Checck out my latest piece in the Commentator on the idiocy of our analysis of events in the Middle East.

The tragedy of the Palestinain people is a tragedy of their own making. Guardian columnists need to learn the basic facts.

Please click here to see my latest piece on the Guardian’s continued anti-Israeli propaganda.

This is a truly brilliant offering on the Goldstone report which is also up on my new website, The Commentator. Please read it here.

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So which is it to be: the end of communism or the rise of the ayatollahs? As we consider the extraordinary wave of revolutions sweeping the Middle East there is a certain inevitability about the struggle for an appropriate frame of historical reference against which to judge what is happening. This, after all, makes sense.

Those of us who do not have the habit of consulting fortune tellers to make our political predictions are always on the lookout for familiar structures, recognizable patterns matching events from the past or, if it really comes down to it, something to at least pin our hopes (or fears) on.

Vaclav Havel, one time dissident and former Czech president, is convinced that it’s 1989 all over again: “The authoritarian Arab regimes are the product of the same decades that produced the Iron Curtain,” he said. “It turns out that there are core moral and political standards common to all cultures.”

The Times of London also had its analytical sights set on Havel’s part of the world, but from a different era yielding a very different outcome. Drawing on the ill-fated Prague Spring of 1968 which ended with the fall of the reformist Slovak leader of communist Czechoslovakia Alexander Dubcek and the Soviet invasion, it splashed across a front page the headline: “Rebellion spreads as ‘Arab Spring’ takes hold.”

For Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, the great worry was a re-run of Iran in 1979. Referring to Egypt and the prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood in that country, he said: “If extremist forces are allowed to exploit democratic processes to come to power to advance anti-democratic goals — as has happened in Iran and elsewhere — the outcome will be bad for peace and bad for democracy.”

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen preferred to look at continental Europe after World War I where, he reminded readers, Germany “reeled from Weimar Republic to Nazi dictatorship in virtually no time at all”.

Taken together, the choices on offer run the full gamut from magnificent success to total disaster. And it is not unreasonable to point out that three of those four possible frames of reference predict outcomes that are unedifying, to say the least.

So, how should we understand what is currently going on in the Middle East? Ultimately, it is probably best to discard all such frames of reference and substitute a political cliché: Hope for the best; plan for the worst. Here’s why.

First, the mainly Sunni, Arab speaking Middle East is not Europe or, for that matter, Farsi speaking, Shia Iran. Divorcing political analysis from the prevailing political-cultural context is a recipe for analytical failure. What happens now in countries such as Egypt will depend to a great extent on what feels right to decision makers who are unlikely to be searching through the history books for blueprints. In addition to calculations of personal risk and reward, as well as of economic advantage and diplomatic congeniality, they will make their decisions on the basis of what resonates with the people who have given them power.

Second, the Arab Middle East has no tradition of liberal-democracy or law based, constitutional government. Nor is there a tradition of developmental liberalism with universal suffrage as a long term outcome. From the signing of Magna Carta – the first legal document limiting the power of the English king – to universal suffrage in 1928, 713 years had passed. In that time, battles had been fought, won, lost, and won again, embedding liberal practices in culture and law. It may not be necessary to wait three quarters of a millennium but it takes time to establish the customs associated with liberal democracy.

Third, those people who remain obsessed by comparisons with the collapse of the Soviet bloc should take note that, in alphabetical order, the following post-communist countries are still ranked “Not Free” by Freedom House more than two decades after the fall of communism: Azerbaijan; Belarus; Kazakhstan; Russia; Tajikistan; Turkmenistan; Uzbekistan. Several others are ranked as only “Partly Free”. The majority of people born in the Soviet bloc do not live in countries designated as “Free” by Freedom House.

Fourth, brute anti-Semitism is rife in the Arab world. No country in history has ever produced enlightened political outcomes when anti-Semitism (and anti-Americanism) has dominated the political discourse. According to a major 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. In Jordan 98 percent said they had unfavourable opinions of Jews with one percent holding favourable opinions. Do with those figures as you please. But history will laugh at you if you ignore them.

