The subject of this essay is a British play about the writer Roald Dahl, but before we can get to that, we must take a step back to 1982 and the casus belli of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year. It was the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, the nation’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, as he left the Dorchester Hotel following a banquet on the evening of June 3. The organization of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, working for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence service, was responsible—but it was assumed by the Israeli government, not without good reason, to have been the work of the Palestine Liberation Organization, run by Yasser Arafat.
The PLO had occupied much of southern Lebanon in the previous years and had been shelling northern Israel for months. And while Israel had returned fire, it had failed to end the barrage. The assassination attempt on Argov gave the IDF its opportunity to attack and overrun the PLO’s missile and cannon bases. Which is what it did, swiftly, and with little resistance.
It was the first time the IDF had prosecuted a strictly non-defensive war, and the effort moved north to target the PLO’s command structures in West Beirut. Many civilian lives were lost; it was reckoned at 9,000–10,000, a figure multiplied by WAFA, the PLO’s news agency, in a manner mirroring the Gaza Health Ministry’s factitious figures since October 7. In September 1982, the Christian Phalangist allies of Israel committed massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. It was very messy. A peace was finally brokered, and the PLO was led out of Lebanon.
In June 1983, the British publisher Quartet Books released a large-format book of text and photographs entitled God Cried, described by its author as a book about “official evil in the Middle East.” The joke from which the title derives illustrates the sympathies of its author, the newsmagazine journalist Tony Clifton.
God called Ronald Reagan, Leonid Brezhnev and Yasser Arafat before him and told them he would answer one question from each. Reagan went first; he wanted to know when an American would be made president of the whole world. God told him it would happen in fifty years—and Reagan cried. God asked why he was crying, so Reagan told him, “Because it won’t happen in my lifetime.” Then it was Brezhnev’s turn; he asked when the world would be totally communist. God told him that it would happen in a hundred years. So Brezhnev cried, and when God asked why he said, “Because it won’t happen in my lifetime.” Then God turned to Yasser Arafat and asked to hear his question. Arafat said, “I want to know when my people will have a homeland of their own.” And God cried.
In his introduction, Clifton stated flatly that “God Cried is not objective.… Our story comes from inside the perimeter, from among the Lebanese and the Palestinians who chose—or were forced—to live and fight and die in those few blood-soaked square miles.” The story, then, was mediated by what the PLO and the Syrians allowed journalists to cover. Peter Meyer-Ranke, Middle East correspondent for Germany’s Springer newspaper chain, wrote in February 1982 that he had frequently observed “self-censorship, self-restrictions, and silence” from his Western colleagues in Palestinian and Syrian-controlled areas. “More important for them is the press card from the PLO and the Syrian government.”
Enter, now, an unlikely intellectual combatant and our subject: Roald Dahl, the beloved author of James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda. He was asked to review God Cried for the Literary Review. Naim Attallah, a Haifa-born Palestinian who owned the Literary Review, was also the proprietor of Quartet Books, the publisher of God Cried. The editor of the Literary Review, Gillian Greenwood, ran Dahl’s article past the magazine’s lawyer, Michael Rubinstein, who approved it, though he suggested the removal of some of the more “intemperate expressions” (Attallah’s words). The reader will therefore perhaps be surprised by what follows.
After two opening paragraphs comparing Israel’s attempts to knock out aggressors on its northern borders to the Holocaust, Dahl pronounced that “never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” Quite a few words follow describing Dahl’s own chivalrous way of fighting war as an RAF pilot. Ordered to destroy the airplanes of a Vichy French airbase in Rayak, in the Levant, Dahl claimed to have refused to fire on “a nice Saturday evening cocktail party” being enjoyed by pilots and their paramours, and so circled twice before doing the dirty deed. This took place during a serious bombing of the airfield at Rayak during the British invasion of Lebanon and Syria in July 1941.
Further on in the review, Dahl referred to “those powerful American Jewish bankers” and accused the United States government of being “utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions over there.” He signed off by calling any Jew who disagreed with his condemnation of Israel a coward.
It caused a bit of a stir, to put it mildly. The historian Paul Johnson called Dahl’s review “the most disgraceful item to appear in a respectable British publication for a very long time.” Nowadays, one wonders whether the reaction would be so widespread. The International Criminal Court issuing a warrant for the arrest of the democratically elected prime minister of Israel for war crimes must have got Dahl’s ghost exulting.
Dahl doubled down, revealing to Michael Coren of the New Statesman that “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason. I mean, if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers, I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they [the Jews] were always submissive.” By 1990, Dahl came fully clean in an interview in the Independent: “I’m certainly anti-Israeli, and I’ve become antisemitic.”
In Milton, the devil has the best lines, as he often does as well in Mark Rosenblatt’s portrayal of the Roald Dahl incident in his engaging, Olivier award–winning play Giant (Best New Play), now playing in the West End. Broadway beckons, for this is a superior piece of work, both subtle and coruscating. Nicholas Hytner’s production features a bravura performance by John Lithgow as the enormously tall and diabolical Dahl for which he too has won an Olivier award (Best Actor). Lithgow describes the character he plays as “a charmer—our intention is for people to find him witty, delectable and endearing.… Until they don’t.”
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The play, which takes place in real time, is set in the sitting room of Dahl’s home, Gipsy House, in Buckinghamshire, on a day of sultry English summer heat. The place is being renovated under the aegis of Dahl’s new wife to be, Felicity Crosland. He has just divorced the Oscar-winning actress Patricia Neal, who had had a stroke at 39 and through which he nursed her by showing her “tough love”—which Neal later said had simply been sheer vicious brutality.
Dahl is checking Quentin Blake’s illustrations for his new book The Witches. Visiting him in a state of some concern following the Literary Review piece is Tom Maschler, head of Dahl’s British publisher, Jonathan Cape. He was a real person, a Jew who had left Vienna with his parents for the UK following the Anschluss in 1938. With him is Jessie Stone, a fictionalized representative of Dahl’s American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Robert Gottlieb, the editor who was then running Knopf, had just let Dahl go. He later told Dahl’s biographer that Dahl had been “unmatched in my experience for overbearingness and utter lack of civility.” Stone is young, female, and also Jewish. Maschler and Stone are there to try in various ways to persuade Dahl to make some kind of apology.
The title alludes ironically to Dahl’s book The BFG (Big Friendly Giant), and of course Dahl was (and is) a very big money-spinner for his publishers everywhere. (In September 2021, Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company for something over $500 million.)
Much has been said of the play’s “evenhandedness.” Its author and director seem proud of this, but they are being delicately disingenuous. The play, according to Rosenblatt, asks, “At what point does criticism of Israel become antisemitic?” But he defines no “point,” and hence there is no direct answer. Since it is at pains to avoid the clunkiness of “polemical messaging,” Giant instead gradually but unambiguously reveals the depth of Dahl’s vile prejudice and thereby undermines the legitimacy of his criticism of Israel.
The poison is administered with plenty of sugar, but by Giant’s end, it is hard not to feel ashamed of the pleasure one initially takes in Dahl’s cleverness and wit (just as many people find it difficult to stomach Dahl’s unforgettable writing for children given the nature of his embrace of the world’s oldest hatred). Still, in the end, it is to the credit of Mark Rosenblatt and his provocative play—especially at this moment—that there is no avoiding the giant’s monstrosity.
Photo by Ronald Dumont/Daily Express/Getty Images/small>
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