Johann Hari

Just as you think you are so bloated with turkey you can shunt it aside for another year, the most succulent and lush of all turkeys has landed before us – and I am twitching for the carving knife.

I am, of course, talking about ‘Australia’, the ten-thousand-hour epic by Baz Luhrman that has crash-landed in our cinemas. It aims to create a new national myth for Australia, no less, by dropping Nicole Kidman – playing a frozen-faced English aristocrat called Lady Sarah Ashley – into the Australia outback, where she promptly rescues the Aborigines, melts the heart of a calloused Aussie ranch-hand, and becomes one with the land.

The film is appalling, excruciating, offensive – and I loved every moment. While everyone else in the cinema walked out or lapsed into a coma, I howled and yelped and wept as Hugh Jackman tells Lady Sarah – with real pain in his eyes – “I mix with dingoes, not duchesses.”

I, dear reader, am always ready to buckle up for a cinematic car-crash. But what makes a glorious turkey? It must be utterly straight-faced. The film-maker must believe he has a profound message humanity needs to hear. That means many of the films often lauded in Great Bad Movies lists have to be dismissed. Goodbye ‘The Swarm’, where the bees turn on humanity and Michael Caine howls: “Why the bees? They have always been our friends!” Farewell ‘The Exorcist II’, where Richard Burton is acted off the screen by a giant prosthetic locust. Who is surprised you suck?

No, the great turkeys aim for profundity. Their pleasure lies in the chasm between the film-maker’s expectations and our guffaws. For me, nobody has yet matched ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, Hollywood’s 1965 take on Jesus Christ. Claude Raines plays King Herod as a shrieking-camp queen – “Ooooh, kill the first-born!” he hisses – while John Wayne is given the last line. Gazing at Jesus’ ascending body, he says: “Truly, this man was the son of God.” When the director told him to say it with more awe, Wayne, with his eyes to the skies and his hand on his heart, said: “Aw, truly this man was the son of God.”

Hollywood did not regain this golden slurry until the 1990s, when Kevin Costner decided to stage the Apocalypse - twice. In ‘Waterworld’, he is one of the last survivors of a drowned world – but it hard to take his long existentialist speeches seriously when he is wearing flippers. In ‘The Postman’, he wanders through a burned landscape, keeping – yes – the postal system running. "You're a godsend, a saviour!" a woman squeals at him. “No,” he says, “I'm a postman.” Can we agree now that if there is ever an apocalypse and we are all dependent on Kevin Costner for survival, our species should just call it a day?

Go to ‘Australia.’ Go now. Go twice. Aw, truly this film is the work of God.

The world isn’t just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment-beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide-vests or rockets. Israel’s leaders have convinced themselves the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.

To understand how frightening it is to be a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of Wight, but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other in vast sagging tower blocks, jobless and hungry. From the top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the Mediterranean Sea, and the Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to fall – as are do now with more deadly force than on any day since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.

There will now be a war over the story of this war. The Israeli government says: we withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets being rained on our cities. Some 16 civilians have been murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice? It is a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it – but it is also filled with holes. If we want to understand the reality and really stop the rockets, we need to rewind a few years, and view the runway to this war dispassionately.

The Israeli government did indeed withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – in order to be able to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon’s senior advisor Dov Weisglass was unequivocal about this, explaining: “The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians… Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.”

Ordinary Palestinians were horrified by this, and by the fetid corruption of their own Fatah leaders – so they voted for Hamas. It certainly wouldn’t have been my choice – an Islamist party is antithetical to all my convictions – but we have to be honest. It was a free and democratic election, and it was not a rejection of a two-state solution. The most detailed polling of Palestinians, by the University of Maryland, found that 72 percent want a two-state solution on the 1967 borders, while fewer than 20 percent want to reclaim the whole of historic Palestine. So, partly in response to this pressure, Hamas offered Israel a long ceasefire and a de facto acceptance of two states, if only Israel would return to its legal borders.

