ROGER KIMBALL: Reporting on War on Israel Shaped by Old Narrative About the West.
Perhaps the greatest part of “The Chatham House Version” is its title essay—“the most devastating polemic,” Pryce-Jones observes, “since the Second World War.”
“The Chatham House Version” is the name [Elie] Kedourie gives to a sensibility, a moral orientation, “a whole intellectual style.”
Kedourie took the phrase from Chatham House, the home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs off St. James’s park in London.
It was there that, for some thirty years, the historian Arnold Toynbee presided as Director of Studies.
And it was from Chatham House that Toynbee promulgated his sentimental effort to enlist history in an effort “to save mankind.”
It was, Kedourie shows in unsparing detail, an increasingly anti-Western effort.
It was also, as the years went by, increasingly anti-Semitic.
The West, Toynbee concludes in the last volume of “A Study of History,” “is a perpetual aggressor”—blundering, brutal, arrogant.
“I trace the west’s arrogance,” Toynbee wrote, “back to the Jewish notion of a ‘Chosen people.’”
It is a doctrine that, though dressed up in the impressive language of academic history, was “essentially simple and familiar.”
And, Kedourie might have added, perennially popular.
Behind it one hears “the shrill and clamant voice of English radicalism, thrilling with self-accusatory and joyful lamentation. Nostra culpa, Nostra maxima culpa: we have invaded, we have conquered, we have dominated, we have exploited.”
Many pages of “The Chatham House Version” could have been written yesterday.
The book’s relevance to the current situation is twofold.
First, it reminds us of an unpleasant history we have chosen to forget, and without which contemporary events in the Middle East are unintelligible.
It also serves as a salutary warning.
The French philosopher Jean-François Revel astringently summed up this aspect of Kedourie’s message when he observed that “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.”
The Chatham House version encourages that orgy of self-recrimination. Elie Kedourie shows us how culpable is that indulgence in misplaced guilt.
And from there, it’s but a short drive to the modern Corbynization of socialist politics: AOC’s and Her ‘Squad’s’ Love Fest With Hamas Gives the Head of Simon Wiesenthal Center a Shocking Case of Deja Vu.