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Michael Henderson

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Peace in our time

Sunday, 13th January 2008

 

Rarely has a moral compass been so completely and publicly destroyed by its owner. George W Bush’s presidency has been defined by the moral position he took, under the impetus of 9/11, to repudiate the amoral realpolitik of his predecessors in appeasing and rewarding aggression while ignoring or even punishing its victims. Instead he would hold the aggressor’s feet to the fire and support and promote those who stood for freedom and democracy. Controversial as this doctrine undoubtedly was in the eyes of many in the US and around the world, it was at least consistent — with one niggling exception. On the Israel Arab impasse, Bush veered between making extraordinarily impressive speeches which correctly identified Arab aggression and incitement to hatred of Israel as the core problem to be addressed, and the imposition of the ‘Road Map’ which, by detailing the steps both Israel and the Palestinians had to take, descended into the kind of moral equivalence — and thus negation of the centrality of Arab aggression — which has kept this conflict alive for the past sixty years. At the time, however, it seemed that the Road Map was no more or less than a sop to Tony Blair — who has always failed grievously to grasp that the Palestinians don’t want a state, they want the Jewish state — as a gesture of thanks for his support over Iraq.

With Bush’s visit to the Middle East this week, however, any such residual excuse is blown away along with the last shreds of his claim to moral integrity. Peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he said blithely, was eminently possible this year. But everything he then said was about pushing Israel to make ‘painful concessions’ rather than the Palestinians. Since the sole obstacle to peace in the Middle East is the Arab rejection of the Jews’ right to their own ancestral home — the fact that Mahmoud Abbas not only has consistently refused to halt the continuing violence against Israel by both Hamas and his own Fatah affiliates, not only has refused to halt the incitement to hatred of Israel perpetrated daily by his own education system and PA controlled media, but has also repeatedly and consistently demanded the right of mass Palestinian immigration to Israel, thus showing his ‘aspiration’ for a Palestinian homeland existing peacefully alongside Israel to be totally bogus as was underlined by his chief negotiator’s recent declaration that the Palestinians would never recognised Israel as a Jewish state — Bush’s position is tantamount to pushing Israel to surrender to an enemy still hell-bent upon Israel’s annihilation.

In this context, some of what Bush said in Israel was deeply shocking and, in the implications of such moral and intellectual obtuseness, very frightening. Here, for example, although he nodded towards the Arab need to

reach out to Israel, a step that is long overdue
and also to
ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders,
he said this:
The point of departure for permanent status negotiations to realize this vision seems clear: There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of Palestine is viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent.
Well no, actually: the point of departure is not the ‘occupation that began in 1967’ (not least because Sinai and Gaza have now been relinquished by Israel, in return for… er, what, exactly, from Egypt and the Palestinians? Why, the uninterrupted importation of arms by the Palestinians from Egypt into Gaza for further attacks on Israeli civilians; and from the Palestinians themselves, merely more and more attacks upon Israel). The point of departure for peace has to be the point of departure for the war — the Palestinians’ refusal to allow Israel to survive. And that is not even mentioned by Bush. Instead:
The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.
Why? Which other body of people whose identity is formed from their aspiration to ethnically cleanse a nation from its historic homeland, and who have never stopped trying to do so for almost a century, ‘deserve’ to be rewarded with a state of their own?
And it will enhance the stability of the region, and it will contribute to the security of the people of Israel.
Run that by me again?? As things stand, these are precisely what such a state will not do. Without Israel’s presence, it will quickly fall entirely to Hamas and directly threaten not merely Israel but the entire region, which it will help Islamise, and thus the free world.

There was, however, one good point about the wretched Road Map, which was that at least it stated that the very first condition had to be the Palestinians’ dismantling of their infrastructure of terror. But now just look at what Condoleezza Rice blurted out aboard Air Force One during the President’s Israel trip:

The ‘road map’ for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the ‘core issues’: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel's border and the future of Jerusalem.

The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,’ Miss Rice said. Miss Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was ‘break that tight sequentiality ... to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road-map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel.’

But the core issue is nothing other than never-ending Palestinian aggression against Israel, which not only continues but increases with every concession Israel makes. Indeed, while one can think of many ‘painful concessions’ made by Israel — relinquishing Sinai and Gaza, getting out of Lebanon, offering to give up the whole of the West Bank (after the 1967 war), more than 90 per cent of the West Bank (in 2000), releasing scores of Palestinian prisoners in order to ‘shore up’ Mahmoud Abbas — one is hard put to think of any ‘painful concessions’ by the Palestinians at all. Nevertheless, Rice is a worshipper in the T Blair church of diplomacy whose cardinal doctrine is that nothing must ever, ever jeopardise a peace process, including the fact that the aggressor is still continuing to murder its victims and to incite others to do so. Since the ‘peace process’ is inviolable and sacrosanct, it follows that any attempt to stop aggression is totally unhelpful since it brings the peace process to a grinding halt. So the one plus point in the Road Map, that it acknowledged that the Palestinians had to stop making war before there could be peace — a universal precept — has had to be ditched.

