In his cover story for Prospect this month, Gershom Gorenberg writes that a new “dovish” Israel lobby is on the verge of being formed in the US to counter the hawkish views of the likes of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). This new grouping, writes Gorenberg, would be likely to support an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the creation of a Palestinian state, and to urge the US government to take a more active role in promoting these ends.
Now it seems the “liberal Israel lobby” is about to be unveiled, according to a report in the Jewish Week News. As yet unnamed—it currently goes by the name “J Street Project,” and if you get that gag you probably know too much about American politics—the group is due to hold a fundraiser today, before a formal public launch in the middle of April. None of the individuals behind the new group will speak publicly before then, but the JWN reveals that it will be headed by Jeremy Ben-Ami, who served as a policy adviser under Bill Clinton. The board of advisers will include several names with links to Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama, as well as a former deputy head of Mossad.
As someone who, much to the despair of the online editor, has difficulty finding the time to write a blog post, I’m always (perhaps overly) impressed by people who manage to write books without giving up their day jobs. Many of Prospect’s writers seem particularly fecund—longtime contributor AC Grayling may hold the record for published books, although I can’t tell from his website how many he’s written (perhaps even he has lost count). Enigmas and puzzles columnist Ian Stewart claims a total of around 80, including a couple of novels. Contributor Raymond Tallis, according to a recent Times interview, is working on five different books at the moment. Which is the number that our Lab report columnist Philip Ball has coming out this year—if you count his trilogy on pattern formation as separate books. (The others are a novel and a book on Chartres cathedral.) I’d love to know what their secret is, but I suspect there isn’t one. Writing books is probably just habit-forming for some.
Sadly, India’s Virender Sehwag could not continue on Saturday where he left off on Friday, soon falling to South Africa’s second new ball, 81 short of Brian Lara’s world record for the highest innings (400 not out) in test cricket.
His 319 was nonetheless by far the fastest triple century ever compiled in test matches—he reached 300 off 278 balls, 84 balls fewer than Matthew Hayden, the previous record-holder. It was Sehwag’s second triple century, a feat that puts him in an exclusive club with Brian Lara, the leading run-scorer in tests, and Don Bradman, the greatest batsman ever.
But it was the manner of this innings that was extraordinary, described by Sehwag’s captain, Rahul Dravid, as “like watching a highlights package” (which you can do here). Sehwag’s second and third hundreds took him 78 and 84 balls—to hit two centuries in an entire test career at that sort of speed is an achievement exclusive, I believe, to Adam Gilchrist and Ian Botham, but to sustain it over an entire day is unprecedented. The heat and humidity in Chennai make it all the more remarkable, as does the fact that the South African attack was experienced to the tune of 718 test wickets and has a bowler, Dale Steyn, with one of the best strike rates of all time.
Continue reading ‘Super Sehwag’
In the September issue of Prospect, we published a short story called “Infested” by Ross Raisin, a young writer from Yorkshire whose first novel (still to be published then) had already got the literary world buzzing with excitement. “Infested,” a macabre tale of revenge set in a pest control deparment, certainly showed talent. Cleverly plotted and written in a deceptively unshowy style, it announced the arrival of someone with a singular way of looking at things, and with the ability (by no means to be taken for granted among fiction writers) to use his imagination. Ross’s novel, God’s Own Country, has now been published by Viking, and, having just finished it, I can confirm that it justifies the hype. It really is a good book. Its narrator is a young farmer named Marsdyke who lives and works with his parents on the Yorkshire Moors, having been expelled from school. Marsdyke is an engaging, often likeable character, with a dour wit and a rich imagination, but he is also not quite all there. When a middle class family from London move into one of the neighbouring houses, he develops a crush on their teenage daughter, with ultimately calamitous consequences. The book, which has been widely compared to Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy (but also reminded me in places of Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange), cleverly combines seemingly opposed qualities: it is creepy but also very funny; it is linguistically ambitious yet very accessible. What knits it together is the ingenious, highly original narrative voice that Raisin contrives for Marsdyke. Rarely can a novelist have made such effective use of local dialect. Words such as “glegging,” “gradely,” “viewsome” and “usselves” (some of which I suspect Raisin simply made up) recur throughout the narrative, as well as all manner of grammatical contortions. The result is that a unique linguistic world is created, with its own rules and conventions, and this acts as a corollary for Marsdyke’s basically deranged, but also oddly coherent, moral universe.
Should British school-leavers be asked to make a pledge of allegiance to the Queen, as suggested in Lord Goldsmith’s recent citizenship review? Possibly, say David Goodhart and Kishwer Falkner in their article in the new issue of Prospect, but there are far more important issues at stake in the citizenship debate.
