The Grift That Keeps on Giving: Bibi’s ‘Innocent’ Gift to Obama

On April 18th, during a meeting with South American leaders, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez presented Obama with a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. The book, first published in 1971, is a damning critique of the consequences of five centuries of European and US colonization and exploitation of Latin America, at one point stating, "Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."

The book, considered a classic of anti-imperial criticism in South America and beyond, presents a forthright account of the perils and destructive nature of Empire and is a work any American would do well to pay attention to and learn from.

In stark contrast, where Chavez gives knowledge, Benyamin Netanyahu offers only farce. During their first meeting as elected leaders on Monday, the Israeli Prime Minister gave Obama a copy of Mark Twain‘s "Pleasure Excursion to the Holy Land," an excerpt from his famous 1869 travelogue, The Innocents Abroad.

The gift is presumably meant to strengthen the Israeli argument for continued Jewish control of the Levant, as the book itself presents a bleak picture of Palestine under Arab control and describes Muslims as "a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious," and whose "natural instinct do not permit them to be moral."

In his account, Twain, one of the most beloved and respected American literary voices, notes the seeming emptiness of the Holy Land when he describes Palestine as "A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse…A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action…" On the road to Jerusalem ("…more stupid hills beyond – more unsightly landscape – no Holy City"), Twain writes, "We never saw a human being on the whole route…hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."

Hopefully, Barack Obama is not an uninformed dullard (though, so far, there is scant evidence to the contrary) and will view the Israeli Prime Minister’s gift with a critical eye and some insight into both its giver and its author.

Netanyahu’s right-wing government is intent on maintaining the Israeli stranglehold of occupation and bantustanization in the West Bank and the humanitarian devastation and bombing of civilians in Gaza. In addition to constantly advocating for a US-supported Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment research facilities (along with requisite collateral civilian damage), Middle East expert Juan Cole adds that Netanyahu "absolutely does not under any circumstances want a Palestinian state or to be forced to withdraw Israeli squatters from the Palestinian territories that they have been colonizing since 1967 (unlike most of Israel proper, the UN never awarded that territory to Israel, nor has it been recognized implicitly by international treaties, as Egypt’s Camp David accords implicitly recognized 1949 Israeli borders.)"

The recognition of Israel as a "Jewish" state is of paramount importance to Netanyahu. Not only would this affirm the ethnic superiority of Jewish citizens of Israel over all others, but it would also destroy the dreams of Palestinian refugees who still hold out hope that they will someday be permitted to return to the land of their ancestry, if not birth. In seeking to confirm Jewish Israeli hegemony over Palestine (including the opposition to Palestinian sovereignty in any future independent nation of their own), Netanyahu has chosen to use familiar Zionist propaganda to make his case to the American president.

The real focus of Twain’s traveling narrator is on revealing the annoyance, arrogance, and sanctimony of the American "pilgrim" in the Holy Land, rather than lambasting the land itself, or the people who dwell there. This pilgrim – the now-stereotypical American tourist – is described as rude, ill-mannered, and always talking "very loudly and coarsely." The narrator’s own stubbornness and nescience is apparent when he makes a mistake in identifying "the spot where David and Goliah used to sit and judge the people," equivocating and eschewing responsibility for the error by claiming that "a pilgrim informs me that it was not David and Goliah, but David and Saul. I stick to my own statement – the guide told me, and he ought to know." It is with this in mind that Twain leads us on an exploratory expedition to lands largely unknown to his American readership at the time.

When Peters, Dershowitz, or Netanyahu rely on, as Kearney says, "Twain’s savaging portrayal of the Holy Land as a filthy, backwards, empty place" in order to justify Zionist colonization and domination, they totally misinterpret the purpose of the book and wind up proving Twain hypothesis of the baffling ignorance of the Western mind in the process. "Peters makes no effort," Kearney explains, "to contextualize Twain’s remarks: namely, that he was skewering nineteenth century America’s sacred cows about the glories of Europe and the sacredness of the Holy Land."

