Category: Sandbox

Two more seconds from “The Crown”

On By Martin Kramer

On Thursday, Mosaic Magazine published my piece on the treatment of the Suez cover-up in the hit Netflix series The Crown. I didn’t write much about the collusion itself—the story has been told countless times—but I focused on the aftermath. Anthony Eden didn’t just lie about the collusion, he sought to destroy the evidence for it—to be precise, the Sèvres Protocol, drawn up among Britain, France, and Israel at the insistence of David Ben-Gurion. When Eden mentions its existence to the Queen (unlikely; see my piece), The Crown cuts away to the protocol being burned by an unseen hand. But Ben-Gurion had put away another copy in his vest pocket—and so put Eden there as well.

The ten-person fact team of The Crown put a lot of thought into these cutaways. Here’s another example. While Eden describes the Sèvres Protocol to the Queen, we see a clacking typewriter. For a flash of less than a second, we even see the typebars from above.

French typewriterNow the Sèvres Protocol was typed in French. And if you capture this fleeting image, you’ll see that the typewriter is a French one. How so? On an English keyboard, the number 7 shares a key with the ampersand (&). On a French keyboard, the 7 shares a key with the letter e under a grave accent (è). So someone at The Crown went to the trouble of finding a French typewriter, because the Sèvres Protocol was typed in French, in France. I may be the only viewer who’s noticed this—and yet someone on the fact team of The Crown thought it was an important detail that the show absolutely had to get right.

But the remarkable thing about The Crown is that within the space of a few moments, it can be fanatically faithful to some arcane detail, and then totally disregard a much more significant one.

So, when Eden begins to admit the collusion to the Queen, there’s a cutaway to British, French, and Israeli negotiators arriving at what Eden calls “a small village on the outskirts of Paris”—that would be the suburb of Sèvres—and entering a château to conclude their secret deal. The stand-in used by the filmmakers is the imposing Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, a Disneyesque pile built by one of the Rothschilds to resemble a famed Loire château. (For the frame, see illustration, top.)

chateau versus villaThis is a disappointing choice. The French hosts convened the negotiation in a modest villa (illustration, bottom). This house had great symbolic significance. It was the family home of a young Frenchman who, in 1942, assassinated Admiral François Darlan, a Vichy collaborator second only to Pétain. The young man, Fernand Bonnier (de La Chapelle), was summarily executed. During the Nazi occupation, Resistance members used the place as a safe house. They included the French minister of defense in 1956, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury.

Mordechai Bar-On, Israel’s note-taker at the meeting, explained that for the French negotiators, who were almost all veterans of the Resistance, the villa stood for

the resolve and courage they deemed to be their heritage. During the Suez crisis the French leaders, as well as Anthony Eden’s group, compared President Nasser of Egypt with Hitler or Mussolini. They referred often to the cowardly submission to Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. The living room of the villa, where most of the meetings took place, held a prominent reminder of the need to resist arbitrary dictators who encroached on the interests of the free world: a bust on the mantelpiece of the young Bonnier de La Chapelle, flanked by two candlesticks and surrounded by flowers.

Fernand’s room in the villa was kept exactly as he left it.

The other Israeli participants, in their memoirs, could not but comment on the deep symbolism of the venue. This world-shaking secret pact was negotiated in the living room of a Resistance safe house, before a shrine to a martyr! The setting inspired righteous moral conviction. Alas, The Crown, preferring to locate the negotiation in a luxurious fantasy castle, misses that entirely.

Now at this point, I could sink into philosophical reflection. It’s impossible to reconstruct or reenact the past; it’s all an approximation. So at what level of resolution should the filmmaker attempt it? And with what degree of consistency? Is it acceptable to get the French typewriter exactly right, but get the French villa exactly wrong? Which details enhance meaning, and which only add verisimilitude? And how much distance is admissible between known fact and its representation, before history becomes “fake”?

But I won’t go there. As Robert Lacey, historical adviser to The Crown, openly admits, the show includes “outright invention—what you could call dramatic license, or as I would prefer to put it, dramatic underlining.” (Underlining!) In other words, dear viewer, The Crown shifts the burden of determining the historicity of events to you. You must rush to Google and Wikipedia if you wish not only to be entertained, but to be educated.

Some people are worried you won’t bother. Hugo Vickers, a royal historian who’s written a quick book on fact and fiction in The Crown, is one of them: “I do not approve of The Crown because it depicts real people in situations which are partly true and partly false; but unfortunately most viewers take it all as gospel truth.”

It’s hard to argue with that, but as the New York Times reviewer has written, “No one’s really watching The Crown for the stories that made it into history textbooks.” Anyway, the industry of which The Crown forms a part is flourishing and profitable, so sniffing one’s disapproval is a losing proposition. It’s probably best to see each such production as an opportunity for critics to show a wider public how history is best practiced.

