Must Yeats always provide a quarry for journalists and headline-writers? How many "terrible beauties" have I seen born in newspapers, how many "gyres" have been conjured up by sub-editors, and bee-loud glades and darkening floods and rough beasts slouching, even the occasional rag-and-bone shop of the heart? And now here comes Israeli journalist Amos Elon with "A Blood-Dimmed Tide", not only a crib but misquoted and misappropriated. "The (not "a") blood-dimmed tide" was Yeats' vision of anarchy that might have applied to post-revolutionary Russia or the Irish struggle for independence but which Elon - yes, you've guessed it - regards as a symbol of the "mindless acts of violence by suicide terrorists" in Israel. It's as well, I guess, that Elon is unaware that Yeats, though no anti-semite, once admired Mussolini and Charles Maurras, founder of the French proto-fascist "Action Francaise".
Alas, this is not the only element of sloppiness in what should have been an important new book. I say "book" advisedly, because although the publishers' blurb - with all the usual guff about the "abiding complexity" of the Middle East - claims this to be a cohesive study of the region, it is in fact a set of articles thrown together with no updating, little checking and a laziness in editing that is an insult to the reader. An Egyptian journalist's account of the Egytian-Israeli peace treaty is repeated verbatim on pages 78 and 287, while Elon's own description of Moshe Dayan is churned out twice - almost identically - on pages 37 and 308.
It is, after all, one thing to be told at the start of this book that Dayan (the "Rudolf Valentino of Zionism", for heaven's sake) is "the darling of the foreign electronic media, favourite star of all the Barbara Walterses . . . yet in the intimacy of his home he lives in the morbid decor of burial urns, funeral plaques, death offerings, and sarcophagi . . . " It is quite another to be informed at the very end of the book that Dayan was "the darling of local and foreign electronic media, the favourite star of all the Barbara Walterses of the world . . . yet in the intimacy of his private home, he lived morbidly surrounded by burial urns, funeral plaques, death offerings," etc, etc.
I think I know what happened. Elon collected his articles on diskettes and - true to the morality of our new writing technology - threw the lot together as a book in the hope that editors would clean up the text. Some hope. Thus we find the present tense being used about events that happened a quarter of a century ago.
At one point, Elon portentously announces that "Israeli censorship prohibits the mention of any names other than those of a few top-ranking officers" - but the officer he quotes is participating in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and must by now be at least 70 years old. He just didn't bother to dig out his name and print it.
Elon is what is called a "liberal" Israeli journalist - in other words, he condemns Israeli brutality towards Arabs, excoriates Judaism's as well as Islam's headbangers and generally acknowledges the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees.
But he still largely fails what I call the "terrorism" test. Half-way through his text, Elon has used the word "terrorism" or "terror" 11 times in relation to Arabs and only three times about their Jewish counterparts. Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish settler who slaughtered 30 Palestinian civilians at Hebron, is a "fanatic". The Sabra and Chatila massacre - in which Israel's Lebanese terrorist allies slaughtered up to 2,000 Palestinian civilians in Beirut in 1982 - is alluded to only four times and without explanation. Israel's recently-abandoned occupation zone in southern Lebanon is obediently referred to in Israeli military jargon as the "security zone".
MORE'S the pity, because there are so many things in this collection of articles that could have formed the bedrock of a fine book. It's not just the passing revelations - that prime real estate in Tel Aviv is now worth twice as much per square metre as in Beverly Hills - but the historical insight with which Elon explains the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after Israel's incredible victory in 1967. Victory, he says, had "stupefied" the Israeli government in the aftermath of its success. "Their imagination faltered under its weight. Exhausted by success, Israel's ageing power elite seemed paralysed by a sense of crushing responsibility."
Nor does Elon avoid the dark side of his own society, quoting Haim Guri's extraordinary "Appeal to the Gentiles" after the 1967 war in which the Israeli commentator urged Norwegians, Dutchmen, Danes, Frenchmen and others to "share everything" with Israelis. "We will give them our pretty daughters for wives and their dark or light-skinned women will find men here worthy of the name. We will make it easy for them to convert to Judaism . . . " Thus, of course, preventing the Israeli Arab population from becoming a majority.
The corrupting nature of occupation is one of Elon's most powerful themes and yet, repeatedly, the reader is brought up short by a lack of perspective that constitutes either a double standard or a grotesque historical exaggeration. In his account of Iraq's wicked 1991 Scud attacks on Tel Aviv, Elon dismisses Moshe Arens' description of the damage as "worse than anything . . . since World War Two" - then embarks on a melodramatic description of the "earthquake" size devastation in the city. Yet only one Israeli died as a direct result of the Scuds - in contrast to the more than 17,000 innocent Arab civilians killed during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its infinitely more devastating seige of Beirut.
Conversely, Israel's struggle with the Arabs is constantly given an epic dimension. The prelude to the 1967 Middle East war is compared to the eve of the first World War in 1914; Elon watches a tank battle in the Sinai "much as Napoleon had watched his cavalry at Dresden"; Dayan is a "homebred Tallyrand" whom Machiavelli would supposedly have appreciated; visiting Cairo, Elon evokes Bismarck. The story of Israel is an epic one. But surely some sense of historical proportion is necessary, if only to restrain the nations of the Middle East from destroying us all in their next war.
Similarly, far too many characters are treated with too much reverence, especially journalists. Samir Ragab, for example, is referred to as the "distinguished publisher" of the Egyptian Gazette - a lackey of President Moubarak, whose articles about Israel sometimes border on the racist (and who once called this reviewer "a black crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt" for having dared to condemn Egyptian police torture). Distinguished, my foot.
There's no doubt where Elon's heart lies: the preposterous nature of Israeli occupation and its consequences for his own country - at least 21 Israeli soldiers had committed suicide in Lebanon by 1985 - and the corrosive and growing nature of Judaism's own lunatic fringe threaten the nation which Elon would like to believe is already in its post-Zionist phase. But it needs a less conformist, lighter touch than this; one that adopts, perhaps, some of the black humour of the Russian Jewish immigrant who flew into Tel Aviv during Iraq's 1991 missile attacks. Asked if he was frightened of the Soviet-made rockets, he replied: "No: things made in Russia don't work!"
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent