Anti-Zionist Guardian editorial illustrates failure to grasp real root cause of Israel-Palestine conflict
Today’s Guardian editorial on the Israel-Palestine conflict provides yet more evidence of the failure of Britain’s political-cultural establishment to understand the real root causes of the conflict in the Middle East. Indeed, in specifically rejecting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s call for Palestinians and Arab states to recognise Israel as a Jewish state it merely endorses the root cause at the heart of that conflict and shows up its real anti-Zionist agenda. Everything, in the worldview of the Guardian, comes down to the settlements and whether the Israelis can be made to yield to the Obama administration’s call for a permanent freeze followed (The Guardian would add) by dismantlement.
Now, everyone recognises that the settlements are an important issue. Israel’s own Supreme Court has ruled against dozens of outposts in the West Bank which it says are illegal. The point is, however, that wherever one stands on settlements a rounded appreciation of the history and current realities of the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot but see this as a second order rather than a first order problem. There were no settlements anywhere before 1967. Following Israeli withdrawals, there are no settlements now in Gaza or the Sinai.
Israel’s legitimacy was not accepted prior to 1967. Dismantlement of settlements in Gaza in 2005 did nothing to enhance Israel’s legitimacy among Palestinians, Arabs and the wider Muslim world. True, withdrawal from the Sinai in 1982 did form part of a peace agreement with Egypt but that peace agreement did nothing to improve Israel’s legitimacy among the Egyptian population as opinion polls show and the anti-Semitic Egyptian media demonstrates on a daily basis.
It is only when Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims renounce anti-Semitism and accept Israel as the world’s only Jewish state — just as the world accepts dozens of Muslim and Christian states — that a solidly grounded peace in the region can be achieved. The Guardian, however, validates the Arab, Muslim and Palestinian bigotry which has always made peace impossible:
“…asking the Arabs for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state moves the bar up from simple recognition of Israel in the full knowledge that this would be a rhetorical step too far for Palestinians and represent a demotion of the status of Israeli Arabs.”
The pseudo defence that such a move would represent a “demotion of the status of Israeli Arabs” needs to be exposed for what it is.
Israel is a liberal-democratic state where the political rights of Israeli Arabs are protected. One might add that they are far better protected than rights of minorities in any other state in the Middle East as well as in most states around the world.
But these awkward realities do not concern the anti-Israeli mindset. And we must be clear in saying that this is exactly what we are dealing with here. For the refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state is a refusal to offer legitimacy to Israel as the state envisaged by its founding fathers, by its current population and by the majority of Jews around the world. The Guardian and its allies in Europe thus expose themselves as emphatically rejectionist of the Zionist enterprise itself. They are not part of the solution. They are part of the problem.
For the full article, click here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/25/israel-us-settlements-editorial