operation shylock (155-6)

* "tunis?"

"i assure you that arafat can differentiate between woody allen and philip 
roth."

this was surely the strangest sentence i had ever spoken in my life. i decided 
to top it. if this is the way george wants to play it, then this is the way we 
shall go. i am not writing this thing. they are. i don't even exist.

"any meeting with arafat," i heard myself telling him, "must be completely 
secret. for obvious reasons. but i WILL meet with him, any place and any time, 
tunis or anywhere, and tomorrow is none too soon. it might be communicated to 
arafat that through the good offices of lech walesa it's likely that i'll be 
meeting secretly at the vatican with the pope, probably next month. walesa is 
already commited to my cause, as you know. he maintains that the pope will find 
in diasporism not only a means of resolving the arab-israeli conflict but an 
instrument for the moral rehabilitation and spiritual reawakening of all of 
europe. i am myself not as sanguine as he is about the boldness of the pope. 
it's all well and good for his holiness to be pro-palestinian and to berate the 
jews for appropriating property to which they have no legal right. it's 
something else again to espouse the corollary of this position and to invite a 
million-plus jews to consider themselves at home in the heart of western 
christendom. yes, it would be something if the pope were to call upon europe 
publicy and openly to invite the jews to return from their exile in israel, and 
for him to mean it; if he were to call on europe to confess to its complicity in 
their uprooting and destruction; if he were to call on europe to purge itself of 
a thousand years of anti-semitism and to make room in its midst for a vital 
jewish presence to multiply and flourish there and, in anticipation of the third 
millenium of christianity, to declare by proclamation in all its parliaments the 
right of the jewish uprooted to resettle in their european homeland and to live 
as jews there, free, secure, and welcome. that would be simply wonderful. but i 
have my doubts. walesa's polish pope may even prefer europe as hitler passed it 
on to his european heirs - his holiness may not really care to undo hitler's 
little miracle. but arafat is another matter. arafat---" on i went, usurping the 
identity of the usurper who had usurped mine, heedless of truth, liberated from 
all doubt, assured of the indisputable rightness of my cause - seer, savior, 
very likely the jews' messiah. ***