I want to end this addendum by emphasizing how much my piece owes to Mordechai Bar-On, the last surviving Israeli participant of the Sèvres negotiations. As I mentioned, he took Israel’s notes at the meetings, and he has used them several times to produce detailed and knowing accounts of the proceedings. This meticulous chronicler stands head and shoulders above any other witness. He’s now 89, and while I studied everything he wrote on the subject, in English and Hebrew, I still wanted him to see the piece before publication. He did, and while I alone am responsible for it, I’m gratified that he found no fault with it.

Kept secret from “The Crown”?

On By Martin Kramer

Suez 1956Have you seen (or binge-watched) the Netflix series The Crown? And wondered whether this conversation or that reenactment is “true” to the historical record? For example, did British prime minister Anthony Eden really hope to keep Queen Elizabeth II in the dark about Suez? (He almost does just that in The Crown.) And why, when he comes clean to her about the secret “collusion” with Israel and France, are we shown a lighter setting fire to a document? I tell the secret-within-the-secret, of the cover-up, and how David Ben-Gurion kept it—and used it.

“How True is The Crown on the Suez Cover-Up?” appears at Mosaic Magazine. Read here.

A defense treaty between the US and Israel? Just say no

On By Martin Kramer

This is a response to an essay by Charles Freilich on U.S.-Israeli relations, published in Mosaic Magazine.

Charles Freilich has produced an astute and savvy analysis of the forces driving the U.S.-Israel relationship. It’s no surprise: all who know him regard him as one of the most thoughtful (and critical) students of Israeli decision-making, and his writing is a model of care and restraint.

But the reader encountering Freilich for the first time is bound to be confused, because his major operative conclusion seems at odds with his analysis. After explaining at length how it would best serve Israel to be less dependent on the United States, he then proposes that it strive to conclude a formal defense treaty with that same United States. Having noted that the stature of the United States in the Middle East “is at its nadir,” he urges Israel to “cement” its understandings with the waning superpower. What gives?

The explicit rationale offered by Freilich is that such a treaty would be valuable to Israel in deterring Iran. Indeed, he writes, it “might prove to be the only partially effective response to a nuclear Iran.” If that were the case, such a treaty would be an existential necessity. But I find it improbable that Freilich really believes this, because in many other op-eds and interviews he’s asserted the opposite: that Israel is perfectly capable of independently deterring Iran, were that country to cross the nuclear threshold. “Israel’s own deterrence should suffice,” he has written. If so, a defense treaty with the United States would add no value to Israeli deterrence of Iran, and so would be totally unnecessary.

Then there are threats that fall short of the nuclear. But Israel, as Freilich knows, is capable of dealing with these threats on its own, and when its estimate of such threats differs from Washington’s, it presently has the leeway to chart its own course of action. Even Freilich is reluctant to sacrifice this freedom, however infrequently Israel exercises it. That’s why he writes that “a treaty could be crafted that would explicitly not apply to cases of low- to medium-level threats and hostilities.”

So if a treaty isn’t necessary to deter high-level threats, and wouldn’t apply to medium- and low-level threats, just what would it add? I could profess to be puzzled, but I’m not. That’s because I’m an avid reader of everything Freilich writes, so I hope he won’t object if I put his Mosaic essay in a broader context.

Elsewhere Freilich has argued consistently that Israel is headed for perdition if it doesn’t separate from the Palestinians. To achieve that separation, he has written, “Israel will have to agree to withdraw from virtually all of the territory [of the West Bank], other than limited land swaps, to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and to divide Jerusalem.” Since there is no Palestinian partner to an agreement, Israel should work to “keep the two-state solution alive” by the transfer of additional territory to the Palestinians “and above all [by] a halt to settlements outside the ‘blocs’ and [by] provision of incentives to settlers to begin ‘coming home,’ even without a final settlement.” Eventually, Israel will have to be prepared “to move the 100,000 settlers who live outside the blocs.” Unless Israel does so, it will be headed down a one-way street to a binational state—if it hasn’t turned that corner already.

Why is this relevant to Freilich’s essay on U.S.-Israeli relations? Because it is his view that no agreement with the Palestinians will ever be reached without the United States. “Peace will be achieved, if at all, only with American assistance.” And the only way for the United States to achieve results is “to confront both sides and ‘crack heads.’” Freilich doesn’t say this in his Mosaic essay, but he’s said it elsewhere, and it explains his otherwise most puzzling proposal that Israel should seek a formal treaty with the United States.