Rather than seize this opportunity and test their sincerity, the Israeli government reacted by punishing the entire civilian population. They announced they were blockading the Gaza Strip in order to “pressure” its people to reverse the democratic process. They surrounded the Strip and refused to let anyone or anything out. They let in a small trickle of food, fuel and medicine – but not enough for survival.

Weisglass quipped the Gazans were being “put on a diet”. According to Oxfam, this November only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza this November – to feed 1.5 million people. The UN says poverty has reached an “unprecedented level.” When I was last in besieged Gaza, I saw hospitals turning away the sick because their machinery and medicine was running out. I met hungry children stumbling around the streets, scavenging for food.

It was in this context – under collective punishment designed to topple a democracy – that some forces within Gaza did something immoral: they fired Qassam rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities. These rockets have killed 16 ordinary Israeli citizens. This is abhorrent: targeting civilians is always murder. But it is hypocritical for the Israeli government to claim now to speak out for the safety of civilians when they have been terrorising civilians as a matter of state policy.

European and American governments are responding with a lop-sidedness that ignores these realities. They say that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate under rocket-fire, but they demand the Palestinians do so under siege in Gaza and violent military occupation in the West Bank.

Before it falls down the memory hole, we should remember that last week, Hamas offered a ceasefire in return for basic and achievable compromises. Don’t take my word for it. According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security services Shin Bet, “told the Israeli cabinet [on the 23rd] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce, but wants to improve its terms.” Diskin explained Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet – high with election-fever, and eager to appear tough – rejected these terms.

The core of the situation has been starkly laid out by Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad. He says that while Hamas – like much of the Israeli right – dreams of driving their opponents away, “they have recognized this ideological goal is not attainable, and will not be in the foreseeable future.” Instead, “they are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967.” They are aware this means they “will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original goals” – and towards a long-term peace based on compromise. The rejectionists on both sides – from Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh to Bibi Netanyahu – would then be marginalised. It is the only path that could yet end in peace – but it is the Israeli government who refused to choose it. Halevy explains: “Israel, for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas.”

Why would Israel act this way? The Israeli government wants peace, but only one imposed on its own terms, based on the acceptance of defeat by the Palestinians. It means they can keep the slabs of the West Bank on ‘their’ side of the wall. It means they keep the largest settlements, and control of the water supply. And it means a divided Palestine, with responsibility for Gaza hived off to Egypt, and the broken-up West Bank standing alone. Negotiations threaten this vision: they would require Israel to give up more than it wants to. But an imposed peace will be no peace at all: it will not stop the rockets or the rage. For real safety, Israel will have to talk to the people it is blockading and bombing today – and compromise with them.

The sound of Gaza burning should be drowned out by the words of the Israeli writer Larry Derfner. He says: “Israel’s war with Gaza has to be the most one-sided on earth…. If the point is to end it, or at least begin to end it, the ball is not in Hamas’ court – it’s in ours.”

Esta manhã (29), amanhã de manhã e todas as manhãs, até que termine essa matança de palestinos, o ódio a Israel só aumentará, cada dia haverá mais ódio e mais os palestinos lutarão, com pedras, com coletes explosivos, com foguetes, com palavras. Os líderes israelenses crêem que quanto mais massacrem os palestinos, mais os amansarão. Já se foram esses tempos de medo, entre os palestinos. O ódio a Israel, hoje, lá, é duro, impenetrável. E os sentimentos mais primitivos, mais basais, de quem só aprendeu que viver é sobreviver em guerra, lá estarão esperando sempre, à beira da história, brutais.

Para entender o quanto é terrível ser palestino na manhã de hoje, é preciso ter estado lá, numa estreita faixa de terra à beira do Mediterrâneo, e ter experimentado na pele aquela claustrofobia quase insuportável. A Faixa de Gaza é menor que a ilha Wight. Mas lá vivem 1,5 milhão de pessoas que jamais podem sair de lá. Vivem amontoados uns sobre os outros, sem trabalho e com fome, em imensos prédios de quartos muito pequenos. Da laje superior dos prédios, vêem-se todos os limites daquele mundo: o Mediterrâneo e a cerca de arame farpado dos israelenses. Quando começam os bombardeios – como hoje, mais violentos do que nunca, desde 1967 –, não há onde se abrigar.

