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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So, this week the mask has definitively slipped. A few days ago — see last entry but one — the Guardian put out an editorial slamming the Palestinian Authority leadership as surrender monkeys over leaked documents showing they broadly accepted that the so called settlements in east Jerusalem could reasonably become part of Israel under a peace agreement.

Today, the paper has taken the next logical step. It has given a high profile platform (via an op-ed) to a representative of Hamas — an organisation whose revered founding charter incorporates the ideas and language of the Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery the Protocols of Zion, whose senior members have described the Holocaust as a hoax, whose television stations and ideological supporters routinely refer to Jews as the “sons of apes and pigs”, whose thugs murder homosexuals and beat women, and whose terrorists (not infrequently brainwashed child suicide bombers) have slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the most barbaric manner imaginable.

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As a follow up to my posting yesterday, please see this excellent piece by Emanuele Ottolenghi ripping apart the Guardian over the leaks on peace talks:

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.

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At first sight, it may not appear as the sexiest story in the world. But Gideon Levy’s deeply flawed analysis today of the effective collapse of the Israeli Labor Party following Ehud Barak’s departure to create the Atzmaut party, is symptomatic of wider misunderstandings of key political dynamics in both Israel and western Europe. Writing in Haretz, where he is a regular columnist and something of a superstar figure for the old Israeli left, Levy laments Barak’s alleged treachery in the following terms:

“[Barak] officially turned Israel into the only state in the West, not counting the United States, that lacks a Labor party, a Socio-Democrat party or a left wing. All European countries have such parties… we are now more like the third world ¬ we are a state that has about one and a half parties. Almost all there is in Israel is an ultra-nationalist right, comprised of parties that have various names: Likud, Kadima, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, National Union; yesterday, Atzmaut (Independence) joined them”.

But Levy spectacularly misses the point. The reason for the collapse of the Israeli left is that the multi-culturalist, third-worldist assumptions that sustained it have taken a 10 year beating from which they were never going to recover. Ever since Barak’s peace offers, brokered by Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001, were flatly rejected by the “moderate” Palestinian leadership in favour of violence and rejectionsim the core argument of the Israeli left that the Palestinian cause was based on legitimate grievances that could be addressed via the “land for peace” formula simply lacked credibility inside the Israeli electorate. And given that social populism — another facet of left-wing parties — is now almost as much a feature of several other parties in Israel, the Labor Party simply found itself with nothing to offer. Its implosion was thus inevitable.

Apart from his inability to get the point, it is Levy’s implicit assumption that Israel is now inferior to other western democracies that really speaks to the paucity of his analytical framework.

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