes against them for over a century. They weren’t allowed to be and they were further brutalized. And a third of the population of Chechnya has died since 1991. You look at aerial picture of Grozny and it looks like it’s been nuked.

MK: But they’ll just fit the Iraq war into that same resistance ideology.

JH: Sure, I think it’s a separate thing. But what I’m saying that Islamism occurs in a context – that’s not to justify it but it’s a fact.

MK: But you’re saying you have to alleviate the grievances to get rid of it.

JH: You have to be careful here. It’s not that you alleviate the grievances because some of their grievances are totally unjustifiable. One of the grievances Bin laden lists is the loss of Andalucia – party of Spain – to the infidel. Another is that UN troops were used to establish East Timorese independence. Another is that gays and Jews exist. Another is that Israel exists. Not the occupation – just exists. These people are not seeking the 1967 borders. What do we do about their grievance that women walk about unveiled? What do we do about their grievance that democracy exists – rmember, these are people who say, “you vote, you die”?

MK: Yeah, obviously there are the mad people like that but you have to undermine the support base.

JH: And you undermine that support base by treating people justly and encouraging democracy which is the exact opposite of what we’ve been doing for fifty years.

MK: Not giving them some sort of fuel for their fire.

JH: Sure. That was always going to be one of the drawbacks of the Iraq war that Islamists would use it to say, “What does this tell you?”

But that is their first reading of Islamism where they are half-right when they say, “Islamism is a psychotic movement.” I think they are half-wrong in then assuming that anyone who is trying to explain the growth of that is in some way apologizing for it – I don’t think that’s true.

Then there is their second reading, which is of neo-conservatism. Hitchens’ reading of neo-conservatism is that firstly, he thinks that 9/11 taught the American governing class – even of the right – a lesson. They realized that they had supported stability at the cost of their security and that they then had to “unpick” that fact they had backed stability at the expense of democracy. Hitchens has actually said that America is now globally promoting the philosophy of Thomas Paine or even Tho

JH: (cont) These are people that made John Negroponte ambassador to Iraq and asked Henry Kissinger to serve on their 9/11 commission. Those people are both blood-soaked psychopathic war criminals – this is not an administration committed to those things. I think it is a profound misreading of what they are.

Hitchens believes that they are sincerely committed to democracy based on talking to people like Paul Wolfowitz – I just don’t think that matches their actions out there in the real world.

MK: Have you read Finkelstein’s essay on Hitchens?

JH: Yes.

MK: Do you think his change was motivated by personal reasons?

JH: No I don’t think it’s motivated by personal reasons in the sense I don’t think it’s motivated by greed.

MK: What I meant is that he had wanted to get out of the left for a long time and 9/11 provided the perfect opportunity.

JH: No I don’t think that’s true either. I think Christopher is naturally contrarian. I don’t think he’s greedy or it’s to do with alcohol either. I think you should judge him on his arguments. I think his arguments are coherent and brilliantly argued. I just don’t think they correlate with reality on this front, but I understand why he says it and I think it’s an argument worth engaging with. Calling him a “psychopath” which is what Finkelstein did in that essay – he quoted the things he had said about Clinton and said isn’t this true of Hitchens himself. I don’t think that’s true. And I don’t think Hitchens has particularly sold out his values – I think he’s saying the things has always had. Hitchens has always been in favor of wars against fascism – he was in favor of the Falklands war when 90% of the British left weren’t, although I think the chunk of the British left he belonged to were absolutely right which included the great Michael Foot although a lot of people forget that. He’s always despised theocracy and religion which is absolutely right. And the Salman Rushdie affair – he’s a very close friend of his – was a kind of a dry run: he saw a theocratic fascist calling for the murder of a novelist because of what he ascribed to a mentally ill person in a dream in a novel. And he say parts of the left equivocating and he was like “what are you talking about?” This is someone trying to kill someone for what they’ve written in a work of fiction, there is no grey area, there is no respect for that, this is as clear a fight between black and white as you could possibly imagine.

Hitchens has also always sided with the Kurds. The Kurds are the people in Iraq who overwhelmingly in the opinion polls still think the war was the right think to do – by huge majorities, we are talking 90% majorities.

