The troublesome concept of the Hidden Hand or the Elders of Zion is superfluous and unnecessary.

“The latest controversy to involve the Arab World concerns a TV program A Rider without a Horse that started airing on Wednesday, Nov. 5th, the first day of the holy month of Ramadan on several Arab satellite channels. The source of the controversy is that the program is partly based on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the old forgery originating in Tsarist Russia”, writes Qais S. Saleh, a business consultant from Ramallah on the excellent website CounterPunch [1]. Expectedly, Saleh condemns the broadcast and warns the Palestinians and the Arabs to stay away from the bad old wolf of anti-Semitism, or, as he put it, “the trend of importation of anti-Semitic bigotry”.

Saleh’s view coincides with that of Michael Hoffman, on whose site the Protocols can be found. Hoffman thinks Arabs have no need to import anti-Semitic arguments from the old and far-away sources, provided they have a fresh round-the-clock local source: actual behaviour of the Jewish state and its Jewish citizens. It is much more convincing than old tales.

However, the Protocols are still with us and still entertain minds. Recently, the leading Italian novelist and thinker Umberto Eco contributed his opinion on the subject to the Guardian [2]. Eco “explains” the popular feelings towards the Jews: “They … engaged in trade and lent money – hence the resentment towards them as “intellectuals”. In my limited knowledge, it is not the intellectuals who lend money, but bankers and loan sharks, while true intellectuals find their behaviour repulsive. Probably Eco has a different definition of ‘intellectual’ up his sleeve. “The ill-famed Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were a rehash of serialised fictional material, and prove their own unreliability, since it is hardly credible that “the baddies” would reveal their fell purposes so blatantly”, – concludes Eco.

One can forgive a business consultant from Ramallah, but Umberto Eco could notice that his definition would fit some other books, for instance, Gargantua and Pantagruel, an even older forgery, pretending to be a real chronicle of the Giants family, and built on ‘serialised fictional material’. Don Quixote, Pickwick’s Club, 1984 of Orwell – all these books “pretend” to describe real events to the same extent. They are ‘forgeries’, as they are ascribed to somebody else: Don Quixote to Sid Ahmed Benengeli [3], and Gargantua to Maitre Alcofribas Nasier [4].

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are best described as ‘pseudo-epigrapha’, rather than ‘fake’. They belong to the same category as Tomas Friedman’s Letter of President Clinton to Mubarak. After all, pseudo-epigraphic genre is an old and venerable one. It is even better to consider the Protocols, ‘a political pamphlet’.

In this essay, we shall attempt to find out why the Protocols refuse to lie down and die. We shall stay clear from the usual question, “who wrote it”. Its real author remains unknown, and it is difficult to imagine this person, for the Protocols are a literary palimpsest. In the days of yore, a scribe would write his composition on a piece of old parchment, previously removing an older text. The erasure was rarely total, and a reader was treated to an integrated version of the Golden Ass and Fioretti of St Francis. In the Protocols, there are layers of old and even older stories, and it precludes meaningful quest for ultimate creator. Every text should be treated on its own merits, disregarding the question of authorship. Although, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the author is an important part of a text. Indeed, if we would know the Protocols contain real blueprint of some Jewish elites, we would have our answer ready in minutes. But Protocols were published in the end of 19^th-beginning of 20^th century “as found”, as apocrypha. They became a great bestseller and still stay there, though in some countries (notably the Soviet Union), mere possession of the text was punishable by death.

The Anonymous author of the Protocols describes a master-plan for vast restructuring of society, creation of a new oligarchy and subjugation of millions. The final product is not too different from the one described in a contemporary piece of writing, The Iron Heel by Jack London, the great radical from Oakland, California. However, London expected harsh cracking down, while Anonym’s way to subjugation leads through Machiavellian manipulations and mind control a la Orwell’s 1984. (Orwell’s homage to the Protocols is even more striking as it is rarely noticed).

The difficulty of the Protocols is in an uncanny dissonance between its uncouth language and deep social and religious thought. It is a rude parody-like rendering of a satanic, subtle and well-thought out plan, wrote the Nobel Prise winning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn [5] in his (written in 1966 and published in 2001) analysis of the Protocols.

“The Protocols … show a blueprint of a social system. Its design is well above abilities of an ordinary mind, including that of its publisher. It is a dynamic process of two stages, of destabilization, increasing freedom and liberalism, which is terminated in social cataclysm, and on the second stage, new hierarchical restructuring of society takes place. It is more complicated than a nuclear bomb. It could be a stolen and distorted plan designed by a mind of genius. Its putrid style of an anti-Semitic grubby brochure [intentionally] obscures the great strength of thought and insight”.

