Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

Again there was the pressure of Kamil’s shoulder against my own and his warm breath on my skin. “Is this not correct? If it weren’t that Israel was Jewish —”

There was the sharp smack of a gavel striking, the judge’s way of suggesting to Kamil that perhaps it was time to shut up. Kamil, imperturbable, sighed and, crossing his hands in his lap, bore his reprimand in a state of ruminative meditation for about two minutes. Then he was at my ear again. “If it weren’t that Israel was Jewish, would not the same American Jewish liberals who are so identified with its well-being, would they not condemn it as harshly as South Africa for how it treats its Arab population?”

I chose again not to reply, but this discouraged him no more than the gavel had. “Of course, South Africa is irrelevant now. Now that they are breaking hands and giving their prisoners medical injections, now one thinks not of South Africa but of Nazi Germany.”

Here I turned my face to his as instinctively as I would hit the brake if something darted out in front of my car. And gazing altogether unaggressively at me were those liquid eyes with that bottomless eloquence which was all opacity to me. I had only to nod sympathetically, to nod and arrange my face in my gravest expression, in order to carry on the masquerade — but what was the purpose of this masquerade? If it had ever had a purpose, I was too provoked by my taunter’s reckless rhetoric to remember what it was and get on with the act. I’d heard enough. “Look,” I said, starting quiet and low but, surprisingly, as the words came, all at once flaring out of control, “Nazis didn’t break hands. They engaged in industrial annihilation of human beings. They made a manufacturing process of death. Please, no metaphors where there is recorded history!”

With that I sprang to my feet, but as I pushed past George’s legs the judge swung the gavel, twice this time, and in the row at the back four soldiers promptly stood and I saw the armed guard at the door toward which I was headed move to block my way. Then the perspicacious judge, speaking in English, ringingly announced to the courtroom, “Mr. Roth is morally appalled by our neocolonialism. Make way. The man needs air.” He spoke next in Hebrew and the guard blocking the door moved aside and I pushed the door open and stepped into the yard. But I had barely a moment to begin to figure out how I was going to find my way back to Jerusalem on my own before everyone I had left behind came pouring through the door after me. Everyone but George and Kamil. Had they been arrested? When I peered back through the open door I saw that the prisoners had been removed from the dock and, except at the dais, the room was empty. And there beside the chair of the army judge, who’d apparently called a recess in order to address them privately, stood my two missing companions. The judge happened at the moment to be listening and not speaking. It was George who was speaking. Foaming . Kamil stood quietly beside him, a very tall man with his hands in his pockets, an attacker whose onslaught was tamed by a cunning camouflaged to look just like forbearance.

The defense lawyer, the large bearded man in the skullcap, industriously smoked a cigarette only a few feet away from me. He smiled when I turned his way, a smile with a needle in it. “So,” he said, as though before we had even exchanged a word we had already reached a stalemate. He lit a second cigarette with the butt of his first and, after a little frenzy of deep inhalations, spoke again. “So you’re the one they’re all talking about.”

Inasmuch as he’d seen me tête-à-tête in the courtroom with the locally renowned brother of an Arab defendant and had to have assumed from that, however incorrectly, that my bias, if I had one, couldn’t be entirely antithetical to his, I was unprepared for the flagrant disdain. Another antagonist. But mine or Pipik’s? As it turned out, a little of each.

“Yes, you open your mouth,” he said, “and whatever comes out, the whole world takes notice. The Jews begin to beat their breasts. ‘Why is he against us? Why isn’t he for us?’ That must be a wonderful feeling, its mattering so much what you are for or against.”

“A better feeling, I assure you, than being a lawyer pleading petty- theft cases out in the sticks.”

“A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Orthodox Jewish lawyer. Don’t minimize my insignificance.”

“Go away,” I said.

“You know, when the schmucks here get on me for defending Arabs, I don’t usually bother to listen. ‘It’s a living,’ I tell them. ‘What do you expect from a shyster like me?’ I tell them that the Arab respects a fat man, a fat man can screw them really good. But when George Ziad brings to this courtroom his celebrity leftists, then I seem to myself nearly as despicable as they are. At least you have the excuse of self-advancement. How will you get to Stockholm without your Third World credentials?”

“Of course. All a part of the assault on the prize.”

“The glamorous one, their courtroom bard, has he told you yet about the burning building? ‘If you jump out of a burning building, you may land on the back of a man who happens to be walking along the street. That is a bad enough accident. You then don’t have to start beating him over the head with a stick. But that is what is happening on the West Bank. First they landed on people’s backs, in order to save themselves, and now they are beating them over the head.’ So folkloric. So very authentic. Hasn’t he taken you by the hand yet? He will, very stirringly, when you are ready to go. This is when Kamil gets the Academy Award. ‘You will leave here and forget, and she will leave here and forget, and George will leave here, and for all I know perhaps even George will forget. But the one who receives the strokes, he has an experience different from that of the one who counts the strokes.’ Yes, they have a great catch in you, Mr. Roth. A Jewish Jesse Jackson — worth a thousand Chomskys. And here they are,” he said, looking to where George and Kamil had stepped through the courtroom door and into the yard, “the world’s pet victims. What is their dream? Palestine or Palestine and Israel too? Ask them sometime to try and tell you the truth.”

What George and Kamil did first when they joined us was to shake the large lawyer’s hand; in turn he offered each a cigarette, and when I refused one, he lit himself another and began to laugh, a harsh, tearing noise with cavernous undertones that did not bring good tidings from the bronchial tubes; another thousand packs and he might never again have to endure the sickly naiveté of celebrity leftists like Jesse Jackson and me. “The eminent author,” he explained to George and Kamil, “doesn’t know what to make of our cordiality.” To me he then confided, “This is the Middle East. We all know how to lie with a smile. Sincerity is not of this world, but these native boys make a specialty of underdoing it. That’s something you find out about Arabs — perfectly natural in both roles at the same time. So convincing one way — just like you when you write — and then, the next moment, someone will walk out of the room, they’ll turn around and be just the opposite.”

“And how do you account for this?” I asked him.

“One’s interest allows anything. Very, very basic. Comes from the desert. That blade of grass is mine and my animal is going to get it or die. It’s my animal or your animal. That’s where interest begins and it justifies all duplicity. There is in Islam this idea of taqiya . Generally called in English ‘dissimulation.’ It’s especially strong in Shi’ite Islam but it’s all over Islamic culture. Doctrinally speaking, dissimulation is part of Islamic culture, and the permission to dissimulate is widespread. The culture doesn’t expect that you’ll speak in a way that endangers you and certainly not that you’ll be candid and sincere. You would be considered foolish to do that. People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: ‘the shifting sands’ — ramál mutaharrika . An example. For all their bravado about opposing Zionism, throughout the Mandate they sold land to the Jews. Not just their run-of-the-mill opportunists but also their big leadership. But they have a wonderful proverb to justify this as well. Ad-daroori lih achkaam . ‘Necessity has its own rules.’ Dissimulation, two-facedness, secretiveness — all highly regarded values among your friends,” he told me. “They don’t think that other people have to know what is really on their minds. Very different from Jews, you see, telling everything that’s on their minds to everyone nonstop. I used to think that God has given the Jew the Arab to bedevil his conscience and keep it Jewish. I know better since meeting George and the bard. God sent us the Arab so we could learn from him how to refine our own deviousness.”