MK: I spoke to Chomsky and put forward the idea that Hitchens still believes that the job of the left is to fight fascism. And Chomsky said that Hitchens was smart enough to know that the support for the war only increased the chances of the virus spreading. And Saddam was one of the most secular leaders…

JH: Saddam wasn’t an Islamist.

MK: But wasn’t Hitchens trying to conflate dictatorship with Islamism in Iraq.

JH: But I think Hitchens arguments are so well put and one should engage with them and take them at face value. He says Saddam was intermeshed increasingly with Islam. Zarquawi, for example, was already in Iraq before the war. I don’t agree with his argument on that. Ba’athism and Islamism are different things, and should be opposed for different reasons.

I’ll go on to the third element of the Hitchens-Cohen argument which is the left. They are right to say that a significant part of the left does not see Islamism for what it is and tries to accuse anyone who does see it for what it is as being Islamophobic. The most important example is the reaction by part of the left to the murder of Theo Van Gough. This is a man who was campaigning against the epidemic of domestic violence directed towards Muslim women. He was in favour of siding with Muslim women against misogyny and abuse. I cannot think of a more honourable left-wing cause. And on the streets of a democratic country,. He was approached by a man who was a jihadist. The jihadist believes women should be imprisoned in their homes and in burquas, that they are lesser human beings, that gay people and poets and novelists should be killed, that democracy is evil. I can’t think of a more reactionary figure. And he beheaded Von Gough. He sliced so deep into his throat his head came off. An absolutely clear fight between lkeft-wing forces and far-right forces – and what did the left say? There were actually parts of the left who said, oh, well, Van Gough shouldn’t have been so provocative. Galloway actually called him “Islamophobic”. Index on Cenbsorship – a veteran left-wing magazine – ran a really creepy article defending the murder. Nick Cohen was right to say that was a moment that revealed something had gone wrong with parts of the left.

Where I think he is mistaken is to say all of the left is like that. This is a small sliver of the far left that has gone mad. Not the majority. And the other mistake is to mix up their critique of the left with their flawed reading of neoconservatism. They basically say, not only are you betraying the left by supporting or apologizing for this Islamist murderer of a leftie, you are also betraying the left by refusing to support our reading of neoconservatism. I think their reading of neoconservatism is mistaken, so it undermines their wider point.

Johann Hari is a parents dream, and every sibling’s nightmare. He’s the son whose mum won’t stop gossiping about him at work; he’s the successful brother that your mum always beats you with when you’ve had a bad parents evening at school.

By the tender age of 20 he had climbed the first rung on the British power ladder, earning a double 1st from Cambridge University. This was followed quickly by a book, which flew on to the shelves when he was a baby-faced 22-year-old still barely out of his academic diapers.

From there he went on to write a play which was performed at the Edinburgh festival when he was not yet 23 earning him the title of the “new David Hare” (Daily Telegraph). By the grand old age of twenty-four he had been awarded a twice-weekly column on a national newspaper, reaching the career apotheosis of most near-to-retirement hacks.

On the way he has received endorsements from an eclectic crowd including glowing reviews from journalistic heavyweights Christopher Hitchens and Julie Burchill. He has also had the undoubted pleasure of being called a “cunt” by the now defunct pop group Busted, with similarly gratifying abuse coming from characters as diverse as Richard Littlejohn and George Galloway.

With a CV of such precocious weight, I was prepared to dislike him. I imagined a pretentious, arrogant and probably posh twenty-six going on sixty-year-old Oxbridge-type. There was also a niggle that with such a prodigious output he would make a young, aspiring – and lazy – writer feel inadequate.

With my fragile ego braced for a beating I set off to meet Johann “wunderkid” Hari in a café outside Aldgate East station in East London. As I trudged into the café determined not to be intimidated, I saw to my left a Berlin Wall of Sunday Papers stacked perilously on a table, with the crest of a head just visible over the top. I hadn’t read that many Sunday Papers in the last year – first points to Johann.

