Blindness in Gaza -- Peter Leyland

Blindness in Gaza*

 

I have been taking The Observer, an English Sunday newspaper, for as long as I can remember, and my story arises from this. When I first began teaching History in Guildford in November 1973 I was asked by my 12-13 year old pupils to explain to them about the Yom Kippur War. This had just broken out when the Egyptians and Syrians had invaded Israel in an attempt to recapture The Golan Heights which they had lost in the 6 Day War of 1967 against the same enemy. I was a recent graduate in English Literature rather than a historian, but to help explain the conflict I spread pages of The Observer, then a broadsheet paper, across the blackboard. I did my best to tell them what I knew. 

 

The Observer was a newspaper which did then and still does favour the liberal arts. I was trusting it then to give both me and my pupils a fair and unbiased view of what was happening in the Middle East. Fifty years later this November in The Observer I read Kenan Malik’s Comment and Analysis piece, In the Middle East, as in Greek tragedy, justice must prevail over moral absolutism. As I expect many others are, I was reeling and numbed from the news bulletins about the war between Israel and Hamas, and I needed a lodestone, a guide. Kenan Malik, using a trilogy of plays called The Oresteia written by Aeschylus in the fifth century BC, provided that. He was arguing that the answer to the question, Where will it end? the question which is asked by the Chorus after Orestes kills Clytemnestra, will depend on whether the political leaders in Israel, Palestine and the West will listen to the Furies or to Athena.

 

I wrote to Kenan Malik telling him how impressed I was by his article. I had read a summary of The Oresteia trilogy, I told him, but wondered which translation he had used? He replied almost immediately telling me that his favourites were those by Oliver Taplin and Ted Hughes although some didn’t like the Hughes version. I looked online and found nevertheless that Hughes’s translation would be the easiest to obtain. As I had taught Hughes’s poetry with some success and as the AE deadline was approaching, I sent for it.

 

It arrived within a week and I set to reading it with post-it notes to hand. To summarise the plot: At the end if the Trojan war Agamemnon's fleet of ships is becalmed for weeks. The returning soldiers are plagued with illness, boredom; infested with lice and plagued by rats, and to get the advantage of a gust of wind to free the ships and return to Argos (Greece), Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to appease Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Enraged, upon his return Iphigenia’s mother, Clytemnestra, together with her lover, Aegisthus, murder Agamemnon, by catching him in a net while he is bathing and stabbing him to death. In turn to avenge his father, Orestes, the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, kills his mother and Aegisthus. Although Orestes claims justice for his action, The Furies are enraged at Clytemnestra’s death and in the final third of the play their searing anger is dramatized.

 

As I read this, I felt the rage of justified anger. The Furies, who are also the chorus in this final part, The Eumenides, represent the slave women of Argos and they demand justice. Athena, Goddess of Wisdom is called upon to help. As I read, I expected some resolution of the issue, but no, there must be a trial where both the accusers (the Furies) and the accused (Orestes) are heard. The reader, or viewer if one has seen it dramatized on stage, learns that a man without fear of the law will easily kill, and that in Athena’s eyes Orestes’s act is the first case of homicide. With the Furies raging against Orestes, Athena arranges votes to be cast by 12 jurors, all citizens of Athens. The resulting count is divided equally. Athena has the deciding vote, and she chooses to give mercy to Orestes.

 

At this the Furies' rage is greater than ever. They cannot abide that the crime of matricide will not be punished. Athena listens and then steps forward urging them to let their rage pass into understanding, saying to them that they have not been crushed or insulted and that she can appreciate their anger but cites ‘The numbed and pitiless carnage/Of civil war.’ Their anger, however, is not assuaged, and they continue raging, saying that they cannot live on words. At this Athena steps back and asks them to ‘Listen to persuasion, the sacred balm/That heals self-wounding anger.’ She says that Athens can offer them all that the gods can hope for and she welcomes them to the city. After more wisdom from Athena the Furies are eventually soothed, and Athena says that she rejoices to hear their changed voices. Using the image of a successful marriage the Furies vow that war will never ever again divide Athens.

 

As I was writing this an arrangement was being made between Israel and Hamas to free some of the hostages taken by Hamas and yet the fighting on both sides was to continue until the very moment of the ceasefire. Since finding Kenan Malik’s article in my Observer, sending for Ted Hughes’s translation and reading, it I have taken part in a Zoom meeting where Linden West, a friend and colleague, talked about his work as an adult education teacher in Israel and Canterbury Christ Church University, trying to reconcile the differences between Jews and Palestinians and the importance of the dialogue between them**. Linden and I have also discussed our reading of Apeirogon by Colum McCann published in 2020. It is the story, based on real life events about Rami, an Israeli, and Bassam, a Palestinian. Both men have lost their daughters in Israel/Palestine - one to a suicide bomber the other shot by a member of the border police. These deaths were the results of the anger that has engulfed the country since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, although I know that the roots of the issue go as far back as 1917 and The Balfour Declaration. 

 

It is now fifty years since I gave my history lesson and I wonder if any of those pupils remember it? I could despair but instead I have turned to literature to assist my understanding. In Apeirogon – the title refers to a shape with an infinite number of sides - Rami and Bassam become the best of friends. I am hoping that the truce between Israel and Hamas that we are currently witnessing on our screens and in our newspapers will continue for as long as possible.

 

References:

 

*The title is adapted from Samson Agonistes (1671) by John Milton

 

**Annunciation and denunciation: relational psychoanalysis, liberation theology and the spirit of transformation by Professor Emeritus Linden West, 14^th November 2023 is well worth reading

 

Apeirogon (2020) by Colum McCann

 

‘In the Middle East, as in Greek tragedy, justice must prevail over moral absolutism’ Kenan Malik in The Observer 5^th November 2023

 

Aeschylus: The Oresteia, a new translation by Ted Hughes (1999)