Neighborhood Bully. The heart of the matter

 

By Joost Nillissen

Approximately nine years ago Tony Attwood wrote a distasteful commentary on Neighborhood Bully.

I use the word ‘distasteful’ partly in jest, of course, as Mr Attwood claimed there was something distasteful about this song. Everybody is entitled to his or her opinion. “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” (Somebody said that, I forgot who). Mr Attwood’s article elicited 21 comments, all in different colors and shapes, but none to the point.

Being a Jew, Bob Dylan has a bond with Israel. He once considered settling in a kibbutz, he celebrated his sons Bar Mitzvah there. He has visited often. So he felt the need to stand up for Israel and write a song. Any song on Israel is going to be controversial, depending on where you stand, so Dylan knows he has to stick to the facts. And he does. He is not pointing any fingers, not blaming anyone, he is just telling us what Israel is up against.

Nobody can disagree with the facts Dylan states:

His enemies say he is on their land, they’ve got him outnumbered, he’s got no place to run, he just tries to survive, he’s supposed to lay down, not to fight back.

There is a lot to say about ‘being on their land.’ It could be the Westbank that Israel conquered during the Six-day War, but it is really all of present day Israel. It’s no secret that its enemies want Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth. What we in the West cannot possibly understand is how it feels to be outnumbered ‘a million to one’. Israel is a tiny country and could be wiped out in no time. It could and the enemies are working on it. That’s a fact.

He’s been driven out of every land, he’s wandered the earth, seen his family scattered, hounded and torn, always on trial for just being born.

The history of the Jews. For two thousand years, after the total defeat at the hands of the Romans and the destruction of their temple in Jerusalem, they have wandered the earth. Always on the run, never welcome in any golf club or University in any country. That’s a fact.

Israel takes preventive measures, knocks out a lynch mob (The PLO in Lebanon) and        destroys a bomb factory (in Syria). What would you do if your neighbor is planning to wipe you out? Really. You can approve or disapprove. But it’s a fact.

Dylan points out that the chances the bully will make it are slim, if he lives by the rules the world makes for him. We are so full of ideas of how Israel should behave and act, while nobody sees or understands that the bully has his head in the noose, a gun at his back and that a license to kill him has been given out to every maniac. Even today, as then, politicians and imams are on record calling for Jewish blood. That’s a fact.

‘The rules the world makes for him’ refer to the United Nations with their silly resolutions. Let me quote Abba Eban, ambassador to the United Nations from 1949 till 1959:

“If Algeria introduced a resolution claiming the earth is flat and that Israel flattened it, it   would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”

Now we come to part that rattled Mr Attwood’s cage, the part he says is untrue. He’s wrong.

Well, he got no allies to really speak of
What he gets he must pay for, he don’t get it out of love
He buys obsolete weapons and he won’t be denied
But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side

If you live in Israel (like I have for 30 years) you will know that Israel has ‘no allies to really speak of’. Europe is disinterested, uninformed and often simply hostile. In Israel today they shrug their shoulders. The European Union, a messy collection of opinions and hollow phrases, has become irrelevant.

As for the United States… Well. Dylan wrote this song in 1982-83, when Israel was involved in Lebanon ‘wiping out the lynch mob’ (Yasser Arafats PLO). It was ten years after the last war, the Yom Kippur War, when the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria attacked together on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. That war was in its fifth day and Israel was losing ground. It was about to be wiped of the face of the earth. Heavy casualties. Nixon was unavailable, incapacitated by the Watergate scandal and Vietnam. It took a phone call from the Saudi’s to Henry Kissinger telling the US to get involved because the conflict was about to get totally out of hand and they feared it might turn global, maybe even nuclear. The Saudi’s threatened with an embargo on oil to the USA. Only then did Nixon send help. It was in the nick of time. That’s a fact.

Next Dylan points his arrows at the hypocrites and pacifists who pray and themselves would not hurt a fly. The bloodshed must cease. They wait for the bully to be butchered in his sleep. But don’t forget, Dylan says, every empire that ever enslaved the bully is gone. The Pharaoh’s, the Roman Emperors, the Babylonians, they’re all gone. The Jews and their religion survived.

Not only that, they made the desert flourish, they took the crumbs of the world and created wealth, and they used that wealth to make the world a better place, with their countless inventions in numerous fields, such as health, agriculture, intelligence, technology, to name but a few. That, too, is a fact.

So to summarize, Dylan is talking facts and takes Israel’s side, which is his right. It doesn’t mean Israel has not made some terrible mistakes, but that goes for everybody in this conflict. That’s not what this song is about. It’s about the facts that Israels enemies and its so called allies seem to forget.

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The original review of “Neighborhood Bully” is available here.  The original title of the review was simply the name of the song.  I’ve changed the title (as I have done for many of the reviews on the site over the years) having reading Joost’s article in the hope that it might make the view that I was trying to express in the original a little clear.  The article itself has not been changed.

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What is on the site

1: Over 400 reviews of Dylan songs.  There is an index to these in alphabetical order on the home page, and an index to the songs in the order they were written in the Chronology Pages.

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6: You might also like: A classification of Bob Dylan’s songs and partial Index to Dylan’s Best Opening Lines

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