This powerful signal threatens to bring about the peace of the grave as Israel is delivered to its enemies. So why is Bush doing this? Almost certainly because he himself and/or the advisers who have effectively imprisoned him within his own waning power believe that they can make a deal with the devil: offering the bound and inert body of the Jewish state in exchange for a Saudi-led Sunni alliance against Iran. If this is so, American amorality is outdone only by its stupidity, since Saudi — which was banking on the US bombing Iran into regime change — has now concluded that the US has lost its bottle and is busy making nice with Iran as the next best alternative.

As for Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who appears to be going along with all of this, and whose Israeli critics ascribe to him every dubious motive under the sun ranging from a venal attempt to evade corruption charges to a desire to suck up to fashionable Israeli lefties, he appears to be actually motivated by two things which contradict each other: the belief that Israel must divest itself of the West Bank in order to retain its Jewish identity; and the belief that he can enter into his own Faustian pact with America by trading 'peace in our time' with Mahmoud Abbas for American support for an attack on Iran, on the assumption that such a deal with the Palestinians will never be struck because the last thing their leadership and their backers actually want is peace with Israel.

Such speculation, however, can only be just that. We cannot know for sure what motivates any of these players at this time. What we do know, because history tells us this over and over again, is that appeasement invariably brings not peace but war; and that when the world favours aggressors and further victimises their victims, countless more foot-soldiers are recruited to the cause of violence.

In that known context, the damage done by Bush’s visit to Israel is incalculable as a signal of surrender to the whole Arab and Muslim world, which understands what it means better than the Americans do themselves; and just off-stage, Iran is waiting, watching and preparing.


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Wonderkid

January 14th, 2008 2:00am

As per an excellent MSNBC.com article of many years ago - before 9/11 I believe, (will dig it out sometime), Bush and Blair are BOTH of the doctrine that the Jews will convert to Christianity after a terrible catastrophe. I believe it's known in the trade as 'End of days' or something like that. This is, in their eyes, destiny - and they are effectively making (biblical) history. And no this is not cods-wallop, while Blair may be a lucid speaker (projecting a false sense of intellectual superiority) and Bush a focused (well meaning?) individual, both are God fearing - and that is as terrifying a scenario as the God the 'other' side worship. All fascinating stuff that some basic Googling will uncover fairly rapidly. So, what do we do?

Alan MacDonald

January 14th, 2008 2:15am

For Bush to even mention, let alone promote his propagandistic "Freedom Agenda" or 'Democracy Agenda', would be like Hitler and Goebbels promoting a 'freedom agenda' and pointing to 'Vichy France' as a sterling example of what the Nazi Empire has been able to achieve. Bush and Cheney have done more to forward the interests of the global corporatist Empire hiding behind this facade of 'Vichy America' than any regime in history.

Brian O'Connor

January 14th, 2008 2:57am

As far as I'm concerned, there is one question, and only one, that needs answering.

Do our friends the Palestinian leaders, grant that Israel has a right to exist?

If the answer is an unequivocal yes, then there is at least there's some basis for discussion.

If no, then what is there to talk about?

We 'mericuns, or at least our politicians, tend to think that every non-'mericun constituency sees the world the way we do: as a place where reason and self-interest (as we Ameri-westerners define them), and negotiation and compromise, are as valued by the "Other" as they are by us.

How arrogant, how ethnocentric, how naive, how appalling is that? And yet, that is the liberal mantra, the one that has tickled the fancy of even President Bush.

Brian O'Connor

January 14th, 2008 3:52am

. . . and another thing.

Quoting Bush:

The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue. The Palestinian people deserve it.

Why, pray, is it that he defends the proposition that the Palestinian people deserve a "state of Palestine" but not the proposition that the Jews don't deserve a state of Israel.

I'm disgusted. Utterly disgusted.

Irene Lancaster

January 14th, 2008 8:33am

What an apt title. I've just been interviewing on of Nicholas Winton's 'children', from the former Czechoslovakia, who was brought to England with around 600 others in 1939, aged 8. Zyta, now aged 76, graphically described the reaction of her Czech family and friends to Chamberlain's piece of paper, as we watched a Czech video made of the entire story. Zyta ended up in Loos, near Maidstone. Her parents were forced into camps in Mauritius for the duration of World War II, being barred from Haifa by the British. They then emigrated to Israel after the war and were reunited with their daughter, aged 16, who has lived in Haifa since 1947. We discussed appeasement at length, and were struck by Nicholas Winton's words that leading a blameless life isn't enough. What is needed is active intervention in order to prevent evil and do real good.

roGER

January 14th, 2008 11:26am

It's wonderful to see Zionists like Mel and the commenters here with their knickers so throughly twisted! For their hero Dubya to be the cause of such knottedness is doubly thrilling. Thank you Mel for making my day!