But I want to take issue with the Goldsmith suggestion. The suggestion of a pledge of allegiance to the monarch violates Lockean republican liberalism—and Britain is a republic with a figurehead monarch.
Lockean theory holds that there is a pre-political people, formed by a social contract—in practice, tacit consent to community membership. This people or nation then creates a state as its servant. Locke was careful to point out that there is no “contract” between people and state—that would imply equality on both sides. Instead, there is merely a “trust,” which is granted to the state by the people and can be withdrawn if the people chooses.
In short, according to Lockean theory, the people could swear an oath of fraternity/sorority to each other, but they should never swear an oath of allegiance to their servant, the government. On the contrary, the government, the agent, should swear an oath to the people, the principal.
It follows that the Queen and/or parliament should swear an oath of allegiance to the four nations/peoples of the United Kingdom—but not vice versa.
Does it not demean a woman, every bit as much as it does a man, to position her either as a victim of men’s appetites or as a fantasist of them? asks Howard Jacobson, who’s been dutifully ploughing through a series of memoirs by high-class hookers for the latest issue of Prospect. The books are cartoonish, he finds, but no less so than accounts that cast prostitutes as mere victims of rapacious male sexuality.
It’s time for a more grown-up debate about sexuality, both male and female, suggests Jacobson—one which acknowledges that there are many types of prostitute, just as there are many reasons for men to visit them. Do feel free to debate, in grown-up fashion, below.
One of the most poisonous debates in American politics in recent years has been the question of whether an “Israel lobby” distorts American foreign policy in the middle east. Two years ago, the American foreign policy “realists” John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published a controversial article on this theme in the London Review of Books, which they later turned into a book. Their thesis was that America’s “unwavering support” for Israel, which jeopardised its own security and that of its allies, was the result of an Israel Lobby (the capitalisation was theirs) that exercised significant influence over the congressional and executive branches of US politics. The piece caused a firestorm, with the professors being accused in some quarters of reviving old antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish cabals, while others claimed that their basic understanding of the inner workings of US policymaking was flawed.
Prospect’s cover story this month takes a slightly different approach. Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli historian and journalist, argues that while Mearsheimer and Walt overstated their case in several ways, Washington’s Israel lobby does have power and influence, and that its hawkish views on the middle east conflict with those of mainstream American Jews, as well as those of Israelis themselves. Why, then, is there no “counter-Aipac,” no dovish Israel lobby operating in Washington? It seems that finally, one is about to be unveiled.
Let us know what you think of the piece below.
The “state of the nation” novel, it seems, is back in fashion. This spring sees a rush of novels taking in Britain’s recent past, from the 1970s to the Blair years. One of them—The Northern Clemency—is by Philip Hensher, who in this month’s magazine writes about the origins of the genre, and surveys the novels that are competing alongside his own in this suddenly rather crowded corner of the market. Hensher is less than impressed with the competition. Surveying new works by Hanif Kureishi, Louis de Berniers, Richard Kelly and Helen Walsh, among others, he writes: “Where these books fail, I think, is in their point of departure. Too often I felt that the author had started not from memory and the painstaking reconstruction of long-forgotten sensations…The started, instead, from journalistic accounts of a period, from their own nostalgia-laden record collection and from a vague recollection of the drugs people used to talk about.” He also has some entertaining things to say about Kureishi’s shaky grasp of English grammar. If you have any thoughts on Hensher’s essay, or on the “state of the nation” genre more generally, do leave comments below.
The latest trend in American psychiatry—re-diagnosing the clinically depressed as victims of bipolar disorder—is on its way to Britain. Patients previously prescribed drugs like Prozac or Seroxat are trading in their antidepressants for mood stabilisers that level out the emotional peaks and troughs that characterise bipolar. Is this a sign of genuine psychiatric progress, or merely the latest diagnostic fad? Annie Maccoby Berglof, who experienced this “diagnostic shift” herself back in the 1970s in the US, explains in the new issue of Prospect.
Is the west on the verge of a new cold war with Russia, as the Economist correspondent Edward Lucas suggests in his new book of the same title? Hardly, says Stephen Kotkin, a Russia specialist at Princeton University, writing in the new issue of Prospect.
Kotkin suggests we all calm down a little. Just as the chaos and impoverishment under Yeltsin’s rule in the 1990s hardly amounted to a liberal democracy, despite the wishful thinking of western analysts, the authoritarian tendencies at home and muscle-flexing abroad that characterised Putin’s reign do not make contemporary Russia an international menace that demands confrontation.
Kotkin also detects in new fears about Russia’s totalitarian turn traces of America’s long-established religiously inspired concern about the west “losing” Russia. For Americans, he writes, Russia has for over 100 years been seen as, in some way, America’s “dark double,” a colossal Eurasian riposte to the civilised, democratic values of the west.
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