Solzhenitsyn is aware of faults of the Protocols. “Its style is that of a filthy leaflet, the powerful line of thought is broken and fragmented, mixed up with ill-smelling incantations and psychological blunders. The system described is not necessarily connected with the Jews; it could be purely Masonic or whatever; while its strongly anti-Semitic current is not an organic part of the design”.

Solzhenitsyn makes a textual experiment, removes words “Jews”, “Goyim” and “conspiracy” and finds many disturbing ideas. He concludes: “The text demonstrates impressive foresight on the two systems of society, the Western and the Soviet one. While a strong thinker could possibly predict the development of the West in 1901, how could he grasp the Soviet future?”

Solzhenitsyn braved the Soviet regime, dared to write and publish the mammoth Archipelago Gulag, an indictment of the Soviet repression, but even he stalled and did not publish his research of the Protocols. He asked it to be published after his death only, and it was printed against his will in a very small number of copies in 2001. Let us follow Solzhenitsyn’s line of thought and gaze into the crystal ball of the Protocols, while temporarily discounting its “Jewish line” and paying heed to the idea of creating a new system, not necessarily a Jewish-dominated one. The master-plan begins with reshaping of human mind:

November 9, 2002

An arch is homage to the moon, as it is formed by two mirroring crescents. Full moon produces the perfectly round barrel vault favored by Romans; the pointed Muslim arches are formed by waxing seventh-day crescents. In Nablous, there are arches for every day of the lunar month, even upturned arches composed of waning moons. A diligent student of architecture could compose a conclusive History of the Arch in this ancient Palestinian city.

In the Kasbah, an archway flows into archway, creating enfilades, and fading in the dim shadows. Near the Salahie Mosque, underground passages form a wind rose of the nautical charts. My gaze sinks in the black pupil of an opening, and stumbles upon arches like shutter blades in the camera aperture. Nablous is a molehill; generations of crafty dwarves could burrow the long winding tunnels under the solid stone houses of the Old City, connecting its bazaars, mosques and churches. TOP

Hussein leads through the tunnels, finding his way in their clew. Claustrophobic in any other place, in Nablous they protect and envelop like mother’s embrace. They hide us from watchful eyes and night visors of the snipers nesting on the Mount of Curse. We have to cross a square, a well-proportionate Italianate square with a cozy child playground. We cling to the walls of the squat colonial building. We are not afraid of narrow and confined tunnels; it is the open spaces we dread.

Bullets shriek in the air, and hit unseen wall. A machinegun replies, and soon, a night orchestra of volleys and flares shakes the mountain air. The city is besieged for half a year, since April, and the Jews sporadically shoot at its dwellers. The walls on the square are bejeweled with bright colored portraits of the slain: a five-year-old boy, or a young girl next to a mustachioed sturdy warrior. The golden dome of the Rock, the Palestinian epitome of perfect harmony, shines behind their heads, crowning the martyrs with glory. In Nablous one is never alone: eyes of the snipers and eyes of the martyrs follow one everywhere.

Strange feeling of being a prey came to me. I remembered first time being shot at, in the grey and yellow barren hills above Suez – Cairo highway. Egyptian artillery opened fire on us, a company of young paratroops who just had landed in the desert. The falling shells raised clouds of sand and dust, the earth shook of impact very near us, just like it did at the last winter war games, when the supporting artillery miscalculated and almost covered us by its salvos. “What are you doing, silly artillerists, – thought I, – we are here, you are shooting at us! This way, you will hit us!” And then I realized it was no mistake. We weren’t at winter maneuvers, but at real war, and the artillery aimed at us in order to kill. TOP

We sneaked into a modern building and walked up to the second floor by the broad staircase, to the Internet Café. It was full: many young boys and girls dared the snipers’ fire and came to this place of refuge and escape. Some of them were fighters; they used the relative lull in shooting, laid down their AK guns on top of the monitor and chatted online with their pen pals from California and Bahrain, Stockholm and Damascus.

I key in a message from Nablous into an Israeli forum and receive a speedy reply from a David Silver in Tel Aviv. “I do not pity them. I have no sorrow for them. I would drive ALL of THEM out to hell. With their children, girls, maidens, women, grannies, with their simple-minded believe in their lies, with their beastly cunning, with their patience and despair, their laughter, their tears, their food, their pride and heroism, their revenge, their working force. OUT! Their fathers, husbands and grandfathers are bloody murderers, admirers of murderers, scoundrels, thieves, cowards and pathological liars. After the expulsion, they can seek our friendship, though I wouldn’t build on it”. So much for “inherent Jewish pity and sweet obstinacy against violence”, as Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1945.