Começa agora outra guerra, em que se disputa o significado desses ataques de Israel, em 2008. O governo israelense diz: "Nos retiramos de Gaza em 2005 e, em troca, ganhamos o Hamás e os foguetes Qassam que destroem nossas cidades. 16 civis israelenses morreram. Quantos mais serão sacrificados?" É uma narrativa plausível, com vestígios de verdade. Mas com muitos buracos. Para entender o que realmente está acontecendo e conseguir que os foguetes parem, é preciso voltar um pouco, alguns anos, e analisar melhor os prolegômenos da guerra de hoje.

É verdade que Israel retirou-se da Faixa de Gaza em 2005 – para intensificar o controle sobre a Cisjordânia. O principal conselheiro de Ariel Sharon, Dov Weisglass, disse claramente: "A retirada [de Gaza] é o anestésico. Anestesiará a situação, o suficiente para que não haja processo político ou discussão política com os palestinos. Apagamos da agenda, por longo tempo, toda e qualquer discussão sobre o pacote chamado "Estado da Palestina"."

Os palestinenses comuns ficaram horrorizados. Mais horrorizados ainda, pela fétida corrupção dos líderes de sua própria Fatah. E então votaram no Hamás. Eu não votaria no Hamás – jamais votaria em partido político com fundamento religioso –, mas... não sejamos hipócritas. As eleições foram democráticas, livres e perfeitas e não implicaram rejeição à Solução dos Dois Estados. A melhor pesquisa que se conhece, sobre tendências de opinião entre os palestinenses, feita pela University of Maryland, constatou que 72% dos palestinenses são favoráveis à Solução dos Dois Estados, conforme às fronteiras de 1967; e apenas 20% votariam pelo fim de Israel. Então, parcialmente por efeito dessa pressão popular, o Hamás ofereceu a Israel um longo cessar-fogo e aceitou, na prática, a Solução dos Dois Estados. Bastaria que Israel cumprisse o seu dever legal de manter-se dentro de suas fronteiras legais.

Em vez de colher essa oportunidade e de testar as reais intenções do Hamás, o governo de Israel reagiu brutalmente – e puniu, com genocídio, toda a população civil de Gaza. Anunciou o bloqueio da Faixa de Gaza, para "pressionar" os palestinos a revogar o resultado das urnas. Sitiaram os palestinenses dentro da Faixa de Gaza. Vedaram completamente qualquer possibilidade de contato com o mundo exterior. Racionaram comida, combustível, remédios – para impedir que sobrevivessem. Nas palavras de Weisglass, os palestinenses de Gaza estavam sendo postos "em dieta". A Oxfam denunciou que só foram autorizados a entrar em Gaza 137 caminhões com alimentos, em dezembro. Para alimentar 1,5 milhão de pessoas. A ONU e já declarou repetidas vezes, que a miséria em Gaza já alcançou "níveis sem precedentes".

Na última vez que estive em Gaza, já sob sítio dos israelenses, vi hospitais mandando doentes de volta para casa, porque não havia nem remédios nem aparelhos para atendê-los. Vi crianças revirando o lixo, pelas ruas, à procura de comida.

Nesse contexto – sob sentença de morte coletiva, sob ataque genocida, urdido para gerar efeitos de golpe de Estado e derrubar um governo democraticamente eleito –, então, alguns grupos dentro de Gaza adotaram solução imoral: puseram-se a bombardear, com foguetes Qassam, de quintal, indiscriminadamente, cidades israelenses. Nesses ataques, mataram 16 cidadãos israelenses. É crime. Matar sempre é crime. Mas é hipocrisia que, hoje, o governo israelense fale de defender a segurança de seus cidadãos, depois de ter passado anos assassinando civis. Depois de ter feito, do assassinato, a única política de Estado, em Israel.

