544
PARTISAN REVIEW
EK:
We are stunned by all that. We became aware of it as soon as we got
here. How do you explain that nobody outside the country knows about
all
these activities?
TK:
That's due to all your professional colleagues. None of this makes
headlines. But
if
somebody gets a stone thrown at his car it makes a headline.
WP:
Do you have an explanation for that? There's no doubt that Israel, and
Jerusalem, are getting a bad press, and there is a mounting tide of critical
opinion
in
America.
TK:
No. I can't explain it. Look, you have the most obscene things happen–
ing. Suddenly I hear that many Labor members in Parliament speak out
against us and talk with the PLO. They are members of the same party
which, when McDonald was the minister of colonies, stopped the Jews from
saving themselves by coming here from Germany or from occupied Europe.
Members of the same party who belong to a country that made the first pact
with Hitler, making him respectable in Munich and Berchtesgarden, that has
been fighting the Irish
all
these years, and they dare to criticize us. You have
Kurds gassed by rockets by the Iraqis, and it may make a small paragraph
on page three or five of the newspapers. And the Iranians were sending
children ahead of the army to explode their land mines, and thousands of
them are getting killed. Look what the Syrians are doing in Beirut. I could
give you dozens of other examples, but nobody cares about them. So what
can we do? This is it.
WP:
There's been a shift. Now a lot of the criticism comes from England and
Germany, from labor and from the left. That didn't exist in the past. Intel–
lectuals, academics, and the left generally. Don't you think there's been a
shift?
TK:
Well, I'll tell you a story which has only a little to do with this, but still
something. Someone I greatly admire, one of our great labor leaders, is a
man named Hazan. He is eighty and a universally admired figure. He was
asked on television a little while ago if he ever had made any mistakes. He
said,"Yes, I've made one great mistake. For a while I took the position that
we had two fatherlands, Israel and Russia." And that was Stalin's Russia.
Now I know that the left has been wrong forever. I don't know of a single
thing the left, as the left, has done right. I grew up in Vienna, when the Social
Democrats were called the Two-and-a Half International because they were
somewhere between the Communist International, the Third International,
and the Second International. And I know now how wrong they were then.
WP:
We agree with you.
TK:
This doesn't mean that the individuals were wrong, but as parties, they
were not very admirable. You know what it leads us to all the time. For in–
stance, the left and the liberals among others were all against the Shah. And