An Italian espresso machine flashed green and red lights, working out its steam. The war in the modern city has incongruous touch: computers are connected to the world net, faxes throw out sheets of neatly printed news, bakery opens between the shelling spells, a cousin arrives from Kentucky, and young fighters prepare their home lessons for the tomorrow’s exam in local university. TOP

It was hard to comprehend that just across the valley there were boys of the same age sent down here from small seacoast towns to reduce Nablous. But it was the reality. Heavy boom shook the house and monitors blinked and went off. It was a home-made mine, said a young fighter, no, it was 81 mm mortar, said his friend. They rushed down the staircase and out, and we followed them into the starry night. Israelis often send their reconnaissance forces into the city in these hours. They enter the houses, round up men and take them to their torture cellars. To extract information, they say, but there is another purpose: a man tortured, like a girl raped, is a broken and subdued creature. Over one hundred thousand Palestinians and uncounted Lebanese were tortured by Israelis, probably the planetary record. The fighters are on the streets to stop the torturers, or al least to make them pay.

The forces are hugely disproportionate: the third or the second army in the world supported by the only superpower against these young men and girls. If Israelis really want, they break into the Old City anytime, night or day. In bloody April 2002, over hundred men and women were slaughtered in Nablous. A whole family of eight found its death when the tanks and armored bulldozers crushed their home at the edge of the city on their heads. Another house was bombed by F16, and the municipality with great difficulty extracted the dead bodies of two old spinsters from below the rubble. TOP

But the city is alive. As shelling and shooting stops, the citizens go out from their homes into uncertainty of the markets, disregarding the curfew. Sellers roll out their vegetable stalls, smell of spices perfumes the air, old women from nearby villages sneak in and sell their olive oil and crushed olives, for we are in the heart of the olive country. The mosques are full, though they provide no safe refuge: Israelis do not mind to shoot at mosques and churches. A small Catholic chapel was ruined in April; an Orthodox church of St Demetrius miraculously was saved from a missile hit that devastated the street in front of it. The oldest mosque of the city, the Green al-Hadr Mosque, had its wall crushed by a tank in April, but it was repaired since then.

The speediness of repairs is amazing. The moment Israeli tank leaves the rubbles, municipality teams come in. They remove the bodies of dead and wounded and start to fix the house. Still, Israelis destroy faster than Naboulsies are able to repair. The chain tracks of Israeli tanks smashed the ceramic flooring of bazaars, demolish the new water supply system. The signs of fresh devastation melt into the old ruins laid low by the 1927 earthquake, and of even older one, of the second century BC, when the Jews razed to the ground the predecessor of Nablous, ancient Shechem. (Its four-thousand-years-old Cyclopean walls still stand at the edge of Balata refugee camp just outside the city.)

But the city did not die. The Jewish rule in Palestine was bloody, cruel but rather short-lived. The country was conquered by the Jewish invader in the second half of the second century BC, its cities were ruined, and the native population expelled, enslaved or turned into ‘second-grade native Jews’ as in Galilee. High taxation, genocide and apartheid were rampant even then. Sixty years later Pompey the Great landed on its shores and liberated the Palestinians from the Jewish yoke. TOP

October 27, 2002

Most soothing, tender and sensual to the touch, picking olives is akin to telling beads. Oriental men wear ‘mesbaha’ beads of wood or stone on their wrist, reminding of prayer and calming down frayed nerves, but olives are much better: they are alive. Olives are tender but not fragile, like peasant girls, and picking them has a touch of comfort: nothing can go wrong. Olives detach themselves from the branch without fear and remorse, smoothly enter the palm and roll down into the safety of the ground sheets stretched to catch them.

It is harvest time, and every tree on the terraced slope is attended. Whole families are out, under the trees and up on ladders, forming a vast pane suitable for Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s brush. We pick olives together with Hafez’s family, five or six of us; we stand below the thick branches of the broad stretched-out craggy old tree, fingering this live rosary of our lady, the sweet land of Palestine. Hair of ripe Minnesota corn, sky-blue eyes, – unexpected for a stranger, but not unusual features in these places, – laughing lips, seven-and-a-half-year old Rowan, young daughter of the sturdy shrewd Hafez, climbed to the treetop, and the olives she picks fell down on our hands, shoulders and heads like green rain. Before going to the next tree, we lift the edges of the sheets and the dense stream of olives fills the bag. A light grey foal grazes nearby, gathering strength for his turn: he will carry the bags into the village above the valley.

