Over the years, I’ve often written about Israel and not always in a flattering light. After President Rabin was assassinated — his wife once told me that she preferred Arafat to Netanyahu any day — I lost all hope that reason, wisdom and humanity might prevail in the Holy Land. I keep returning to a subject that does not exactly endear me to my Jewish friends partly because the mistreatment of the Palestinians offends my sense of justice. People often warn me to lay off. ‘Don’t get involved, it’s the last thing you need,’ they say. I have a pat answer. ‘A Palestinian mother who loses a husband or a child to a bullet cries as bitterly as a Jewish one.’ And a small reminder: the Palestinians never put a Jew in a camp, the Germans did, so why take it out on the former?
Yet after each column I’ve written about Israel, the feedback is mostly: ‘You’re an anti-Semite, and we expect nothing less of you.’ Well, get your pens ready, pals, here we go again. It is mind-blowing to me that, taking account of their history, the Israelis have allowed themselves to become the systematic oppressors of another people. Well before 1948, Jewish armed gangs had begun to chase Arabs out of places they had lived in since time immemorial. Because of the Holocaust, people turned a blind eye. We all know the rest.
Under Jordanian leadership the Palestinians permanently lost their lands after the wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967, and only Egypt managed to get the Sinai back after a so-so performance in the war of Yom Kippur in 1973. No Arab leader lifted a finger to help the dispossessed; keeping them in squalid camps served a political purpose, and to hell with them. I spent time in those camps back in the Sixties, camps that are still bursting at the seams today. My mentor was Glubb Pasha’s son, a young Englishman who pointed out the terrible inequities Israel was imposing on a people who had always lived in peace with Jews before the big boys got involved.
Which brings me to the present. The argument that security concerns justify Israel’s expanding illegal settlements was and remains a bad joke — a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, no ifs or buts about it. Just as the Jewish state declared ‘never again’, upon its creation, so are decent, freedom-loving people the world over saying ‘enough is enough’. And that includes close to half the Israeli population not content to be oppressors. The problem is that Israel is no longer the secular state it once was. If the Israeli religious parties had their way, Israel would by now be an ethnocracy with theocratic leanings.
Then there is Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister and leader of an extreme nationalist party, a former Soviet thug and nightclub bouncer, who believes the West’s hegemony has come to an end, and that the future lies with autocratic governments like Russia and China. His constituents are primarily Russian and hardline, although secular. Netanyahu, who more and more resembles a Chicago political ward boss shifting alliances and counting votes in order to remain in power, is caught in between. This is no way to run a country that owes its very existence to Uncle Sam and the generous donations of the international Jewish community.
And speaking of Uncle Sam, Israel can do no wrong, even when it slays an unarmed American citizen in international waters as it did last year. Criticism of heavy-handedness or brutality by Israel is a no-no in Obamaland, witness the 38 standing ovations given to Netanyahu in Congress after he told the President of the United States to shove it. The American–Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) can be extremely dangerous for any American politician’s health, and everyone knows it. Forty million evangelical Christian voters are another reason no one in America will read the riot act to a so-called great ally who is regularly caught spying on Uncle Sam.
Now the Palestinian Authority has applied for full membership of the United Nations as a sovereign state. Although this has long been promised by the international community, the reaction by the Anglo–Saxon powers has been muted at best. ‘Well, yes, of course, but, ah, not right now’ type of thing. The Palestinians have heard it all before. And yet let’s look at the record: according to the World Bank and the IMF, the Palestinian Authority has been remarkably successful in building Palestinian public institutions. The prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has pursued Palestinian goals non-violently and diplomatically, yet the Israeli response has been one of sticking its head in the sand and announcing that everything you have is mine, and everything I have is mine also. As a Palestinian friend of mine told me this week, ‘Everyone, starting with the Egyptians, Tunisians and the Libyans, are entitled to be free except for us.’
The hypocrisy over Palestinian statehood is astounding, outrageous — even for a species known for it, the politicians. Israel’s Prime Minister has used any excuse he can find to avoid negotiations, and Republican leaders in Washington have encouraged his resistance to sitting down and talking peace. Obama could not deliver a promised settlement-freeze once Aipac issued a veiled threat concerning the 2012 election. The Israeli hardliners, mostly American religious zealots and Russians, are engaged in a new system to terrorise local Palestinians, one they call ‘price tag’, in which they attack Palestinian property — and occasionally the Israeli military — in response to army curbs on their illegal building or other anti-Palestinian activities. Settler violence against unarmed Palestinians and ‘price tagging’ are seen as normal by the Avigdor Liebermans of this world, and colonising settlers now rule Israel’s political landscape. The rest of us should be ashamed of ourselves.
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