Os governos dos EUA e alguns governos europeus têm fingido que não sabem disso. Dizem que não se pode exigir que Israel negocie com o Hamás, enquanto o Hamás não suspender os ataques com foguetes Qassam. Mas exigem que a Palestina negocie, apesar do sítio, apesar do bloqueio, apesar da brutal ocupação militar na Cisjordânia.

Antes de que tudo se apague no abismo dos esquecimentos construídos, lembremos que, semana passada, o Hamás propôs um cessar-fogo, em troca de alguns compromissos básicos e aceitáveis para Israel. Não precisam acreditar só em mim.

A imprensa em Israel noticiou que Yuval Diskin, atual chefe do Shin Bet, serviço interno de segurança de Israel, "informou ao governo israelense [dia 23/12] que o Hamás está interessado em manter a trégua, com apenas pequenas modificações nos termos do acordo." Diskin explicou que o Hamás desejava duas coisas: o fim do bloqueio de Gaza e que Israel parasse com os ataques na Cisjordânia. O gabinete – acometido de febre eleitoral e interessado em mostrar-se 'durão' aos eleitores – rejeitou tudo.

O núcleo duro da situação foi bem claramente exposto por Ephraim Halevy, ex-chefe do Mossad. Diz que, embora os militantes do Hamás – como boa parte da direita israelense – sonhem com varrer do mundo os adversários políticos, "eles já perceberam que esse objetivo ideológico não é viável e não será viável no futuro próximo." Então, "estão prontos a aceitar um Estado da Palestina, nos limites das fronteiras de 1967." Os militantes do Hamás sabem que isso significa "que terão de adotar um caminho que provavelmente os afastará de seus objetivos iniciais" – e levará a uma paz estável, sob acordo difícil de romper por qualquer dos dois lados.

Os 'do contra", dos dois lados – de Máhmude Ahmadinejad do Iran, a Bibi Netanyahu, de Israel – ficariam marginalizados. É a única via possível que ainda pode levar a paz. E é a única via que não interessa ao atual governo de Israel. Halevy explica bem: "Por razões que só interessam ao atual governo de Israel, não interessaria a Israel aceitar o cessar-fogo e convertê-lo em início de um processo de negociação diplomática com o Hamás."

Por quê? O governo de Israel quer a paz, mas só se for a paz imposta por Israel, nas condições que Israel determine e que sempre implicarão que os palestinos sejam definidos como derrotados. Assim, Israel poderá manter, do "seu" lado do muro, os cadeados que fecham a Cisjordânia. Assim, Israel poderá controlar as maiores colônias e o suprimento de água. Assim, a Palestina será dividida (e caberá ao Egito a responsabilidade sobre Gaza) e a Cisjordânia, com a espinha dorsal partida, ficará isolada. Qualquer tipo de negociação cria riscos para o sucesso desse 'plano': Israel sempre terá de ceder mais do que deseja ceder.

Ao mesmo tempo, qualquer paz imposta deixará de ser confiável: e continuarão a chover sobre Israel os foguetes da fome que gera ódio.

Se quer obter real segurança para os israelenses, o governo de Israel, mais dia menos dia, será obrigado a negociar com os palestinos que hoje Israel está matando; terá de obter deles alguma solidariedade e alguma compreensão. E Israel dependerá disso, para continuar existindo.

O som dos incêndios de Gaza pode ser silenciado pelas palavras de um escritor israelense, Larry Derfner. Diz ele: "A guerra entre Israel e Gaza é guerra inventada por Israel. A decisão de pôr fim à guerra não cabe ao Hamás. Cabe a nós. Cabe a Israel."

All year I write columns exposing people who threaten ordinary life, but I want now – for once, for a moment – to describe the people who make that ordinary life worth living. For me, near the top slot would be one word: Gran.