We pick olives in Yassouf, a blissfully obscure village in the highlands. Its spacious and tall houses, made of soft and light stone, witness its old prosperity, created by the relentless toil; broad staircases lead to the flat roofs, where they lounge warm summer evenings and enjoy the breeze from the distant Med. There are plenty of pomegranate trees, and in a thousand years old description of Palestine, by a contemporary of William the Conqueror, the village of Yassouf is mentioned for abundance of pomegranate and for wisdom of a learned sheikh al-Yassoufi who made himself a name in remote Damascus.

It is paradise, or not too far from it. We arrived yesterday to the village, built on the ridge between two valleys. Above the village, a hilltop retains the old sanctuary, bema, one of the high places where ancestors of Hafez and Rowan witnessed the miraculous communion of celestial and earthly forces. The villagers often go there, to seek spiritual comfort, as did their forefathers, the people of the small principality of Israel: we are in the Holy Land, and for its people, a daily miracle of faith goes hand in hand with the daily portion of toil. The kings of the Bible tried to ban these local bema places and monopolise the faith in the centralised, easy-to-tax-and-control temple, but ordinary people preferred their local sanctuaries for daily worship. The peasants preserved the two-tier structure of local and universal faith, similar to Shinto-Buddhism link in Japan. They are religious but not fanatic. They do not wear the Islamic garb; women do not cover their pretty faces. These two aspects, local and universal, survived millennia and blended together. The temple became the gorgeous Umayyad Mosque of al Aqsa, and on the high place of Yassouf, people pray to its God.

These are venerable old trees; they have heard many an oath and seen many a secret in their long lives. A miraculous shallow well that never runs dry even in the hottest July, but rests in rainy winter; a holy tomb which probably changed name many times since the days immemorial, and now is called Sheikh Abu Zarad. There are ruins from the first days of Yassouf, well over four thousand years ago, and since then the village has not been deserted. In the Bible heyday, it belonged to Joseph, the strongest of the tribes of Israel. When Jerusalem fell under sway of the Jews, these lands and these people retained their own Israelite identity, and eventually accepted Christ. The domed shrine at the top still calls for prayer. In February, the hilltop turns white with almond blossoms, now it is fresh and green, and affords a superb view of the rolling hills of Samaria.

But we came too late for the view from the hilltop, as sun sets early in the autumn. Instead, in the dusk we went down to the village spring, the throbbing heart of the village. Water was quietly gushing from the opening in the rock, flew in the covered tunnel and poured out to give life to the gardens. We sat under the fig trees, and they spread their broad trefoil leaves like Japanese Noh dancers raise their fans, in one incessant gracious movement. In the moonlight, between the leaves, giant black butterflies took wing: it is bats, dwellers of the nearby caves, emerging in the dark to drink water and feast on the fruits.
Usually, a talk at the spring flows freely and joyously like its water. There is no better place to sit and chat with the villagers about the harvest, the good old days, the children, and the last essay of Edward Said reprinted in the local paper. The farmers are not boors: some of them travelled the big world, from Basra to San Francisco; others attended a small university branch in the vicinity. Their political education was completed in Israeli jail, an almost unavoidable stage in the upbringing of a young man in our land. Their Hebrew, acquired there, or through long work in the Israeli building industry, is fluent and idiomatic, and they are keen to practice it with a friendly Israeli.

But now our hosts were gloomy, and worries did not move away from their sad eyes. Even at the dinner, as we feasted on rice with nuts and yogurt, they were rather pensive. We knew the reason: a new dread had nested on the bare hilltop and spread its webbed wings over the village. The army had confiscated the lands of Yassouf for military purposes, and passed the site to the settlers. They built a concrete prefab monster entwined by barbed wire, interspaced with guard towers, and appropriated the name of the nearby Apple spring. The settlement was not willing to stay put on the land stolen a decade ago from the people of Yassouf, but kept encroaching on the entire countryside, throwing out its metastases onto surrounding hills, eating up the olive groves and vineyards.

The farmers did not dare to go to their own fields, for the settlers were harsh men with guns, quick to draw. They shot at villagers, often kidnapped and tortured them, set fire to their fields. They had to keep the farmers away for five years, and after that, according to the Ottoman law they found in the old books, the fallow land would revert to the state. To the Jewish state. The state would then give the land to the Jewish settlers. Meanwhile, they tried to starve the farmers.