Clueless in Gaza: A seance with Cardinal Richelieu’s ghost
Supreme strategist’s spirit says Hamas attack on Israel was much more than an intel failure while averring Palestinians were never really a people
“Hamas won first prize this year,” said the ghost of Cardinal Richelieu. “First prize in that part of the world means that you are allowed to compete for first prize next year. Second prize is, you’re extinct.”
Once again, I was shivering in the dank gloom of the Carthusian ossuary below the sewers of Paris, where 11 years ago I first conjured the spirit of the supreme strategist of the Thirty Years’ War and the architect of France’s lopsided victory over the richer and more populous Austrian Empire. Nitre dripped from the greenish rocks, and skulls atop neatly stacked rows of bone grinned at me from all sides.
I had carried a magnum of Chateau Petrus and a spittoon down the spiral staircase hidden below the Pont d’Alma – the Bridge of Souls – in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, to the crumbling stone stairs below the 19th century sewer system built by Napoleon III, through masonry encrusted by the mold of the ages until I reached the venue of my midnight tryst with the Cardinal.
I poured the fragrant Bourdeaux into the spittoon and waited for the shriveled grey shade of the great man to appear. It inserted a “spectral proboscis into the mouth of the spittoon and absorbed the liquid until it transmogrified into Richelieu’s purple robes. With a plop, its head withdrew and addressed me with the intonation of Maurice Chevalier: “So how come you never call?”
“Pardon me, Eminence,” I stammered. “I’ve been busy –”
“No, you’ve been complacent, Spengler,” chided the ghost. “Like the Israelis.”
“Everyone talks about Israel’s intelligence failure, Eminence.”
“It was much worse than an intelligence failure, Spengler. Israel fails to understand the world in which it finds itself. Too many of the world’s peoples can foresee the day when their language no longer will be spoken, when their culture gathers dust in libraries, when the fields and valleys they inhabit today will be inhabited by others. A people that has no future also has no rational self-interest.”
“But Hamas are fanatics!” I protested. “They have gone mad!”
“Everyone is going mad, Spengler, except perhaps the Chinese, and they have not come to grips with the madness that is abroad in the world,” said the Cardinal. “Consider the Ukrainians: Why should they insist on eliminating the Russian language—not to mention Hungarian and Polish—from within the borders they inherited from Stalin? Why not let Russian speakers have their own schools and their own local government, as Putin proposed a decade ago?
The reason is that Ukraine is a dying country. Before the war, it produced barely more than one child per female, and nine million of its 21 million working-age population had left for jobs overseas. No war in recent history was easier to avoid than this intra-Slavic butchery, but an arrogance born of despair pushed the Ukrainians into war with Russia.”
The Cardinal’s specter began to grow, like Faust’s dog. “Ask Azerbaijan why it found it necessary, after more than 30 years, to conquer the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and expel 120,000 Armenians whose ancestors had lived there for 2,000 years? Ask the Serbs why their army is poised on the border of Kosovo ready to expel Albanians who seized the province from Serbia in 2008, with the help of the United States?”
“But what does that have to do with the Palestinians?” I protested.
“The Palestinians are the most vulnerable of all peoples,” hissed the Cardinal’s ghost, “because they never were a people to begin with. Why indeed is there such a thing as a Palestinian? No Arab called himself a Palestinian before Israel declared independence. During and after Israel’s 1948 war, Muslim countries expelled 800,000 Jews, and 800,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from Jewish territory—a population transfer like the exchange of Greeks and Turks after 1922.
“The Jews of Iraq and Persia, whose ancestors had lived there for 2,500 years, left with the clothes on their backs, as well as the descendants of the Spanish Jews expelled in 1492. Israel absorbed them. The Arab states refused to absorb the 800,000 refugees of the 1948 war, but kept them in segregated camps because they refused to accept the existence of the Jewish State.
“Half the Arabs living in Palestine before the declaration of the Jewish state were economic migrants who came when the Zionists began rebuilding the country. They were not a nation, but only hostages to the Arab states’ refusal to accept Israel’s existence. If, perchance, the Arab states should make peace with Israel—and in particular Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s holiest places—the Palestinians would have no reason to be there in the first place. They would simply be stateless Arabs.”
“But Israel has the support of the Americans in dealing with Saudi Arabia,” I countered.
“The Americans?” Richelieu snorted. “Israel’s problem is that it is the ally of a senile superpower that ruined Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.”
“But what will happen, Eminence? What will happen to the Palestinians?”
“Ask the Serbs in Kosovo, or ethnic Ukrainians in the East, or the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. The problem is that the population transfer of the 1940s – 800,000 Arabs for 800,000 Jews – was never completed. The ethnic patchwork of the old empires is peeling off. Israel will make life in Gaza sufficiently difficult that a large part of the population will leave, or Israel itself will become unlivable, and Israelis will leave.”
“Some would say, Eminence, that population transfers are ethnic cleansing, and this will shock the conscience of the world.”
“Balivernes! exclaimed the Cardinal’s ghost, which had now waxed so large that it squeezed me against the bone stacks. “It will burst the bubble of moralizing amour-propre that has made Western policy so consistently idiotic for the past 50 years. There is no balm in Gilead for peoples cursed with a presentiment of extinction.”
“Eminence, surely the Arab Gulf States will turn against Israel if it destroys Hamas with many civilian casualties?”
“Foutaise!,” thundered Richelieu. “The Gulf States know better than anyone that the Palestinians have no raison d’etre once the Arab world accepts Israel’s existence. Quite the contrary: The Gulf States are painfully aware that they have incubated a monster and are more anxious than anyone to be rid of it.”
The expanding shape now had me pinned against the wall, and the bones behind me tickled my back. The skulls began to sway back and forth, and took up a chant: “We were once a people, and now we are no more. Those who live can see their fate in those who went before.”
The Cardinal’s ghost had lost its purple sheen and was becoming translucent, and the grinning skulls shone through his fading robes. Their chant became louder and more boisterous. I tried to scream, “Go back to being dead!,” but I could not hear my own voice over their clamor.
I woke up next to an empty bottle of Bowmore and a copy of the Jerusalem Post.