This September, a solitary tear symbolised how many of us feel about our grandmothers better than a library of lyrical poetry. In the brutal pressure of the Presidential election, only one thing broke through Barack Obama's superhuman coolness: his granny, Madelyn Dunham. He stopped the campaign to visit her sick bed, and when she died a few days later, at a public rally he let that tear run down his cheek.

Like so many grandmothers, Madelyn had offered Obama the purest love he had ever known. She drudged every day in a bank, setting off on the bus at 7am, so she could send him to the best school in Hawaii. She went without, so he could be all he wanted to be. Obama's mother – like lots of parents, who have kids when they are still nervously trying to realise their own potential – was elsewhere. His father was gone. But his gran was always there, on his side.

A grandparent's love is purer and cleaner and easier than a parent's. You share their genes, but you are not torn from their body. You are an extension of their story, but there is no pressure to be its culmination. You come into their lives when they are in their fifties and sixties, when they are relaxed with the story of their life: they know who they are.

Every Christmas now, I feel an empty ache among the tinsel and the discarded wrapping paper. Louisa May Alcott wrote that "a house needs a grandma in it" – and a Christmas house needs a grandma most of all. But my grandmothers are not here.

My grandmothers came from different worlds – the Scottish tenements and the Swiss mountains. They both left school at the age of 14, and were immediately rammed down the same narrow path: do a menial job, get married, breed, and die. Nobody was interested in their complex dreams and ambitions.

My maternal grandmother, Amy, wanted to take a backpack and travel the world. She was told not to be so foolish and get back to the factory. She did not leave Britain until I took her, in her seventies, to Paris.

My paternal grandmother, Lydia, wanted to be a painter and stared dreamily at Monet, but she was told to get back to the farm and marry a boorish man who proceeded to yell at her for the next sixty years. But she never stopped drawing, and dreaming.

Their generation somehow dealt with thwarted dreams without becoming bitter. Like Madelyn, they spread their hopes outwards, rather than letting them curdle and die inside.

Amy lived with us throughout my childhood, and I never once heard her complain about her life. When she was in her thirties, the husband she adored died suddenly, and she was left with three children to raise alone. Two days after the funeral she began three jobs, starting at six in the morning when she would stumble out into the dark to scrub the public toilets. When I think of her now, she is sitting up all night, reading me story after story. She particularly loved stories about all the distant places she would, she realised, never go to now.

For me, the essence of Amy's life is captured by one night in 2001. My sister had just had a baby and she was broke, so my 80-year old grandmother was on her way to post her £20 she had scrimped from her pension when a speeding driver smashed into her at 80mph. She was thrown over the car and lay on the ground bleeding, her legs smashed and her heart about to stop.

When the ambulance crew arrived, she said to them: "Could you put this letter in the post-box please, because my grand-daughter really needs the money?" Half-dead, her only thought was for somebody else. My sister received the blood-splattered envelope two days later.

As I recount this story, I feel proud of my grandmother, and ashamed of myself. We are – so many of us – betraying our grandmothers. Amy is alive, but she is living in a residential home. She is washed and tended by strangers. She sits surrounded by dementia-addled old people who shriek and groan all day. She is dejected; she does not understand why her life is ending here, like this, after all she has done for other people.

After being run over, my grandmother began to develop dementia. At first, she developed mild hallucinations: she thought there were animals in her room. Gradually, it got worse, and she thought she was being beaten and attacked at nights.

The staff in nursing homes are given no training in how to deal with dementia. None. They would respond to her paranoid fears not by reassuring her, but by laughing awkwardly, making her even more terrified.

Many of them – through no fault of their own – couldn't speak English, and found her accent incomprehensible. One night I turned up and Amy was wheezing and pleading for an inhaler. The staff didn't know the word "inhaler": they had been bringing her glasses of water, bemused. I moved her to another home, paying £1,400 a month, guiltily thinking that I could bribe my way to better care for her. Still it was appalling. They gave Amy grossly inappropriate medication to "calm her down."

