JOHN LE CARRE ON THE LEBANON WAR

John Le Carre on the Lebanon War by Jonathan Kay (Political Mavens)

The author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People has weighed in on the Lebanon war. In this Web-posted essay, dated August 29, he follows the expected pattern and blames Israel. But even by the standards of left-wing intellectuals, his tone is unusually naive. To wit: Israel has indeed done to the Lebanon what it did to it twenty years ago: laid waste its infrastructure and visited collective punishment on a delicate, multicultural, resilient democracy that was struggling to reconcile its sectarian differences and live in profitable harmony with its neighbours.  By “struggling to reconcile its sectarian differences and live in profitable harmony with its neighbours,” Le Carre is presumably referring to Beirut’s decision to hand over the southern part of Lebanon to a terrorist organization pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state.