Some Middle East realities

In the midst of a wide diversity of highly emotive commentaries on the current situation in Palestine, a welcome shaft of light was cast by Andrew Alexander, writing in the Daily Mail of the 19th April. Said Alexander:-

‘There is far too much talk in the Arab-Israeli crisis about right and wrong. The essence of diplomacy is not right and wrong or good and bad. It is about peace and war. We are threatened by a dangerous and worsening conflict, which, if it persists, could destabilise the Middle East with consequences which would be felt world-wide and certainly in Britain.

‘It is a side issue now who are the goodies and baddies. The point is that both sides are convinced of the righteousness of their cause.’

Though this is far from the complete picture, it does form some framework for the issue to be judged. From the strict British standpoint, what matters about the Middle East crisis is simply and solely how it affects us; it should be a matter of supreme indifference to Britain whether one or another group of Middle Easterners occupy a particular tiny piece of land far from our shores unless certain essential national interests are affected by this issue. This question must be judged completely independently of whether we sympathise with the Arabs or the Israelis. Sympathy is a matter of personal feeling; national interests are a matter of cool, sober judgement in which feelings should play no part.

Mr. Alexander speaks of consequences affecting Britain. There are two essential respects in which this is true. Britain, like all industrial nations, is affected by anything which interferes with the necessary flow of Middle Eastern oil to its economy - and that is the most vital issue. But we are also affected in another way. Here we must distinguish between Britain as we would like it to be - a nation under a government dedicated single-mindedly and exclusively to British interests and not swayed by any other considerations - and the nation we are today: one governed by a set of politicians of globalist loyalty and inclination, indifferent to real British interests, heavily committed to the support of Zionism by way of the immense power of the Jewish lobby both here and across the Atlantic - and, not least, responsive to every gust of wind, large or small, from the mass media and public opinion, which in turn exploit - or are swayed by - popular emotion.

This is important - even if it should not be. Whereas Alexander is right in saying that the question of who are the goodies and who are the baddies is only a side issue; it is a political fact that popular perceptions of good and bad, right and wrong, have an immense bearing on policies likely to be adopted and therefore likely to affect us.

And here is where we are witnessing some dramatic developments. The totally callous and brutal actions of the Israeli armed forces and police in the occupied territories, actions which, from a vast weight of evidence, go far beyond necessary counter-terrorist measures - have caused such outrage that the mass media, disposed almost viscerally to be pro-Jewish, have not been able to ignore them. Journalists reporting from the spot - journalists, mark you, predisposed from way back in their student days towards philo-Semitic attitudes - have simply been forced to take account of the evidence before their very eyes. The result is that the British public is seeing another side to the race which for the past sixty years or so has been treated always as the victim of brutality and consequently as beyond criticism. Also, many who in the past, for fear of being dubbed ‘anti-Semites’, have hesitated to condemn Jewish actions are now shaking off that inhibition as they see that others are freeing themselves from the same shackles and speaking openly. This is causing tremendous alarm in Jewish quarters, and has provoked the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, no less, to observe that ‘anti-Semitism’ in Britain is at the highest level for many years, perhaps since the 1930s.

We should of course understand straightaway what the Rabbi means by ‘anti-Semitism’. No civilised person wants to see Jews singled out for hostility just because they are Jews, but all reasonable people should wish to see an open and honest debate about Jewish matters in which Jews are no more immune to criticism than the rest of us. This is what is happening at long last, and this is what scares the daylights out of Mr. Sacks and his kind, many of whom are accustomed to thinking of themselves as an exclusively protected species whose good and bad points of behaviour may never be discussed as are those of the rest of us. When we say that the British public is now seeing another side to this race, what we mean is that the faults of the Jews (or at least some of them) are being revealed to be measured against the virtues, just as is fair with British people, Germans, French, Eskimos and others. Many Jews, including some very powerful ones, would prefer that this should not be permitted; but whether they like it or not, it is happening.

In that regard, what is going on right now in the Israel/Palestine region is having undoubted effects in this country. It is tragic that it is taking great human suffering for this to come about, but that is something we cannot alter. Often it happens that out of suffering comes truth.

And the truth is important to us in Britain because it bears on matters far wider than this local Middle Eastern quarrel. It helps to inform our attitude towards Zionism world-wide, which in its turn affects areas of British life too numerous to list in this short analysis. Zionism - the wider Zionism, that is - crucially influences British policy both foreign and domestic, and we believe that this influence is mostly not for the good. If events in the Middle East play some role in changing British perceptions of Zionism, and these in turn eventually lead to changes of British policy, something worthwhile will have been achieved.

Right now, almost everyone - even including comparative realists like Mr. Alexander - is saying that there must be a truce and a settlement between the Arabs and the Israelis. This flies in the face of history. History should tell us that there simply is no formula for a settlement that will ever satisfy both sides. The Arab-Israeli conflict, like the Northern Ireland conflict, is one which can only be resolved by one side winning and the other side losing. And in the end, the plain fact is that Israel cannot win. The realities of demographics and geopolitics make this clear to anyone not blinded by pro-Jewish prejudice. Israel's inevitable defeat is at the moment only being postponed by American protection, and that in turn is only being sustained by the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington - something that Americans are not going to put up with for ever.