I recognize him from the picture that accompanies his columns in the Independent, but he’s also a dead ringer for the lead singer of Keane. Sticking out a hand, I ask if he has enough newspapers and inquire if he needs a hand taking them back to his flat (there are that many). He says it’s “a perk of the job”, then, as we are leaving he adds plaintively, “or a drawback.”

I soon realize my preconceptions are completely wrong. Rather than being an aloof rah-rah like my prejudices had assumed, Hari is candid, down-to-earth and funny. We skip up to his building chatting all the while and wait patiently as the security guard buzzes us in (he’s lost his key).

Hari occupies a weird position among the intellectuals that comprise the British left. While firmly on that end of the spectrum, his outspoken support for the war in Iraq and his enthusiasm for the piecemeal social reforms of New Labour has meant that he’s often been unpopular amongst his natural comrades. But his controversial support for the war in Iraq was deeply rooted in a humanitarian conviction that a US/UK invasion was better for Iraqi’s than decades of Saddam and his scions.
“You were confronted with two power structures, both illegitimate and deeply flawed – one was the Bush administration, the other was Saddam Hussein,” he tells me. “My feeling about the war was – given a choice between these two things – obviously I want to see a world with much better choices than that – but given that was the choice we were confronted with, the best way through it was to try to find out what Iraqis prefer.”
“Would Iraqis rather take their chances with an Anglo-American invasion with all the risks that took, or with the near certainty of Saddam and his sons forever? And the evidence I had from going to Iraq, from the opinion polls and from meeting as many Iraqi exiles as I could, is that Iraqis would rather take their chance with the invasion than with Saddam and his sons for as far as the eye could see. That did turn out to be true: all the opinion polls showed that Iraqis still preferred that option to the option of Saddam and his sons for as far as the eye could see … What I have tried to do, for what it’s worth, all the way through, is to try to side with what Iraqis want for their country.”

Unlike other liberal-hawks Hari never gave attention or credence to the Weapons of Mass Destruction and UN resolutions pretext for war. “I never thought it was about UN resolutions. I never thought there were Weapons of Mass Destruction,” he says. “I always thought that was a ridiculous piece of nonsense and I said it all along – I thought it was transparently untrue. Indeed, if there had been WMD’s it would have been a very good reason not to invade because they would have used them! Of course, with Iraq it is perfectly possible I was wrong.”

Listening to this, I feel that Hari is joining up all the dots correctly but it takes him inexorably to an admission that he was wrong about the war. His belief that we should support the invasion of any country where of majority of the population support it is quite insane in my opinion, especially when we are not entrusting the task to just anyone, but neo-imperialists like Bush and Cheney. So I ask him, seeing what how it has turned out, would he support an invasion if he could go back?
“If I’m honest, I don’t know … I think I would find it very hard to see my Iraqi friends who are out there now when they are trying to organize women’s organizations and democratic organizations and witness the people they are organizing being shot. When I try to talk to them about this they say, “Look, we don’t want this argument, we want to talk about what is happening now.” They don’t regret the invasion, but then, for obvious reasons they are worried about much more immediate things. They were in favor of the war and I think it would be very painful for them to admit that things could have become so catastrophic and bad that even the horrors of Saddam might have been preferable. I don’t know. I find it very hard to feel that Iraqis would have been better off if Saddam would have been left in power. But I can see the opinion polls suggest now that the majority of Iraqis think the war has done more harm than good and they certainly show that a majority of Iraqis want the troops to leave now – and I agree with them certainly on the latter point.”

By now I have settled down and begin to look around the sizeable living room of Hari’s sixth-floor apartment. Through the windows on my right is an expansive, panoramic view of East London, all around the room are piles of books (Ayn Rand seems to be the current literary flavor as it was set-out from the piles), and to my left is the computer I assume all those Independent articles are written on.

Then I notice on the wall opposite me is hung a kitsch, garish rug with the face of Saddam Hussein emblazoned across it. For such a Saddam-hater – Hari calls him a “genocidal fascist” – it may seem a weird piece of interior design but I suspect it is meant to act as a political motivator or an attempt at Hoxton trendy. Hari occupies the swiveling thinking chair that was placed in the middle of the room, and as I re-focus my attention on what he was saying after the shock of looking Saddam in the face, I ask him whether he feels he wields much power in British politics.

