Rhys Kaminski-Jones

‘The first part of Asia we set foot on…begins just a little below Gaza’ – this is the sentence I had come to find. Turning back to work, and away from the stream of half-seen horrors on social media, I went looking for something that could link the two; moving between them otherwise felt too much like whiplash to handle. Digging into a text by Thomas Pennant (the Welsh tourist at the centre of the Curious Travellers project, on which I’m currently working) I wanted to see if I could connect what was happening now in Palestine with the distant-seeming world of this eighteenth-century gentleman. What use this is, I’m not sure, but it somewhat assuages the feeling that doing my academic work is just a distraction from brutal violence enacted on the immiserated and starving.

              Pennant never went to Palestine, though reading some of his correspondence you might be forgiven for thinking that he did. Here he is in November 1788, describing recent apparent journeys to his friend Richard Bull:

‘I have travelled all over… Africa…turned into the red sea: crossed it with the Israelites & stopped short in sight of the Land of Promise, which I trust I shall reach i[…]n due time’

This letter is misleading on two counts. Firstly, Pennant hadn’t (physically) travelled anywhere; he was describing the writing process of an eccentric project called the Outlines of the Globe, in which he constructed an “imaginary tour” of the world’s coastlines from the safety of his Welsh library. Secondly, even within the Outlines’ imagined world, Pennant barely reached the Promised Land of Israel; though he journeys towards it with Moses via Mount Sinai / Jebel Musa, and briefly skirts its modern coastline on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba.

Like me then — though in wildly different circumstances — Pennant only saw the Middle East mediated by what was on his writing desk. For me, that means the scanned images of pages from Pennant’s own manuscripts, interspersed with a grim repetitive flow of videos showing Israeli bombs hitting Gazan houses. For him, that meant a combination of Biblical, Classical, and eighteenth-century traveller’s texts. Pennant makes it clear, however, that he had a favourite amongst his sources. As in his fantasy of crossing the ‘red sea…with the Israelites’, he emphasises the Old Testament throughout: ‘I will travel’, he writes at one point, ‘with the books of Moses in my hand as the most infallible guide’.

              Pennant seems relatively uninterested in the Jews who still inhabit the Middle East (as, of course, they have done through the centuries). Instead, he peoples the lands ‘below Gaza’ with modern Muslims, modern Christians, and resonantly distant Jewish anachronisms – the ancient ‘children of Israel’ familiar to an eighteenth-century Welsh Anglican. Jethro, Moses, Aaron, Hur: these are the Jewish people, familiar from Sunday services, that Pennant sees as he traverses the Sinai desert. The latter two, Pennant informs us, were companions of Moses during the exodus from Egypt, who helped support his upraised staff ‘during the battle with Amalek’: an attack in scripture on fleeing refugees that has often become a justification for genocidal violence, from European settlers’ ethnic cleansing of Native Americans to the current pronouncements of Israel’s far-right government. But the most tangible signs of post-Moses Jewish presence in this section are a few inscriptions in Hebrew left by pilgrims, alongside ones in Arabic and Greek – and even these are attributed to a ‘very early time’. They are noted in passing by Pennant, then set aside.¹

              Pennant’s Muslims, on the other hand, are obvious contemporary presences in his landscape – in his Islamophobic reading, they had ‘spread like a deluge…over the eastern and western world’. Whereas Pennant’s ‘Israelites’ are largely absent forerunners of his own Christian beliefs, his Muslims are disdainfully portrayed as followers of an ‘impostor’ prophet – even the story of Muhammad’s tolerance towards the Christian monks of Mount Sinai is presented as an underhanded plot to ‘conciliate the affections of every religion’. As Dr Abdul-Azim Ahmed of Cardiff University has argued in a recent workshop on these texts, we can trace in Pennant’s Outlines a kind of Islamophobic thinking that still exists in modern Wales, especially in Pennant’s later comparison of the Muslim Mughals’ conquest of India with the Saxon conquest of the old Welsh-speaking Britons.

              Viewing Palestine and the Middle East from a distance, Pennant’s conclusions are often self-involved and prejudiced. That can’t help but give me pause, sitting here at my computer, at a similar remove. But the distanced gaze of Wales on the Middle East is not just an external irrelevance to what is happening there today – it is, instead, an important ingredient in the ongoing crisis in Palestine. Take, for instance, David Lloyd George, the Welsh Prime Minister whose government issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917, committing themselves to supporting ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’ via the colonial decree of the British empire. Lloyd George, like Pennant, could not think of Palestine without the overlay of his Christian faith (nor the combined philo/anti-semitism that still characterises Christian Zionism): he commented during WWI that Palestine had Biblical ‘place names…more familiar to me than those on the Western Front’. Additionally, like Pennant, he held deep prejudices about the region’s majority Muslim and Arab population: ‘The Jews alone can redeem [Palestine] from the wilderness and restore its ancient glory’, Lloyd George claimed in the 1920s, ‘The Arabs have neither the means, the energy, nor the ambition’. Lloyd George also defended British support for an undivided ‘Jewish Commonwealth’ in Palestine (with a majority-Jewish population) by explicitly invoking his Welsh identity, claiming descent from the Ancient Britons like Pennant before him: any ‘division’ of Israel/Palestine or similar compromise would, according to Lloyd George, be ‘going back on our declaration…as an old Briton, who belongs to the most ancient race in the islands, I do not like it’.²

              And this distant but direct Welsh influence continues, in particular given the presence of a BAE Systems factory on Welsh soil, an arms company who are perfectly willing to supply the Israeli military, just as they shipped weapons to Saudi Arabia during their brutal bombing campaign in Yemen, and profited from Britain’s own disastrous mass-killings during the Iraq war. Though many in Wales today only almost see Palestine, as an image on a screen or a sentence in a book, we can’t pretend we’re not actually involved in it. And unlike Pennant, we’ve been able to hear and respond in real time to the voices of those who’ve been killed in Palestine and those who still remain – we’re not so distant that we can’t do something.

[Many thanks to Emma Pritchard for comments on an earlier draft]

[1] Later in this volume of Pennant’s Outlines there are brief mentions of contemporary Jews in the Middle East: a community ‘obliged to live in a village at a distance’ from Taiz in Yemen, and Syrian merchants carrying European goods to Basra in modern Iraq.

[2] For more on the long (real and imagined) Welsh relationship with Israel, Zionism, and Jewish people (including discussion of Lloyd George’s above-quoted racist contrast between Jews and Arabs), see Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People?: Wales, Israel, Palestine (UWP: Cardiff, 2012).