When Heminges and Condell published Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623, they classified King Lear as a tragedy and The Merchant of Venice as a comedy. The first is self-evident. Mental and physical abuse abound in King Lear, bringing chaos, injury and death. The Merchant of Venice, on the other hand, ends on an up-beat. A happy resolution is expressed in romantic poetry. And no-one actually dies.

In 2008, my wife and I visited Palestine for the first time. We had read the Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, about his 40 years in the Palestinian countryside. When he had started it had been over the landscape Jesus would have recognised. The landscape we saw in 2008 had become something very different. Concrete roads with hundreds of roadblocks barred the way. Wooded hilltops were being cleared and replaced with concrete settlements, The Wall of Separation was being built, augmented with wire and gun positions, snaking across the hills and valleys and annexing Palestinian land. Palestinians’ houses were being demolished, their olive groves destroyed and their wells concreted in. And the whole morbid project was enforced by Israel’s army, police and its civilian settlers.

There was never really a time when Zionist ideologues hoped for or expected a peaceful colonisation of Palestine. The matter was debated seriously at the end of the 19th century - might there be a peaceful assimilation of European Jews into existing Palestinian society, or was it necessary to fight against that society in order to replace it?

I wrote this originally in November 2024, but with one or two updates it still seems relevant.

Originally posted in August 2022, but now slightly amended

Originally written in May 2020 but, with a few changes, still relevant.

I began writing this on 27th January 2024 - the annual international Holocaust Remembrance Day which commemorates the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.  In WW2, the most terrible episode of the 20th century, millions were killed, not only in combat, as fighters or as supposedly unavoidable ‘collateral damage’, but more significantly in deliberate acts of mass killing, including the carpet bombing of large urban areas and terrible programmes of extermination. 

Whenever there is a grand, patriotic occasion, we can always find some theatrical knight of the realm ready, with thrilling voice, to recite John of Gaunt’s speech about England, from Shakespeare’s Richard II. You know the one:

I often travel on the London Overground. My line runs between Stratford and Richmond, via Hackney, Holloway, Camden Town, Hampstead, Willesden and Acton: it’s a cross section through London, in which spacious suburbs alternate with the crowded inner city. The fellow-Londoners I see on my travels may be on their way to work in schools or shops, building sites, hospitals, universities and Council yards. They are black, white, middle-class, working class, elderly or young, affluent or poor. Their families may have been here for generations, or they may have recently arrived. As well as English, many of them will speak one or more of London’s 200 languages. In them we see our culture and our horizons - not to mention our local economy - extended in many different ways.

Well, maybe not the planet.  The planet itself will survive. But its physical environment is incontrovertibly changing, threatening the lives of a great many living things. This is not just an extravagant claim, but the facts are borne out by the melting ice-caps, the rising sea-levels, the abnormal weather events, floods, water shortages, fires, crop failure, desertification and - importantly - by an overwhelming body of scientific opinion. Whole species are lost, populations are uprooted, people die. It is now commonplace for commentators to say ‘something must be done’.

Most people, I’d like to think, want a world which offers a decent life to everybody, which gives special respect to the most needy in society, and in which the natural environment is preserved and nurtured. I say ‘most’ because there are many who clearly don’t want this and who work hard to negate it. At this particular stage in history, it is this latter group whose power dominates the world and the way it works.

Written Christmas 2022