Fifth, the best organized political forces in many Arab countries are Islamist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt being the most widely talked about example. Islamism is best understood as a form of fascism, an ideology incompatible with liberal-democratic values and practices.

This is indeed a bleak and austere summary. But it is better to be aware of the problems the region is going to face in building free societies than to censor them out of our consciousness. We will know soon enough which way things are going to go. The first clues will come with the conversation the emerging leaders start having with their peoples. If you start hearing too many references to Jews, Islam and the perfidy of the West don’t expect things to turn out well. I say again, hope for the best; plan for the worst.

Game over. No way back. An entire edifice of anti-Israeli demonisation definitively consigned to the scrap heap, never to be recycled again. This is the uncompromising message that comes out of yesterday’s revelations on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To the horror of a European political intelligentsia which has been steadfast to the point of fanatical in its opposition to Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership itself, we now know, has long accepted that the vast majority of Israeli settlements can be considered legitimate and would become part of Israel under any reasonable peace agreement.

This is utterly devastating since it simultaneously shows that everyone from the British Foreign Office and the BBC to the European Commission and the continent’s passionately anti-Israeli NGO community have been adopting a position which was significantly more uncompromising on “settlements” than the Palestinian leadership itself, and also that that same Palestinian leadership had accepted that the so called 1967 “borders” — the gold standard for practically every anti-Israeli polemic around — are irrelevant to the prospects of a lasting peace.

In one of its most resentful leader columns for years, the Guardian was nothing short of apoplectic: not so much with Israel, but with a Palestinian leadership which has effectively blown the credibility of the Guardian’s very own mantras on the MidEast straight out of the water. The Palestinian leadership, the paper declaimed, had been shown to be “weak” and “craven”. Their concessions amounted to “surrender of land Palestinians have lived on for centuries”. And, in words that look alarmingly close to the position adopted by Hamas, “The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.” This is sheer spite.

The Palestinian leadership accepts what any reasonable person has been able to accept for decades. The Guardian then slams them as surrender monkeys. The Guardian newspaper is more hardline against Israel than the Palestinian leadership itself. And bear in mind, as you mull over the implications of that stark and unyielding state of affairs, that the Palestinian Authority is led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is a Holocaust denier.

But it gets worse. The only conceivable way out of this for the anti-Israel community is to turn this all upside down and argue — as analysts, reporters (anyone they can get their hands on) have been doing on the BBC all day — that what this really shows is the extent of Israeli “intransigence”: the Palestinians offer all these concessions, and still the Israelis say no! This was the line adopted by Paul Danahar, the BBC’s MidEast bureau chief, who quite casually averred that, “The Israelis look churlish for turning down major concessions”. Good thing no-one’s taking sides then.

Tragicomically, it just won’t wash. Privately and morally, senior Palestinians can see that there is nothing illegitimate or even especially problematic about most of the “settlements”, (as reasonable observers of the MidEast have been saying for years). This we know from the leaks themselves. But publicly and politically they cannot sell such concessions to their own people. This we know because they are currently trying to distance themselves from the leaks, and because they educate their own people in an implacable rejectionism which extends to the “moderate” Palestinian authority glorifying suicide bombers and other terrorists by naming streets and squares after them.

Logically and reasonably, the Israeli response is to see such “concessions” for what they are: well intentioned in so far as they go, but impossible to implement in practice. Quite apart from the question of Hamas-run Gaza, the Palestinians have been playing the same old game of saying one thing to one audience and something else to another. They are not a credible partner for peace, and the Israelis do not look remotely “churlish” for understanding this.

It will be interesting to see how this whole affair now plays out. But never again can the anti-Israel community play the settlement card and at the same time retain a single ounce of credibility.

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NB: Just for the record, there are no less than four opinion pieces on the subject up on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site right now. This has got them seriously rattled…
p.s. As of 3pm UK time, make that five pieces which I think is an all time record. Not that anyone’s obsessed or anything…