For a while she had a catheter fitted, but it began to hurt, so the doctor said she could wear incontinence pads instead. One day I turned up and my gran was screaming. A "carer" had refused to believe her when she said she didn't need a catheter any more, so she was being held down, kicking and howling, while a catheter tube was rammed up her. That was it: I moved her to a third home, where she is – at last – being treated like a human being.

One of the strangest things about dementia is that you have to grieve for a person who is still alive. But even now, when her personality is disintegrating, Amy's fundamental kindness keeps surfacing.

There is one carer she thinks is trying to kill her – but she wanted to get her a Christmas present nonetheless: "She cannae be all bad, and she's got three wee children to look after," she said a few days ago.

My grandmother, at least, knows she is adored, if only in the fleeting moments of clarity when she is still herself. But is this simply the comforting excuse I offer to myself – and my family – for not looking after her ourselves?

And what about all the elderly people left in those first two "homes", and the thousands like them? Most of them had no visitors at all. They would beg for attention, and be pathetically grateful if you stopped to chat for a few minutes. Where were their children and grandchildren?

Yes, a house does need a grandma in it – but instead, we have put grandmas in a home, and discreetly closed the door.

And so. Pinter. Has. Died. Without the trademark pause, there will now be a torrent of praise for the departed playwright. But in the fawning, the more interesting - and bleak - questions about Harold Pinter that will be lost.

How did the world’s leading literary prize, the Nobel, go to a man whose most recent works include this: “We blew the shit right back up their own ass/ And out their fucking ears./ It works. / We blew the shit out of them,/ They suffocated in their own shit!/ We blew them into fucking shit./ They are eating it./ Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth”?

And – more importantly – how did a young Jewish boy who grew up bravely fighting against gangs of Mosleyite fascists on the streets of the East End wind up as a patron of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic?

There are two arguments against Pinter – one literary, the other political – and they are both hard to make, because in amongst the screw-ups Pinter has some undeniable achievements. Harold Pinter has one literary accomplishment: he imported the surrealism of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Luis Bunel into the staid English theatre. As the critic Irving Wardle put it, in his first play ‘The Birthday Party’, Pinter showed “how a banal Blackpool boarding house could open up to the horrors of modern history.” The play shows a man, Stanley, hiding out in a dank Blackpool boarding house, only for two torturers to track him down. His landlady, Meg, is oblivious to the violence smashing through her own home. At their best, his plays are like a nightmarish stress-dream: unbearably primal, raw expressions of menace and fear, whose meaning is always just beyond our grasp.

But with Samuel Beckett, you always know there is an elaborate existentialist philosophy underneath the darkness and chaos. With Pinter, if you turn on the light and switch off the atmospherics, you find… nothing, except a few commonplace insights: Torture is Bad and Resistance is Good. Pinter himself says “the most important line I’ve ever written” is when Meg’s husband calls out, as Stanley is taken away, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” The playwright said of this unobjectionable, obvious platitude, “I’ve lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now.” It’s depressingly revealing: Pinter’s staccato sinisterness does not illustrate a point; it distracts the audience from the fact his point is so banal.

Yet Pinter has been protected by an elderly critical establishment so invested in creating and building up his reputation that they cannot admit how feeble most of his plays now look. (I assume nobody at all takes the poetry seriously). When I saw ‘The Homecoming’ – a revoltingly misogynistic work – in the West End a few years ago, the audience kept laughing in all the wrong places. It literally looked ridiculous, yet it was given respectful – and in some cases fawning – write-ups.

But the more important case against Pinter is political. Ever since Pinter was a teenager, he was relentlessly contrarian, kicking out violently against anything that might trigger his rage that day. He claimed to be a man of the left, but a few wildcat strikes at the National Theatre were enough to make him vote for Margaret Thatcher. He had an extraordinarily patronising attitude to the poor, illustrated in an anecdote in Michael Billington’s biography. Pinter once bumped into the tramp he had used as a model for the central character in his play ‘The Caretaker’ on Chiswick roundabout. “We had a chat and I asked him how he was getting on. I didn’t mention the play, because he wouldn’t have known what a play was,” he said. Pinter did not mention that he had made millions of pounds by using this man as an inspiration. No: instead he noted to himself, “I was very close to this old derelict’s world, in a way.” His reason for comparing himself to a homeless person? When he was a student at RADA, he would skive off (because it was “full of poofs and ponces”) and wander the streets “like a tramp.” Yes Harold, just like a tramp.

