AJ R Info r mation Volume UII No. 12 December 1998 £5 (to non-members) \ Don't miss ... A craving for poison Richard Grunberger p3 Reflections on the Wye Accord and its possible consequences A saint for the Holocaust Ronald Channing P5 The great facilitator The peace caravan trundles on Prof Paul Cohn pi 6 bba Eban once described Menachem Begin as has rendered the old maps - not only of the West Honorary 'the dark at the end of the tunnel'. Eban had a Bank, but also of the political land.scape - obsolete. A rare gift for aphorisms - he dubbed All this is happening at a time when the geopolitical jews Chamberlain's Britain a 'brollygarchy' - but his pattern of the entire Middle Ea.st is highly fiuid. In the he.se are judgement on Begin was somewhat half-baked. The area of the Palestinian Authority Arafat and Hamas are not to be latter embarked on the futile invasion of the Lebanon, locked in battle to the death, and in Jordan King Tconfu.sed yet he also made the lireakthrough peace with Egypt Hussein is battling death. On the other hand, in Iran with the Nazi- at the heavy cost of handing back Sinai. the AyatoUahs are facing their Taliban enemies out­ designated 'white Benjamin Netanyahu .seems cast in the Begin side, and modernisers inside, the country. In Turkey Jews', i.e. .scientists mould. He, too, perpetrated egregious mini-Lebanons, the secular E.stabli.shment have .seized the initiative who refused to but is to be recommended on concluding, in the face from the Islamicists, and have scored a foreign policy subscribe to the of last-ditch opposition, the Wye Plantation Agree­ success by forcing Syrian President Assad to lose face non.sense of ment which takes the Oslo-initiated peace process by abandoning the Kurdish insurgents. Aryan Physics'. forward on its obstacle .strewn path. Although the Middle Ea.st is .still highly volatile, it can When, in '68, the This interim agreement is one in which there are no now be .said that it is a safer place at the end of 1998 French authorities real losers - except Hamas who now come under CIA than it was at the beginning of the year D called Danny surveillance. There are, of course, self-perceived Cohn-Bendit a kxsers, primarily the West Bank settlers, whose intran­ foreign agitator, sigence can only point in one direction: Annageddon. thoLLsands of Just as Netanyahu's cabinet intenningles politicians - students took to the in the .sen.se of politics being the art of the po.ssible - streets chanting 'we with purblind zeaU)ts, .so Netanyahu is himself a mix­ are all Gennan ture of ideologue and pragmati.st. Rightwing Zionism Jews'. In a less is in his 'genes', since his father was a disciple of facile a.ssumption Jabotinsky's. His intermittent pragmatism stems from of Jewi.sh identity acute awarene.ss of Israel's closeness to America the late Ted (where he himself lived for a while). The link is .so Hughes, Poet intimate that at times the fortunes of American presi­ Laureate, was wont dents come clo.se to hinging on Israeli compliance to describe him.self with their plans. This had tempted Netanyahu into as a Holoc-aust what is Ix'st described as a tail-wags-dog ploy. Feeling .survivor. What unduly pressured by Clinton to make concessions, he lay behind this has drawn close to the Republican opposition in .self-characteri.sation Congress. However, the backlash against the Starr was his father's Report, prefiguring the Republican fiasco at the mid­ p.sychic scarring in term elections, seems to have brought him back to the Great War, and the path of .sanity. the suicide of Sylvia The Wye Accord has already played a small part in Plath, as well as of altering the American political landscape. In Israel his second - part- Netanyahu's apparent volte-face has redrawn the Jewish - partner D Life or Theatre-' The work of Charlotte Salomon is being fauklines separating the Likud and Labour blocs, and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art until 17 January 1999. AJR INFORMATION DECEMBER 1998 his retirement in 1977. His great love, Profile however, was translating. Alongside a for­ midable number of books translated from German and Czech into English, he has es­ The gift of tongues tablished a pioneering role as a ccording to a disdainful aphorism distinguished translator of Bulgarian and of Somerset Maugham's, only Macedonian poetry. Among the many of­ Acard-sharps and diplomats are flu­ fices he has held are those of Chairman of ent in several languages. Ewald Osers' the Translators' Association and the Transla­ distinguished record as a translator medi­ tors' Guild, 'Vice-Chairman of the In.stitute ating between English, the tongue of his of Linguists and leader of the British del­ adopted homeland, and an astonishing egation to four World Congresses of variety of