Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Webdiarist Sol Salbe was born in Israel, lives in Melbourne and runs a small Middle East news service relying predominately on Israeli sources which he often translates himself from the Hebrew. Sol's last pieces for Webdiary were Julia Irwin and the scriptwriter and Danby MP vs Melbourne University Press. Sol is a member of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, the Greens, Hamerkaz HaIsraeli and even a few cooking groups however the views expressed are his personal views and are not necessarily those of any these organisations. Info: ssalbe@westnet.com.au

The Nobel game: what is the score?

by Sol Salbe

It is a well-worn phrase that politics are invariably intertwined with most Nobel prizes. This year has been no exception but at least the politics came in style - a patchwork of Left and Right for the eyes and ears to behold.

Chronologically the first of the three "social" announcements came for the Peace Prize. Mohammed El Baradei prize was not welcomed by the glass-is-half-empty crowd. Many of these would have preferred someone like Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Others again, mainly on the Left pointed out that the International Atomic Energy Association was actually involved in increasing the use of nuclear energy. That, they contended, was something to be discouraged - not to be rewarded.

Of course receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is no proof of being commendable or, for that matter, making a great contribution for peace. Think of Henry Kissinger, described by Christopher Hitchens as a war criminal. My favourite anecdote relates to another such "worthy" recipient, Menachem Begin who was Prime Minister when Ariel Sharon orchestrated the 1982 Lebanon War in which ten of thousands of innocent Lebanese and Palestinians (and quite a few Israeli soldiers) died. The anecdote concerns the head of Physics in Israel's Technion who nominated Begin for the Nobel Prize in physics on the ground that his contribution to physics… was about the same as his contribution to peace! [The Norwegians wrote back saying that they were glad that the Jewish sense of humour was alive and well.]

But in El Baradei's case most people saw it as the finger being given to the Bush administration. Bush and Co hated El Baradei for arguing that there were no WMDs in Iraq. They disliked his stance on Iran and were even desperate enough to try to have him replaced by Alexander Downer no less. [Only Israel's Shimon Peres, himself a Nobel Laureate, thought that giving the prize to El Baradei was a warning to Iran!]

The Peace Prize was followed by a reward to the forces of the Right for economics. The two winners were the American Thomas Schelling and Robert (Yisrael) Aumann who holds both Israeli and US citizenships.

If you've never heard of Schelling or Aumann right-wing politics then the Australian media wasn't much help. The nearest thing to a hint was Tanya Nolan on the World Today: "Schelling, successfully applied Game Theory during the Cold War, explaining that the ability to fight back is sometimes more useful than defending oneself from an attack."

US based left-wing Israeli academic Daniel Breslau was more forthcoming: "[Thomas Schelling] was the most important figure in the application of game theoretical thinking to geopolitical strategy, with books like The Strategy of Conflict in 1960. His work is taught in military colleges around the world, and is frequently cited in articles on military strategy. "

Schelling is the theorist of the coercive use of military force, ie force used to induce desired behaviour in an adversary, rather than simply to destroy the enemy's military capacity. His ideas were the direct inspiration for US strategy in Vietnam, of indiscriminately bombing the North in order to persuade Ho Chi Minh to stop supporting the Vietcong in the South. This strategy resulted in two million civilian deaths and was a complete failure in realising its objectives. Schelling's ideas are no doubt read in Israeli officer courses, and inform the IDF approach in suppressing Palestinian resistance.  The IDF approach of pressuring the civilian population, which shades into state terror, is consistent with some of Schelling's recommendations, as discussed here by Fred Kaplan in Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/2127862/)

Aumann's politics are no better. Writing is Israel's main liberal daily, Haaretz Tamara Traubman profiled him: "A religious man identified with right-wing politics - some of his colleagues label him "extreme right" - Aumann has an explanation from game theory for the failure of the Oslo agreements, and the same tools serve him to explain why Israel must continue the arms race and hold on to nuclear weapons."

And further: "Aumann is a veteran member of Professors for a Strong Israel, a right-wing think tank, and he opposed the disengagement. At the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University, they said he arrived daily with an orange ribbon, and kept doing so after the plan was implemented. He insists on calling the disengagement "the expulsion." [The orange ribbon was the symbol of the Gaza settlers and their supporters.]

Traubman was a bit coy about Professors for a Strong Israel. Its political positions are on the far right. For example, the organisation is opposed to Israel's infamous fence/wall. No, it does not care about the impact on the Palestinians. It is concerned that the fence may undermine Israel's claim for the whole of the OccupiedTerritories. A current comment by the group chairperson Ron Breiman in Israel's largest circulating daily is telling. While in English the heading is circumspect Give Hamas a chance, there is no such compunction in Hebrew where it's Let the Hamas win. His logic is simple - all the Palestinians are terrorists so if the Hamas were to win then "the tired Jews" (and by implication the rest of the world) "will understand that peace and a Palestinian state west of the Jordan are a contradiction in terms."

So with one win to the very mild left and one to the hard right the decider was to be the Nobel Prize for literature. Attention was centred on the Swedish Academy like the camera focussing on Simon Taufel standing in the middle of the SCG. But when the wait was over and the finger went up it didn't signify a batter being given out but the rudest gesture Bush and Blair could imagine. The Swedes award the Noble Prize for literature to Harold Pinter.

The Guardian initial report gave an idea why the Coalition of the Willing wasn't happy: "An outspoken critic of the war in Iraq (he famously called President Bush a "mass murderer" and dubbed Tony Blair a "deluded idiot"), in 2003 he turned to poetry to castigate the leaders of the US and the UK for their decision to go to war."

Murdoch's London Times editorialised: "there are two possibilities. First, the Nobel committee may have ruled that 2005 was the ideal moment to honour a man who wrote his signature works in the late 1950s…"

Then there is another possibility: that Pinter is just about the biggest and sharpest stick with which the Nobel committee can poke America in the eye. His recent output has consisted almost entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants against the Iraq conflict. He did not like those in Afghanistan or Kosovo either. In his anger, which only occasionally verges on the coherent, Pinter is as spare with logic as he once was with language.

Pinter's Noble was announced in the late evening on Thursday 13 October (AEST.) It must have taken everyone by surprise for on the next morning the same Associated Press story was run in the country's three leading broadsheets and as a bonus in the Hebrew Haaretz and even Al Jazeera. All alluded to his humble background as a son of a Jewish dressmaker. However his Opposition to the  Iraq war somehow wasn't deemed worthy of being mentioned in the Australian. The Age at least mentioned the war and the Sydney Morning Herald even quoted the first line of his poem on the war "Here they go again, /The Yanks in their armoured parade"

Here is the full poem:

God Bless America

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.