Pinter often fumed about tyranny, but equally fumed about people who resisted it. During the Second World War, Pinter called the British Army uniform ”a shit-suit” (his talk was filled with faeces) and during the war against the Nazis he declared, “I am never going to put a shit-suit on for anyone.” Just a few years later, Europe was being threatened to the East by a Stalinist tyranny that had already murdered 30 million people, and the Labour left – led by Nye Bevan – was (rightly) supporting the airlifts to occupied Berlin. But Pinter called this “ridiculous”. When he was called up for army service, he became a conscientious objector, deriding the people backing free Berlin as “fools.”

Yet Pinter cannot be dismissed as politically worthless: hhis is a story with many greys. Sometimes his fickle rage was directed against targets who really deserve it, and Pinter behaved with ramshackle heroism. In 1979, he travelled to Nicaragua to back the democratic, socialist Sandinistas against the US-backed fascist guerrillas who were besieging the country. In 1985, he spent five days in Turkey – as international President of PEN – where he met with dissidents, and spoke out against torture and state-backed murder. Not many Western intellectuals put themselves at risk like this.

The tragedy of Pinter’s politics is that he took a desirable political value – hatred of war, or distrust for his own government – and absolutizes it. It is good to hate war, but to take this so far that you will not resist Hitler and Stalin is absurd. It is good to oppose the crimes of your own government – but to take this so far that you end up serving on the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic is bizarre.

When Serbian nationalism – stoked and stroked by Milosevic – began to ravage the Balkans in the 1990s, Pinter’s response was simple and visceral: whatever the US and UK governments are for, I’m against. Blair and Clinton are condemning Milosevic? Right, sign me up for the defence. The Committee he sat on right up to Miolsevic's death – headed by Jared Israel, a friend of Milosevic – was not simply calling for the Serb to be given a fair trial, a demand all reasonable people supported. It called for Milosevic to be released on the grounds that he was not guilty. In fact, the website bragging Pinter’s signature describes him as a “the strongest pillar of peace and stability in this region.”

So when there was ethnic cleansing two days’ drive from Auschwitz, Pinter’s response was to defend the aggressor and attack the victims. While much of the left – good people like Peter Tatchell, Michael Foot and Susan Sontag – were calling for democratic countries to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to defend the ethnic Albanians from racist murder, Pinter described the KLA as “a bandit organisation” that was “actually” responsible for the ethnic cleansing in the region. Watching the trial, Pinter said admiringly, “Milosevic is giving them a run for their money.”

Human Rights Watch – and others who know something about the Balkans – responded to Pinter’s position with horror. Its director, Richard Dicker, said at the time of the trial, “This is not victors’ justice – this is justice for the victims of horrific crimes. Slobodan Milosvic was at the top of the chain of command of military and security forces that wrought mayhem in Kosovo in early 1999.” Pinter repeatedly said the “real” crimes began after the NATO bombing campaign, but most of the crimes Milosevic was charged with were committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. To give just one example, in November 1994, Dzenana Soklovic, 31, and her seven year old son were walking in woods near Sarajevo. A bullet passed through Dzenana and hit her son in the head, killing him. The closest Pinter has ever come to condemning the man responsible is this grudging concession: “I am absolutely not saying that Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities but I believe what’s been left out of public debate is that there was a civil war going on down there. Actually.” I once tried to discuss his defence of Milosevic with him and he began to scream – literally scream – at me.

Goodbye. Harold. Pinter. You shouldn't. Have defended. Milosevic. (Stage directions: Off-stage, there are howls and screams of rage. We do not know if these are from ethnic Albanians murdered by Milosevic, or from Pinter himself.)