T h e L ittle D r u m m e r G ir l
91
ing a political demonstration, an Israeli air strike is conducted against the camp.
Charlie, however, realizes that her presence has aborted the attack and temporarily
spared the children. Le Carre places extreme anti-Israeli thoughts in the mind of
Charlie, writing, “You bastards, she thought. You rotten, killing Zionist bastards. If
I hadn’t been here, you’d have bombed them to Kingdom Come.”7
Despite her growing sympathies for the Palestinians, Charlie retains her alle
giance to Joseph and the Israelis, still maintaining some faith in Kurtz’s promise
that forestalling the terrorists would, in the long run, save innocent lives. Charlie,
thus, fulfills her mission, and Khalil is murdered, but the innocent as well as the
guilty fall with him. Israeli agents murder the decadent European fellow travelers,
but the children at Charlie’s former camp become the target of Israeli air strikes
and bulldozers, while Kurtz is unable to prevent the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
The futility of Charlie’s and his own sacrifices as an Israeli soldier leads a disillu
sioned Joseph/Gadi Becker to question, “What are we to become I wonder? A
Jewish homeland or an ugly little Spartan state?”8
In The Little Drummer Girl, le Carre seems to suggest that, like the West in
the Cold War, Israel had lost its soul and way in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This conclusion led to negative assessments of le Carre’s novel in some conserva
tive political journals as well as publications associated with the American Jewish
community. In the pages of Commentary, for example, Wal