Britannia Radio

Israel's false friend

MELANIEPHILLIPS

WEDNESDAY, 24TH NOVEMBER 2010

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, is one of a (small) minority of Conservative Cabinet ministers – let alone if you include the LibDems in the Coalition – who is a staunch Atlanticist and well-disposed towards Israel. It is an open secret that his hawkish views on foreign affairs do not coincide with those of David Cameron. So it was to be expected that, as the guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews last night, he would present himself as a friend of Israel. And he acordingly declared that Britain was a friend of Israel.

Methinks he did protest far too much. For hisspeech was full of easy platitudes. It was a kind of check-list of all the buttons that he knew he had to press to curry favour with that audience.

And then there was this

Like many, many people in this room we want to see the Israeli Government negotiate peace, and we urge upon them an end to settlement building, and an opening up of Gaza.

This paragraph negates Osborne’s professions of friendship and shows them to be cynical and false. The implication was that the Israelis were the ones preventing those negotiations – one of the great canards of the day. The fact is that you can’t negotiate peace unless there’s someone who wants to negotiate it with you. But the Palestinians don’t want peace with Israel. They want peace in place of Israel. They don’t want a two-state solution; if they did, there would be peace between two states tomorrow. Since the 1920s the Arab line has remained consistent: they want one state and Israel gone.

Recent polling bears this out: distressingly, a majority of the Palestinians support a two state solution but only as a route to one Arab state – in other words, Yasser Arafat’s genocidal ‘strategy of stages’ -- and two thirds do not accept that the Jews have the right to a state of their own. In other words, they want Israel gone.

Indeed, Mahmoud Aabbas has said repeatedly he will never recognise Israel as a Jewish state. It follows therefore that he remains intent on destroying it. That’s why his Palestinian Authority is still teaching Palestinian children to hate and to kill Jews. That’s why, only a few days ago, the PA published a ‘study’ saying the Western Wall of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem has nothing to do with the Jews but was always Muslim, claiming that not one stone dates from the time of King Solomon.

This is of course totally absurd, not least because evidence is being excavated in Jerusalem all the time dating back to the time of Solomon, David and other Jewish kings centuries before Islam was invented. The PA is constantly trying to deny evidence of the Temple because it give the lie to its wholly mendacious assertion that the Jews do not possess the sole historic claim to the land of Israel. This ‘study’ should therefore be bracketed with that other notable Palestinian contribution to scholarship, Mahmoud Abbas’s own doctoral thesis which denied the Holocaust.

So how can Israel possibly negotiate ‘peace’? The entire ‘peace process’ is a sick farce. Since it is patently not within Israel’s power to negotiate ‘peace’ with an enemy still hell-bent on destroying its very existence, the pressure on Israel to do so is actually pressure to surrender to genocidal violence and blackmail. This is the import of what George Osborne, friend of Israel, has said.

Next he urged on Israel canard number two: an end to settlement building. The British government holds that the settlements and the ‘occupation’ are illegal. This is totally untrue. The idea that if settlement building ceases, peace will be forthcoming is ludicrous. Even when settlement building stopped for almost a year, Abbas refused tro negotiate. When the settlers were forcibly removed from Gaza, the Palestinians did not start to build their state but responded by firing thousands of rockets at Israel. When more than 90 per cent of those territories was offered to the Palestinians to form a state of their own, they launched their terrorist ‘intifada’. The settlements are merely the stick being used by the Arabs, their patsy Obama and the enemies of Israel to destroy Israel. This is the import of the position that George Osborne, friend of Israel, has taken.

Worse even that that was his remark than he wants to see Israel ‘opening up Gaza’. First of all, the border with Gaza that really is sealed is the one controlled by Egypt; Israel lets through into Gaza thousands of tonnes of supplies every week. Gaza is only ‘closed’ by Israel to prevent arms and missiles from being brought in. So it follows that anyone who urges ‘opening up Gaza’ is urging that Israel should no longer be able to prevent arms and missiles from being imported into Gaza, thus exposing its citizens to the certainty of further and far greater carnage.

In other words, it should not be allowed to defend itself. And a country that cannot defend itself cannot survive against its enemies.

This is the import of what George Osborne, friend of Israel, has said. And then he dared wrap himself in the mantle of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorist murder in order to protect himself from the disgusting import of the line he was parrotting.

Compare this speech with the magnificent one made by Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper a week or so ago, in which he explictly linked the demonisation of Israel to the rise in Jew-hatred across the world and stated unequivocally that he stood with Israel against its enemies even at the expense of Canada's interests at the UN. That’s what a true friend of Israel says.

Whether or not Osborne actually believes the line he was mouthing last night, Britain is now a false friend of Israel -- and stands as a result on the wrong side of history.