Connect: Poet Tom Paulin's explosive outburst about Israeli settlers has caused outrage, but his record shows that charges of anti-Semitism are unfounded - and at least he is engaging publicly with important issues
QUOTED in the Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram Weekly, as saying that "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers "should be shot dead", Tom Paulin is, not surprisingly, in the news again. Earlier this year, at the time of the 30th anniversary of Derry's Bloody Sunday, he told viewers of BBC2's Late Review that the British paratroopers responsible for that massacre were "thugs sent in by public schoolboys to kill innocent Irish people; they were rotten racist bastards".
Paulin, a rigorous respecter of language, does not dilute his words. He has repeatedly condemned T. S. Eliot's "anti-Semitism" and has objected to the editing out of Philip Larkin's more obnoxious racist views from his collected letters.
"I had a go because I think there is a tolerance of prejudice in the \ culture. For instance, if you talk about Eliot's anti-Semitism you are accused of not appreciating the poetry, which is ridiculous," he said last month.
Six years ago he wrote of Eliot: "I can think of no other modern writer whose prejudices have been treated with such tolerance."
It's probably impossible to think of any culture, Irish included, which does not include tolerance for particular prejudices. However, the power of a culture in the world - and British is more influential than Irish, as American is more influential than British - ensures that some prejudices are more ruinous than others. Nomads in Chad, for instance, might be deemed to be the most biased, intolerant and racist people in existence, but even if such were the case, the ripples of their bigotry would be curtailed by Chad's limited influence.
Anyway, Paulin's latest reported outburst, though it is unlikely to be an incidence of verbal suicide bombing, is explosive stuff. Those bulwarks of British culture, the BBC and Oxford University, under pressure from enraged Jews and perhaps their lawyers, will not be best pleased by his assertions. But the incident raises major questions for the media, academia and law. Paulin is, after all, unlike so many less talented academics, who effect to regard the media with disdain, committed to engaging publicly with issues of injustice and racism.
As such, he forges links between academia and the media. He is in clarion contrast to those precious, self-regarding and conveniently credulous academics, who, like so many clerics, appear to consider their primary allegiances to be to the institutional framing of their role rather than to people. "All professions are conspiracies against the laity," said George Bernard Shaw. Fortunately, not all professionals are conspirators. Certainly, Paulin is no academic conspirator and his highlighting of Eliot's alleged anti-Semitism practically negates similar charges against himself.
Nonetheless, his reported prescription for dealing with American-born Jewish settlers is, it must be agreed, insupportably extreme. Recommending the shooting dead of any group of people cannot but be extreme. Yet even though Paulin's precise prescription ought not to be endorsed, most fair-minded people realise that Jewish settlers in Palestine are at the front line of the current problem. They should not be shot, but they should not be there in the first place. Relocation inside a suicide- bomberless Israel proper or back in Brooklyn would not be an insupportably extreme solution.
'BECAUSE Eliot has so dominated 20th- century poetry and because his writings have been so central to critical practice and to English literature as an academic discipline, to subject him to this kind of investigation [charges of anti-Semitism] is to call a large part of our culture - root, branch and flower - into question," wrote Paulin in 1996. Critics who have been indifferent to Eliot's anti-Semitism - and he cited Denis Donoghue as one such - are complicit in it, Paulin has argued.
A well-known academic figure calling a large part of a culture into question is refreshing. It could, of course, be done for notice and notoriety, but Paulin does not give that impression. Even people who consider him wrong-headed and/or resent his fame and influence do not suggest he is a cheap, pre-meditated controversialist. His commitment to fighting injustice and racism, though opponents will naturally attack some of his pronouncements, has not been doubted.
"If you spend your life with academics, when you step outside you realise there is this huge general readership that is almost impossible to meet with critical writing," he said in March. "It is a rare critical monograph that gets a general readership and if you spend your life as a teacher the central value is communication. And there are different forms of it."
There certainly are. As often as there are sensationalised or trivialised accounts and commentary in the media, there is turgid and lifeless criticism in academia.
Stringing together dreary, constipated clichés or dreary, constipated lit crit terms - one reducing language to mulch and the other clotting it to a coronary - are undeniable characteristics of media English and academic English. But journalese and jargon, those twin abusers of clarity and meaning, are not Paulin faults. Because he is such a high-profile commentator, who is sufficiently clear-headed to recognise the more objectionable aspects of media and academic agendas, and instead acknowledge the best of both, he is a pivotal cultural figure.
Consider Israel's name for the rape of the West Bank: "Operation Defensive Shield". There's an abuse of language from the same school of contemptuous propaganda as "Operation Infinite Justice" and "Operation Enduring Freedom". Should misnomers of such disdain go unremarked? Reports tell us that "Operation Defensive Shield" used Palestinian women and children as defensive shields. "Infinite Justice" was considered gross even in an America that was understandably angry after last September's outrages. The world risks being swallowed by lies and a sophisticated plain-talker like Tom Paulin represents a genuine defensive shield.
IN THE US, Edward Said, the leading academic champion of the Palestinians, has recognised that the media represent a crucial arena of public culture and political struggle. He has surely influenced greater numbers and a far wider range of people by means of print and the broadcast media than by his books. Perhaps his books and lectures leave deeper, more permanent influences, but without the media many people would never have heard Said's arguments about Palestine.
It's true that even a US with a resident Said remains overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Without him, however, it would be further imbalanced. Under the opportunistic banner of the US's "war on terrorism", Ariel Sharon has embarked on an attempt to destroy the infrastructure of any future Palestinian state. Along the way, suicide bombers have been a gift to Sharon, frightening and enraging ordinary Israeli citizens and convincing many of them to support their prime minister's bloody military campaign.
But Sharon is a large part of the problem, not of the solution. Likewise the settlers denounced by Paulin. Israel, contrary to Paulin's view, surely has a right to exist, but it has no right to behave as it is currently doing. The contrast between the Israelis and the Palestinians has typically been one between an economically developed (backed by the US) and an economically under-developed people. The fact that it is F-16s versus suicide bombers makes the point.
"I think culture is an argument," Tom Paulin has said. Fair enough. It is not, of course, as he understands, a pinched, petty or precious argument between academics unwilling to engage with the wider world. Culture is more inclusive than that and, with his latest contribution, Paulin has certainly started an argument. His remarks were unacceptably strident, but, like Said, he has shown himself to be rightly passionate about a complex situation that persists because of cynicism, apathy and hand-wringing in high places.