My piece in this week’s Jewish Chronicle looks at the question of whether there is any justification for calling Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem and the West Bank illegal following the Obama administrations recent veto of a UN resolution describing them as such. To read the article, click here.

I’m all eyes and ears. Surely it’s going to come from every direction imaginable: saturation coverage on the BBC, leader columns in the Financial Times, op-eds by the dozen in the Guardian, resolutions galore in the European Parliament and the UN, a UK Foreign Office enraged by the cruelty of it all. What on earth have the Israelis done now? Well hold on to your braces, because the blockade of Gaza is back, and, wait for it, it’s now been imposed by Hamas.

Yes, you read that right. Nine months after Israel began relaxing restrictions on exports to the Gaza strip Hamas has re-imposed them. The blockade will apply to all goods that can’t be produced locally or obtained from elsewhere. The reason for the move is partly that like all Islamo-fascist outfits Hamas does not look kindly on things that bear the fingerprint of the dreaded Jew — or as the Jerusalem Post reported it, they’d rather do business with the Arabs — but also it’s because, now that imports are flowing in from Israel, the terror group’s extortion rackets from the tunnels between Gaza and Egypt are yielding a good deal less in revenue than they used to.

Surely there’s going to be an outcry! The Gaza “blockade”, let’s not forget, was one of the great humanitarian causes of our time: malnourished children roaming the streets in search of food; babies with jaundice; old women huddled around camp fires because the evil Israelis had cut off the fuel supplies. Believe it or not, a ban on Israeli fuel is part of the new blockade: “Hamas has also stopped the daily fuel supplies it used to receive from Israeli energy company Dor Alon,” the Jerusalem Post reported today. “In the past, Dor Alon used to transfer about 1,000 liters a day to the Gaza Strip for the power station, but now Hamas prefers to receive its fuel from a contraband pipeline it has set up through a tunnel under the Egyptian-Gazan border”.

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In an astonishing re-run of the most controversial moment in British pro-Israel advocacy for many years, Mick Davis, the man at the centre of that storm, has launched a second broadside defending his judgement in warning of the prospect of Israel becoming “an apartheid state”.

Mr. Davis, who is chairman of the United Jewish Israel Appeal and chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council, made his original remarks in November last year. Among the formal UK Jewish leadership there was a mixed reaction –see here for comments by supporters and opponents — while the Israeli embassy issued a scathing protest and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and its supporters reacted with jubilation.

In this week’s Jewish Chronicle Mr. Davis sought to clarify his remarks as follows:

“… I said clearly that Israel was not an apartheid state. I reject any comparisons between Israel today and apartheid, an analogy which is often used as a stick to beat Israel. I did say that if the world came to believe that a two-state solution was not possible and that a single unitary state (“a one-state solution”) was seen to be the only way forward, then that unitary state may be characterised as an apartheid state as you would have a minority ruling over the majority – or at least a majority of Palestinian non-citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. The international pressure for full civic rights for all, including the right to vote, would be enormous and would mean the end of Israel. This is not a new or controversial point. Prime Minister Olmert said as much in 2007 as did Defence Minister Barak last year”.

Unless forced to do so it is my policy not to get involved directly in the internal affairs of the UK Jewish community over discussion of Israel since Jews and non-Jews face a different calculus of risk. For example, as a non-Jew defending Israel I will never be accused of dual loyalties, (though I am accused of pretty much everything else!). The wider debate about Israel, however, is an entirely different matter. And since, as Mr. Davis acknowledges, the apartheid analogy is such an insidious and dangerous weapon in the arsenal of Israel’s opponents I would like to offer some thoughts from a purely analytical perspective on why it is so wrong to raise it in the Israeli context, and why it always will be under any future scenario:

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As a leading player in the global deligitimisation campaign, it is never a surprise when the BBC lashes out against the Jewish state. Sometimes, though, the presence of an agenda against Israel is more blatant than other times. So it is with a video segment about an exhibition of photos in London by German photographer Kai Wiedenhofer on the aftermath of Israel’s war with Hamas in December 2008 and January 2009.

Wiedenhofer has lived among the Palestinians for years. He is effectively an anti-Zionist campaigner. He has drawn on Nazi imagery, implied parallels between the Star of David and the Swastika, captioned photos with words such as “ghetto” creating a comparison with the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, and promoted the notion of Israeli “apartheid”. Speaking about Wiedenhofer’s photos of the security barrier, Levi Salomon, of the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against anti-Semitism, an initiative of the 12,000-member Berlin Jewish community, told the Jerusalem Post in 2008: “In the motifs he chooses for his photos, Wiedenhofer’s political views become clear. In his work, he presents a completely distorted, one-sided image of the Israeli security installation.”

Basic journalistic ethics would clearly lead any normal media outlet to relate such information to the reader or viewer since informing ones audience about the credibility of the source is a central element of the journalistic enterprise. The BBC, of course, tells you nothing about him leaving the impression he is just an everyday photographer innocently doing his job. The reporter, Anna Macnamee, relates the fact that he has been accused of anti-Semitism only to allow Wiedenhofer casually to dismiss it:

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Here are two sets of statistics that you have never been informed about by the BBC, and have never heard from the mouth of a senior official in the British Foreign Office: According to a major opinion poll survey conducted by Pew in 2006, 97 percent of Egyptians admitted to holding “somewhat unfavourable” or “very unfavourable” opinions about Jews while none (zero percent) said they had favourable opinions about Jews; in Jordan 98 percent said they had unfavourable opinions with one percent holding favourable opinions.

Those figures tell you much about why genuine, liberal democracy is going to be so difficult to achieve in Egypt (ditto Jordan), while also telling you just how harmful to the prospects of genuine MidEast peace have been the appeasement/stability-at-all-costs oriented policies of Western governments and the assumptions which have underpinned them.

This is a complex issue, and the key points are rarely spelled out. So let me think aloud in front of you. My thoughts, as you will see, are not yet fully formed on this. So, I welcome your contributions in the comment section. Here goes for starters, in question and answer form:

Q) Why is mass anti-Semitism incompatible with genuine liberal democracy?

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