“No, but I think I am incredibly lucky,” he says. “There was one time I’d been doing the job for about six months and I was invited to have lunch – as you are sometimes – with this Labour MP, very nice, very intelligent Labour backbencher. For the first half an hour I was thinking there’s something not quite right here. We were having this conversation, it was really interesting and suddenly it occurred to me: You’re treating me like I’m more important than you, why are you doing that? You’ve been elected; you’ve done something. I haven’t done anything; I don’t know any of these things. Why is the power balance wrong here?”
“And you really see that. I don’t go to a lot of mediaish things – I think journalists that hang out with journalists are asking for trouble, it warps your worldview. But I was at a Christmas party for a television programme and I was talking to talking to Melanie Phillips and another columnist and this cabinet minister came up to us and was incredibly kind of solicitous and acted like we were important and I just wanted to say: “Stop it! You know more stuff than us, you are doing the important job.” I thought something has gone wrong here.”

Via a lengthy digression on the merits of Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model which posits that the corporate media squeezes out uncomfortable truths through a series of filters like advertising, I ask Hari - who works in the corporate media - whether he feels that if he said certain things his editors would mention something.
“No. It doesn’t work like that,” he says.
It’s unspoken? I prompt.
“Yes. What [Chomsky] would say is you internalize the norms and there are certain things that you don’t say. I think that is how it works; it doesn’t work as self-censorship. But in terms of the Independent, I’m very lucky. I got some people saying to me after I started at the Independent, understandably in some ways, that they must have chosen me because of my views on Iraq. Actually the editor didn’t know my views on Iraq before I started there. I appreciate the Independent is exceptional. I think that I could literally say anything; there are very few limits. Short of saying something that was transparently insane I can’t imagine that at any time the editors would say, "You can’t say that." But then I am lucky – the two parts of the media that I have worked in are owned by comparatively benign billionaires rather than the vast majority who are disgusting and foul billionaires. I think trusting one of the most important institutions in a free society – the media – to the benevolence of billionaires is pretty dodgy.”

No doubt he is right and I suspect there are thousands of little Hari’s running around with radical ideas and a notepad that can’t smash their way through the impenetrable walls of British journalism because of the monopoly these “disgusting and foul billionaires” and their conservative agenda, have on the media. But we should be happy at least one got through.

[POSTSCRIPT: I just wanted to clarify something I've had a few e-mails about. I've been reading Ayn Rand because I'm writing a critical article, not because I'm a fan! And I have a Saddam rug that I bought in Basra to remind me how evil tyranny is, and obviously not because I'm a fan of him either...]

London is enraged. London is appalled. London is angry. The Routemaster – the red hop-on, hop-off symbol of our city – is about to disappear forever. From the end of the year, I will not be able to hang off the back of a bus as it stutters along Piccadilly, with the delicious chemical tang of the London air running through my hair. Instead I will be crammed into a bog-standard double-decker, dependent on the bus driver for my moment of release.

When I first heard about this, I was outraged. The reporting suggested this was an act of bureaucratic madness, a piece of pure cultural vandalism by Ken Livingstone. Then I spoke to a disabled friend, and a different story tumbled out. Haqeeq Bostan, a 32 year-old parliamentary consultant confined to a wheelchair since he contracted polio at the age of two, explained: “For disabled people, the Routemaster is something from another century. Imagine living in London but never being able to get on the tube. The buses are the only way we have to get around. Now imagine half the buses had a ‘No Disabled’ sign on them. That’s what the Routemaster is like. I have never seen the inside of one, and I never will. It is impossible for us to board them.”

I decided to travel with Haqeeq on a pretty normal route: from the South Bank to Covent Garden, to see how our public transport system looks from a wheelchair’s eye-view. As we wait in the freezing cold, he tells me, “When you go to cities with full wheelchair access like Tokyo, people often ask – did something happen here? Why are so many people disabled? And you have to tell them nothing happened. These people exist in every city, it’s just that in most places you don’t see them because they are physically stuck in their homes.”

