My Right Word

I am atacked in London Review of Books,
twice!

In response to my letter, responding to Virginia Tilley's article of last November, two letters subsequently appeared (see below).

My response (not yet published) then follows.

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Unfair to Revenants
From Virginia Tilley

In accusing me of mischaracterising the settler population in the West Bank, Yisrael Medad (Letters, 6 May) misquotes my article. The full sentence read: 'Nor does the problem lie with the minority of settlers in "Judea and Samaria" who are indeed gun-toting religious zealots (mostly from the US), even if their domestic political influence is daunting.' I had meant to highlight, not obscure, the minority status of the extremists who, in stereotype, are the face of settler intransigence, while explaining why this minority has unique political leverage. Certainly the settlers are 'secular in the main'. In briefly acknowledging that many of the most militant are from the US I intended an oblique reference to their insulated origins, which have fostered a particularly chauvinistic attitude toward Arabs. The term 'revenants' that Medad prefers for that majority (as reflecting a 'return' to 'ancestral homes' and a right to sovereignty after 'a long hiatus') indicates more graphically than I could have managed that where the land is concerned the secular settler world-view is not so very different.

Virginia Tilley
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York

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Unfair to Revenants
From Nicholas Blanton


Yisrael Medad asks that we call the Jewish settlers in the West Bank revenants, as befits 'persons who have returned after a long hiatus to their ancestral homes' (Letters, 6 May). I know just how he feels. My family lost everything in the North of England in 1070, when William the Conqueror ethnically cleansed the landowners, and it's been annoying us ever since. If Medad would meet me next Thursday in Barnard Castle, with a few hundred of his armed friends, we could finally see justice done. It's tough perhaps to the non-revenants, who've been there for only 934 years, but we won't charge them back rent and there are plenty of people who speak their language next door. I'm sure they'll adjust and find other places to live, among their own kind.

Nicholas Blanton
Shepherdstown, West Virginia

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Now me:-

Virginia Tilley (Letters, 3 June), in responding to my comment on her article claims I misquoted her. If guilty of anything, I would admit to the crime be miscontruing, perhaps.

"Gun-toting" could also be applied to any person officially licensed to carry a weapon for self-defense but the way Tilley employed it, it was purposively pejorative and that is how I understood it. Jews in the disputed territories must carry guns, as do a majority of Israelis living in Israel, due to an Arab predilection to kill Jews wherever they find them, no matter their age or gender or where they live. If this be a "chauvinistic attitude", then this is turning the conflict on its head whereby the victims are altered into a state of the perpetrator.

As for Nicholas Blanton's bemoaning of lost real estate in northern England, (20 May), but why should I joust with him? My 'battle' is with an invading force which, in 638, conquered my country crying "Muhammed's law by the sword!".

My forefathers walked these hills of Judea and Samaria two thousand years before that Arab forceful usurption 1300 years ago as kings, prophets and priests. Those Jewish revenants came back to this land after a first exile and again after a second exile. No century passed without an attempt to return to our homeland.

Despite Blanton's blandishments, after having undergone the rule of a British Mandate that doomed millions of my brethren to the Nazi ovens by halting immigration during the Second World War, we are not going anywhere. And neither need the Arabs go anywhere, if they desist from using terror.