Hugo Rifkind
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‘Fine,’ I said. ‘So he’s like Proposition Joe.’ Proposition Joe, as you will know, is one of the big league gang bosses in that other hit US series, The Wire. He smuggles and deals coke and smack, arranges hits, bribes lawmen and, as a front, runs a small clock repair shop on the East Side of Baltimore.
‘Again,’ said the wife, without looking up, ‘a professional.’
‘But it’s only a front,’ I said. ‘And he looks like he enjoys it.’
‘Still not the same,’ said the wife, and I suppose she was right. And musing on this, as she settled back into her book, and Jeremy Paxman went on to be really quite unreasonably rude to poor old George Osborne, two things struck me. A bit like two gongs, if you want to keep the theme suitably clockish. The first was that I really ought to stop trying to understand the world in terms of character synopses from hit US TV series. Bong. And the second was that it is incredibly easy to make monsters out of the Israelis. Bong again.
In my mind’s eye, Barak lives in a darkened house, full of jarringly unsynchronised ticking. Perhaps he has a failing grandfather clock he calls ‘Ariel Sharon’ which he winds, just a little, every day. I can see Tzipi Livni calling at him through the letter box, refusing to go any further. I can see him owning cats. Lots of cats.
And, in a similar sort of way, bong three if you like, it now strikes me that I can’t see Hamas at all. None of us can. As a result, I suspect that the instinct is to ignore their nasty bits. Like last night, on the BBC News, when they went into that hospital in Gaza. Horrifying, you probably thought. This won’t do at all. Whatever is going on, this has to stop. And then, almost as an afterthought, they dredged up some beardy leadership figure from Hamas. Never seen him before in my life.
‘We will remain on the right path,’ he vowed, ‘until we liberate all of Palestine. We tell all people who demonstrated, all over the world, that we won’t let them down.’
Do you hear that, Annie Lennox? Hamas won’t let you down. They’re going to liberate all of Palestine. Even Tel Aviv. Even Eilat. That’s what you want, isn’t it? What was it you said? ‘It’s not about Gaza, It’s about all of us.’ All of us including Hamas? Why don’t you ever mention Hamas? Why is it so easy not to? Do they fix clocks? Who cares?
There is an occasional conviction, particularly on the hawkish Right, that much criticism of Israel is predicated on anti-Semitism. I’ve never really bought it. In fact, it bugs me. I’m sure there are plenty of anti-Semites among Israel’s critics, but I reckon their anti-Semitism came afterwards, as a result of lazy thinking.
Criticise Israel as a Jew, and other Jews will often call you a ‘self-hating Jew’. That bugs me even more. But it makes me wonder if the disproportionate vitriol thrown at Israel at times like this — and it is disproportionate, compared with the death toll in Iraq, or Zimbabwe, or Chechnya, or Darfur, or Congo, or a hundred other places — is due to self-hating of another sort. Self-hating secular liberal democrats. In other words, we’ll cut a lot of people a lot of slack because we don’t quite know where they are coming from. Russians, Congolese, Sudanese, Sunnis, Shia, even Hamas — who are we to judge? Israelis, though, we can get a handle on. Israelis can be the whipping boy for everything that Western democracy does, that we don’t quite approve of or understand. Not because they are different, but because they are the same.
But enough trivia. I’ve met the new Doctor Who. Hardly anybody else had even heard of Matt Smith before last weekend, and I think I might have bought him a pint. I’m thrilled. It was a couple of years ago, in a bar in Westminster. ‘Please don’t go,’ he pleaded, at one point. ‘This is the most normal conversation I’ve had all night.’
It was a gathering, you see, populated by two sets of people. The first lot were the cast and crew of Party Animals, that vastly underrated BBC drama about the gripping, gritty, sexy lives of a bunch of photogenic political researchers. The second lot were a wide collection of actual, honest-to-god political researchers. If any of them were having sex, believe you me, it wouldn’t have looked nearly so good on television. I gatecrashed. At the time, I was a parasite by trade. Plus, I was a fan.
I don’t remember exactly what we spoke about, which is regrettable, but I didn’t know then that he would be the next Doctor Who, or that I’d one day pillage our innocuous conversation for the tail end of a column. I doubt I was particularly gripping. I didn’t have to be. His delight came from the way I wasn’t saying things like ‘What will be the primary objections to Crossrail?’ and ‘Who would you rather write speeches for, Yvette Cooper or Caroline Flint?’ He’d played such a convincing political anorak that none of the political anoraks could accept that he wasn’t one. If there had been a sofa, he would have hid behind it.
And now? Substitute Cooper and Flint for Kaleds and the Thals, and Crossrail for the sonic screwdriver, and the rest of his life will be like this. I suppose one sort of cultish obsession is much like any other.
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