Until two years ago – when Ken started to make London’s buses accessible – this was Haqeeq’s life too. As a ramp automatically slides out and we smoothly board a double-decker, he says, “It’s changed my life. I can go out at night. I can get to hydrotherapy sessions at St George’s in Tooting.” The parts of London covered by the Routemaster are the only remaining No Go areas for disabled people. Do we really want to be a city that congratulate itself on putting Alison Lapper on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, yet campaign to – in effect – keep her off our buses, I suddenly ask myself.

We get off the bus and wheel our way along the Strand to the connecting bus stop. I walk these streets every day, but now they look different. Are those steps up to the bank an insuperable obstacle? Is that bus carrying an unofficial Keep Out sign? I begin to feel a bit ashamed about my pro-Routemaster fervour as I read the literature distributed by the Save the Buses campaigners. I would have some respect for them if they would just honestly say, yes, we want to continue discriminating against disabled people, but we like the accessibility and aesthetics of the Routemasters so much it trumps the rights of wheelchair users. Instead, they hide behind a wall of euphemisms, refusing even to use the word “disabled”. They talk instead about “interest groups” and “minorities” and “lobbyists for special interests”. (In reality, improving transport is the number one, two and three issue for disabled people, according to the Diability Rights Commission’s recent survey. Some interest group.) Haqeeq looks at the anti-disability writing of curdled conservative Simon Jenkins and says, “He’s against all change. I’m just waiting for his campaign to abolish e-mail and bring back the carrier pigeon.”

As we trundle onto another bus, Haqeeq continues, “All we want is equality. We want to live like everybody else. It’s interesting, the same people moaning about the Routemaster also say the disabled are given too much in benefits. How can we come off benefits if we can’t get to work? Give us the tools and we’ll do it. Look at the million people use Waterloo station every day. If you suddenly put a huge ditch in front of the tube, and then a massive wall, would they get to work on time?”

Haqeeq wheels onto the pavement in Covent Garden, and I try frantically to think of a justification, a reason, an excuse for refusing to make all bus journeys this easy for him. I can’t think of a single one. Yes, I will miss the Routemaster – but not half as much as Haqeeq will miss the days when he was left in the roadside, waiting for a bus he can never board.

It would make a beautiful biopic: the blood-splattered old General, in his 77th year, discovers the cause of peace. The movie opens with a young Ariel Sharon leading Unit 101 - a notorious Israeli death-squad that was sent into Palestinian villages to burn houses and terrorise civilians in raw revenge attacks. Cut to Sharon 50 years later, sitting over a plate of gefilte fish with Abu Mazen, the elected Palestinian leader, haggling over he status of east Jerusalem as grandchildren play at his feet.

This story is so intoxicating that many Israelis -desperate for an end to the grinding war of attrition that has haunted the country since its creation - have convinced themselves it must be true. Look at the changes Sharon is bringing, they say: he has now dismantled two big settlement blocs in his career - Sinai in 1982, and Gaza in 2005. He has torched the Israeli political landscape by quitting his own right-wing party, Likud, and formed a new centre party for peace. His people are briefing the Israeli press that they want a binding peace treaty and the creation of a Palestinian state in Sharon's third term. So is it time to clear the Israeli film studios and start casting the movie?

The facts, alas, do not back up this blissed-out fantasy. Ariel Sharon has dedicated his career to destroying any sort of peace negotiations, and to denying the Palestinians a viable state. Far from representing a Damascene conversion, his statements reveal the underlying continuity of his plans. Just a year ago, Sharon said he accepts the road-map because "first and foremost, it does not demand a return to the 1967 borders; it allows Israel permanently to keep large settlement blocks which have high Israeli populations; and [it entrenches] the total refusal of allowing Palestinian refugees to return to Israel." Yesterday his top political strategist, Eyal Arad, said that the idea of swapping land for peace was "false philosophically, and naive politically", and insisted Sharon would never lead his new party to a return to the Green Line. You can't say they didn't warn us.