And yet, it is this reading of Twain’s text as both anthropological and demographic reportage that Zionist have tactically misused in order to support their colonial and supremacist ideology for over 125 years. The conceptualization of Palestine as barren and uncultured, and its inhabitants unsuited to civilization, has served to justify the integral ethnocentrism and institutionalized racism of the Zionist project. It supposedly confirms, first hand by a renowned American scribe, the barbarity (or mere non-existence) of a native Palestinian population. It also acts to legitimize the ethnic superiority and forced sovereignty present in the unilateral Israeli Proclamation of Independence, adopted over eighty years after Twain’s book was published, and which says of the thousands of illegal Jewish immigrants flooding into Palestine over that period: "Pioneers… and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood. [emphasis mine]."

Furthermore, Twain exposes the common racism of American thought and the conception of Middle Easterners as both despicable and disposable when he writes, "I never dislike a Chinaman as I do these Turks and Arabs, and, when Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere."

Twain’s narrator later describes a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There, he is in awe of the sword of Godfrey of Bulloigne, which he sees as the most impressive representation of crusading chivalry and legendary heroism. "It stirs within a man every memory of the Holy Wars that has been sleeping in his brain for years, and peoples his thoughts with mail-clad images, with marching armies, with battles and with sieges," Twain writes. The sword’s power is described as almost omniscient; it can tell Christian from Muslim, always protecting the former and eager to slay the latter. He even goes so far as to let his imagination get carried away, as he wields the sword himself: "I tried it on a Moslem, and clove him in twain like a doughnut…if I had had a graveyard I would have destroyed all the infidels in Jerusalem."

I wonder if these words will remind Obama of the Jewish Rabbinate who, during the recent Gaza attacks, indoctrinated young Israeli troops with pamphlets claiming that they were holy warriors fighting to expel the "murderers" (Palestinians) who are "interfering with our conquest of this holy land." The rabbis preached that "when you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral."

While it’s obvious that a war-monger and ethnosupremacist like Netanyahu revels in Twain’s satirical violence, hopefully Obama will be a bit more discerning in his own literary analysis and, perhaps, pay attention to the descriptions of various Palestinian towns, alive with energy and agriculture. He writes that the land around Nablus is highly cultivated, fertile, well watered, and that "its affluent vegetation gains effect by contrast with the barren hills that tower on either side." He marvels at "the noble grove of orange-trees in which the Oriental city of Jaffa lies buried." Luckily for Twain, he was able to visit these sites before they were ethnically cleansed of their native populations by Zionist militias and Israeli policy.

Perhaps, Netanyahu is slyly likening Obama to the ignorant American tourist depicted in the pages of The Innocents Abroad, an inexperienced traveler distraught to find that the Holy Land of legend is not that of reality. Is Bibi suggesting that Obama discard his romantic visions of peace and coexistence once he discovers that there are no "picturesque Arabs" solemnly smoking from "long-stemmed chibouks" as seen in "a grand Oriental picture" but that instead there are only blood-thirsty, anti-semitic terrorists and barbarians lurking in bombed out schools and refugee camp eager to destroy a righteous and long-victimized Israel with non-existent Iranian nukes?

One wonders if Obama will see any connection between the Israeli Prime Minister and Twain’s Wandering Jew, who, with shaken confidence, "has carried on a kind of desultory toying with the most promising of the aids and implements of destruction, but with small hope, as a general thing. He has speculated some in cholera and railroads, and has taken almost a lively interest in infernal machines and patent medicines. He is old, now, and grave, as becomes an age like his; he indulges in no light amusements save that he goes sometimes to executions, and is fond of funerals."

It has been said that "in satire, irony is militant." It appears, through using the writings of Mark Twain to argue for continued Israeli hegemony of the Holy Land, Benyamin Netanyahu has revealed himself to understand only the militant part, and none of the irony.