The explanation is made explicit in this crucial passage:

A defense treaty might constitute the kind of security assurance and strategic “carrot” that could increase the willingness of a highly skeptical Israeli electorate to accept the risks, and dramatic concessions, necessary for peace with the Palestinians.

This sentence appears in an earlier iteration of Freilich’s Mosaic essay. It was titled “How Long Could Israel Survive Without America?” and was published last July in Newsweek. The sentence reveals that the real significance of the defense treaty isn’t its contribution to Israel’s security. Rather, the treaty fits into a future public-relations strategy for wooing the Israeli center into concessions, so that Israelis won’t entirely recoil when the Americans start “cracking heads.” It’s the carrot to accompany the stick, something a future Israeli prime minister can dangle as compensation when time is ripe for the next big push for “peace.”

This linkage of the defense treaty to the Palestinian issue is, however, completely missing from the Mosaic essay, and that has the effect of making Freilich’s entire proposal nonsensical. For if you think that now is the time for Israel to assert its independence vis-à-vis the United States, and if you argue, as Freilich does, that Israel should even give up U.S. military assistance, why would you argue for a defense treaty, which would only shackle Israel even more tightly to the United States? The seeming contradiction is resolved as soon as the missing rationale is restored. The treaty has nothing to do with Israel’s real security needs. It’s the psychological part of the compensation package a future Israeli government will need, when it prepares to divide Jerusalem and turn 100,000 settlers out of their homes so that they can “come home.”

Let’s give Israel’s electorate more credit: they know that a defense treaty wouldn’t add substantially to Israeli security. And Freilich anticipates this by making another argument: a treaty may not add to Israel’s security, but its absence could subtract from it. Why?

Because, he answers, U.S.-Israel relations may have peaked, and, absent a treaty, U.S. support for Israel might slip. Freilich emphasizes the erosion of support for Israel on the left end of the American political spectrum, before making this argument: “A defense treaty would symbolize and cement the ‘special relationship’ at a time when signs indicate it may not continue to be as deep as it is now.” By constituting “a binding commitment to Israel’s security,” a treaty would “ensure the ongoing availability of weapons, remove any residual limitations on the supply of arms and technologies, and assure Israel’s long-term qualitative military edge”—even if the relationship goes from “deep” to shallow.

Freilich says a treaty would “cement” the relationship; another common expression is “lock in.” Robert Danin, a former U.S. diplomat and negotiator, used just that phrase in a 2016 Foreign Affairs article: Israel and the United States could

drift apart as each undergoes demographic, political, and social changes. This may be happening already. . . . There is no guarantee that the strong pro-Israel consensus that has long been a bipartisan feature of U.S. politics will endure forever. Now is therefore the time for Israel to lock in the existing benefits of its relationship with Washington.

So we are supposed to believe that even if support for Israel in America were to erode away, the United States would continue to “pay out,” as if a defense treaty were a Treasury bill.

This is a charmingly naïve approach to American foreign policy. In the vast spectrum of promises of all kinds issued by the United States, the T-bill is the most reliable; the foreign treaty is the least. You can “lock in” an interest rate for 30 years and sleep soundly. Sign a treaty with the United States? Don’t close your eyes for a moment.

It’s not that the United States is less reliable than other nations. It’s that interests aren’t interest rates, and when they shift (or the perception of them shifts), no treaty in the world can hold up under the stress. If the assessment in Jerusalem is that the United States is going to drift away from Israel, the last thing Israelis should want is a defense treaty. Israel would end up imploring some future administration to keep commitments it would rather forget, and for which there’s dwindling public support.

Given Freilich’s own doubts about the stability of American politics and policy, it’s remarkable he continues to propose this. He has called Donald Trump “probably the most ill-suited president ever elected in American history, glaringly incompetent, a danger to the American people and to the world.” The American president, he has written, “is motivated by fleeting political and personal gain, rather than deep strategic thought.”

If one believes this, why would one continue to advocate a defense treaty with a polity whose electorate has shown itself capable of putting such a “dangerous” man at the helm? Perhaps the rules of American politics have changed? Does Israel want to be handcuffed to a polarized and weakened power? Don’t misunderstand me: it’s not I who’ve passed this judgment on the Trump administration. But if I had, I wouldn’t be pressing for a defense treaty with a state whose foreign policy has just fallen unexpectedly into “dangerous” hands and might easily do so again.

Freilich has argued that it would be a betrayal of Zionism were the Jews to become a minority in their own state. I think he’s right. But I also think it would be a betrayal of Zionism if the only sovereign Jewish state were to become a satrapy. I agree fully with Freilich: Israel’s independence has eroded, and it must work systematically to restore its freedom of maneuver. But a U.S.-Israel defense treaty would be precisely the wrong way to go about it.

• See the original response at Mosaic Magazine, right here.