In reality, what Sharon means by "peace" and a "Palestinian state" is so withered and weak that the Palestinians can never accept it. He is proposing - as a non-negotiable starting point to talks - to annexe much of the West Bank, one of the few remaining scraps of land inhabited by the Palestinians.

Today only 22 percent of historical Palestine is designated for its Arab inhabitants, and this is too much for Sharon: he will append even more to Israel by force and seal it off with an iron wall. All that will remain on the other side is a Palestinian statelet consisting of the scrag-end of the West Bank, an isolated Gaza, and a lonely east Jerusalem. Three decades ago, Sharon said the way to control the Palestinians was to "salami slice" their land, separating them from each other and surrounding them with armed Israeli settlers. That is precisely what he is proposing today.

Even to get to the miserable position where this offer is made, the Palestinian leader Abu Mazen has to do the impossible and dismantle "all terrorist organisations" operating on his soil. This is hard when almost all your police stations have been demolished or blown up. And it is harder still for Mazen to persuade a people living under vicious occupation that they should pre-emptively hand over all their weapons, on the off-chance that Sharon is now suddenly interested in peace after all these years of killing them.

Yet most of the world is ignoring Sharon's explicit statements and buying the rhetoric of Sharon as centrist peacemaker. Partly, this is because the genuine shift that occurred in Sharon's political thought in the early Noughties has been poorly understood. He has genuinely moved - but only a few inches. He used to believe in a Greater Israel stretching from the river to the sea, populated by new waves of pioneering Jewish settlers like his parents. He was the leading champion of these settlers in the Knesset, allocating huge funds for them to build homes on Palestinian land.

But then - some time earlier this decade - he began to understand that this bloated Israel was resting on a demographic time-bomb. Because Palestinians have far more children than Jews, within 20 years Israel was set to become an apartheid state presiding over an Arab majority. This is unthinkable - so Sharon had to claw back Israel's borders to accommodate a firmer Jewish majority. His advisor Dov Weisglass explained that Sharon gave up as little as possible to the Palestinians, shedding Gaza - "which is of no strategic importance" - precisely so he could retain control of the choicest morsels of the West Bank. "The settlers should have been dancing around the Prime Minister's office" in glee at this clever move, he said.

So here's the reality: Sharon has shifted from believing in Greater Israel to believing in the greatest Israel compatible with a Jewish majority. This is enough to enrage the crazies in Likud, but it is hardly a conversion to the cause of peace. It is not likely to end in a Palestinian state that even moderates like Abu Mazen can settle for. That's why I am extremely nervous about the pre-emptive selling of Sharon as a dove: it is setting up the Palestinians up for another fall.

There is now a real danger that Sharon will be elected on a "peace" landslide, sweep up to Mazen with a derisory, dangerous offer, and be rejected. (If Mazen gives in to American pressure to accept a lousy deal, there is a risk of triggering a third Intifada among an outraged population.) Cue the accusations once again that the Palestinians have inexplicably rejected Israel's Generous Offer (copyright Ehud Barak), when in fact they have merely been offered a cheap Tesco Own Brand peace they could never accept.

I hope I am wrong. I hope Sharon has - in his late seventies - undergone a much larger change of heart than is revealed in his words and actions.

But everybody who has put their trust into Sharon seems to have been cruelly disappointed. Levi Eshkol - the Israeli Prime Minister during the 1967 war - trusted the general, only to find out years later that Sharon had suggested mounting an anti-democratic military coup against him. Menachem Begin - the first Likud Prime Minister - trusted Sharon in 1982 when, as Minister of Defence, he led the country into an invasion of Lebanon he claimed would last a matter of weeks. Israeli troops remained for 18 years, and Begin retired into near-seclusion, believing Sharon had deliberately deceived him. Sharon's own soldiers trusted him, until he was found by the Israeli Knesset's own investigation to be indirectly responsible for the 9/11-sized massacre of over 2,000 innocent Lebanese civilians.

If you were a Palestinian or an Israeli peace activist, would you trust in this half-offer of a half-state?

Feedback is very welcome at j.hari@independent.co.uk but please bear in mind I am getting hundreds of e-mails a day. I do read all of them but I'm not snubbing you if I don't reply!