Bob Dylan turns 80 on Monday and the airwaves have been rasping all week with retrospectives on the long life and complex works of America’s greatest modern lyricist.
It’s a mark of the enduring power of the Nobel laureate that songs he wrote decades ago can be heard again and understood afresh. Or perhaps it’s a testimony to the enduring flaws in American society that the sentiments he expressed remain as relevant today as they were when they were written.
In the past year especially, Dylan’s protest songs from the early 1960s, with their indictments of social and racial inequality, have been taken up by a newly motivated and empowered progressive left.
One song that probably won’t get any attention from the Dylanologists is an especially apt and timely one from a later era, the 1982 album Infidels. Neighbourhood Bully was written during an earlier Arab-Israeli conflict, after Israeli forces had invaded Lebanon and the Jewish state had predictably earned the opprobrium of much of the world’s media, public intellectuals and many of its governments.
The song is a sarcastic denunciation of the critics of Israel, the “neighbourhood bully” of the title:
“The neighbourhood bully just lives to survive
He’s criticised and condemned for being alive
He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin
He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He’s the neighbourhood bully”
The words are remarkably relevant as Israel finds itself again the object of much of the world’s venomous and, you might say, ancient loathing. Or, perhaps, like the endurance of injustice in America, the lyrics’ contemporary resonance shows that the cant and hypocrisy of Israel’s critics never dims.
Hamas, armed and backed by its sponsor, Iran, is once again attempting to kick down Israel’s door and, once again, in the eyes of much of the world’s media and opinion-shapers, it is Israel’s fault.
There is, apparently, some gross disproportionality in the fact that Israel’s powerful military has killed more people than Hamas’s wildly indiscriminate acts of terrorism. The real disproportionality is, of course, that Hamas aims to kill civilians: Israelis, by firing directly at them, and Palestinians, by using them as human shields for its offensive. While Israel’s armed forces target terrorists, innocents get killed because Hamas has placed them in the line of fire.
Or take the supposed unfairness of the advantage Israel gains from its “Iron Dome” missile defence system while Palestinians have no such protection. There is such a protective shield for the Palestinians, in fact, freely available to Hamas: the option not to fire rockets at Israeli cities. If no Iranian-supplied rockets were falling on homes in Haifa and Tel Aviv, no Israel Defence Forces’ missiles would be fired at Hamas targets in Gaza.
Dylan’s satirical disdain captured and skewered the same kind of one-sided analysis decades ago. But one thing that has changed since then is the political forces within the United States.
For its entire existence, Israel has enjoyed bipartisan American support.
There have been critics, obviously, and periods of tension when Israel’s actions have at times merited sanction. But the essential understanding on both sides of American politics has been that the Jewish state’s continuous existential peril demanded robust support.
Today, however, the progressive wing that is ascendant in the Democratic Party is overtly hostile, not just to certain Israeli actions but, it seems, to Israel itself.
A vocal group of members of Congress have condemned Israel in the past week in terms that are unusual by the standard of American political discourse. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young standard-bearer of the left, denounced Israel as an “apartheid state” in a tweet, a statement as bizarre as it was offensive in alluding to a country in which Arabs have many of the same rights as Jews and substantially more than they would in most Arab states.
A number of her colleagues have made similarly caustic criticisms. Rashida Tlaib, another left-wing congresswoman, implored President Biden to take a stand against Israel, urging an end to the long-standing military support that has helped to protect the Jewish state. She met the president on the tarmac at an airport in the Midwest this week and, according to media reports, told him: “The US cannot continue to give the right-wing Netanyahu government billions each year to commit crimes against Palestinians. Atrocities like bombing schools cannot be tolerated, much less conducted with US-supplied weapons.”
What has led to the new intensity of this anti-Israeli sentiment is the equation of the Palestinian cause with the condition of African-Americans that has become such a powerful mission for the left. “Israel is having its own Black Lives Matter moment” was the headline on an opinion article this week by a professor at the University of California.
So far the Biden administration has been admirably staunch in its backing of Israel’s right to defend itself but it’s under pressure.
On Wednesday the president told Netanyahu in a phone call that he “expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a ceasefire”.
For now, the US remains Israel’s dependable ally. However there are profound shifts under way in American politics that will continue to reverberate. As we’ve seen in all kinds of ways in the past year, the times they are a changin’.
The Times
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