European languages, refutes that Translators. proposition. Born in Prague in 1917, into He has been showered with prizes and an affluent, German-speaking Jewish honours for his literary translations, includ­ family, Ewald and his younger brother ing the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for the best were largely brought up by their mother, translation from German, 1971, the Euro­ the daughter of Austria-Hungary's first pean Poetry Translafion Prize, 1987, and Jewish high court judge, after the early most recently the Kafka Medal of the death of their father. Masaryk Academy of Arts, Prague. Besides Ewald's mother's family name was important works of history, biography and Anders. It had been 'Abeles', but when her Eivald Osers philo.sophy, he has translated from German father became a high court judge it was such eminent writers as Reiner Kunze, suggested to him that he should change London, thanks to the intervention, life-sav­ Rose Ausliinder and Thomas Bernhard, as his name, so he called himself 'Anders'. A ing as it turned out, of Professor well as the correspondence between Rich­ further promotion would have required Heyrovsky, Czech winner of a Nobel Prize ard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, him to change his religion, which he re­ for chemistry. During the war, his mother and Jaroslav Seifert, Miroslav Holub and fused to do. was deported to her death; his brother, Ivan Klima from the Czech. Educated in the legendary culture of however, survived Theresienstadt and de­ Ewald Osers lives with his wife Mary- Prague Jewry - his father had met Kafka, portation to Poland. whom he married in 1942, in the and Franz Werfel and Max Brod were old When war broke out, he got a job at the delightful Thames Valley surroundings of boys of his school - Ewald studied chemis­ BBC's Monitoring Service, where he en­ Sonning Common; they have two children try at the German University in Prague. joyed a distinguished career, working on and two grandchildren. He remains crea­ But in .spring 1938 antisemitic harassment highly important confidential material both tively active in his long and productive drove him from Prague; he was admitted during and after the war, and rising to be­ 'retirement'. as a doctoral student at University College, come Assistant Head of Department before D Anthony Grenville towards Israel had brought diminishing sup­ within his interpretation of the Oslo ac­ Peace in our time? port for the PLO. cords. Nevertheless, Prof Rubin proved rof Barry Rubin of Bar-Ilan University, The 1993 Oslo Agreement was, in his rightly confident in predicting that an cutting through confused thinking view, "of tremendous importance". While interim agreement would be reached in Pand misinformed opinion, presented recognising that every step agreed at Oslo the USA and a second Israeli withdrawal a clearly argued and timely analysis of had been delayed, progress had been accomplished. The achievement of a fina' 'Propects for Peace in the Middle East' at made. Palestine elections had been held status agreement, however, was quite an­ an Institute of Jewish Studies lecture given and won by Arafat and his supporters, and other matter at University College London. He spoke Israel had withdrawn from parts of the In Prof Rubin's opinion, the Palestine AU' during the later stages of the Israeli- West Bank and Gaza, though the Palestine thority, with up to 2.8 million people Palestinian negotiations hosted by the USA Authority had notably failed to achieve a within the territories, faced an uphill task, at Wye Plantation in Maryland. deal with Hamas. not least becau.se the Arab world now gave Professor Rubin pinpointed key factors The greatest .setback had come in 1995 the Palestinian cause lower priority. The influencing the Israel-Palestinian relation­ with the assassination of Prime Minister past decade's strengthening momentLim to­ ship, including the fact that more Yitzhak Rabin, followed by an escalation in wards an Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement significant changes had taken place in the attacks carried out by Hamas and Islamic had led to agreements being achieved only last eight years in the Middle East than in Jihad. Terrorism, he pointed out, was car­ through incredibly tough negotiations. A'' the previous half century. In addition, the ried out by people who did not want the both sides needed a peace agreement, i^^ dissipation of pan-Arab nationalism, the col­ peace process to succeed - indeed they Prof Rubin's analysis, neither was prepared lapse of the Soviet Union and its decline as had set out to wreck it. Binyamin Netan­ to walk away from the process established an Arab ally, the weakening of the more yahu, on the other hand, favoured the by the Oslo accords.