Ben-Tsiyon

January 14th, 2008 12:35pm

Where does roGER get the idea that dubya is the hero of us Zionists ! It says in our good book: "Put not thy trust in princes", and that means any and all of them, whether royal or political. When it comes to the crunch the Jewish people has to stand alone. It goes without saying that all those who share roGER's prejudice relish any situation which they vue as detrimental to Israel and the Jewish nation at large.

Irene Lancaster

January 14th, 2008 12:50pm

Roger sounds a bit ignorant to me. What, in your view, is a Zionist, Roger?

Hereford

January 14th, 2008 2:00pm

roGer, I am not a Zionist. In fact I am not Jewish. I read Melanie's blog because she reflects some of the legitimate concerns and fears I have for the world. In common with a lot of the people who berate Melanie and others like her, you seem to have no argument to put forward, just the Nah! Nikky! Nah! Nah! of the primary school playground. I don't agree with everything my fellow posters say, nor with eveything Melanie says. But I value and appreciate the fact that most posters here address the point, rather than personalise. They largely provide reasonable arguments for the stance they take (the logic of which you can always argue with of course).

Stuart

January 14th, 2008 2:39pm

I have argued for years that the Palestinians signed The Roadmap and acknowledged it is a sequence of co-ordinated events. You can't just jump to page twelve without doing page one. Page one, paragraph one, sentence one states that the Palestinians will IMMEDIATELY and UNCONDITIONALLY renounce terror, violence and incitement. As written it requires Israel to do nothing but respond to this compliance and then embark on a mutual sequence. Clearly the Palestinikans have broken this agreement and the response seems to be that "Violence, terror and incitement" are only to be stopped as the pen is placed on the final peace agreement. ie keep killing because its too difficult to get you to stop. Its an acknowledgement that terror works and its a reward for terror to force peace on Israel simply because you can negotiate with Israel but not the Palestinians. I have also argued that I don't think the Palestinians will ever cease their ways until they get the massive blow they deserve. Wars can sometimes be stopped by an overwhelming application of force leaving the opponent breatless in its intensity. Sorry, but being 'nice' has never worked. Granting concessions has never worked. However, I have one ray of sunshine on the horizon. The Palestinians have failed every process of peace and I expect them to fail to qualify even if the bar is on the ground. Perhaps the US administration realises this and so extracting the concessions out of Israel is just for our consumption so the USA can play "Good Cop". I happen to believe that the USA can never abandon Israel and that it will never actually sell Israel to the terrorists. Strong currents can run deep and I don't think we can see all that is being worked-out. Consider this. If the Palestinians have a state then they also become members of the UN and sanctionable for their terrorism that will surely never go away as long as a Jew lives in the Middle East.

Manuel

January 14th, 2008 2:52pm

As always, beware politicans coming to the end of their term. They all crave a "legacy" to fulfil their "place in history" .... and ego. George Bush has now shown himself to be no more than a man of straw in his search for a "peace" in the Middle East - more likely a piece, a very large piece, of Israel to satisfy the lust for legacy.

wonderer

January 14th, 2008 4:26pm

Stuart, while I agree with your sentiment, how could a Palestinian state, even if a member of the UN, be sanctionable without the say-so of the Security Council, where a number of the Permanent Members, especially Russia and China are likely to use the veto?

Adam L

January 14th, 2008 4:34pm

This is completly detached from reality. I wonder when Ms Philips last visited the region?

Mladen Andrijasevic

January 14th, 2008 4:51pm

How come this proclivity to failure is not addressed by the checks and balances of the American political system? How can failure of this magnitude, which is obviously not in the US national interest, go unchecked for so long? Should not US Congress enact some kind of legislation whereby those who repeatedly flop in their grand peace schemes be held accountable for their miserable performance? Should not the policy-makers of unrealistic peace plans be discouraged to repeat the same error over and over? Oslo I, Oslo II, Taba, Wye, Tenet, Mitchell, Zinni, Sharm El-Sheikh, Roadmap. Annapolis. There ought to be a way to break this Sysiphean cycle either through fines or sentences which would include ordering the authors of future peace plans to read the basic texts which the protagonists of the conflict constantly invoke, but which are never considered relevant by the policy makers.

Stuart

January 14th, 2008 4:52pm

Wonderer, when you said " how could a Palestinian state, even if a member of the UN, be sanctionable without the say-so of the Security Council, where a number of the Permanent Members, especially Russia and China are likely to use the veto?" - you found the once piece of fantasy in my comments. We also need to remember the grip of the OIC over the UN and that getting the UN to condemn The Lebanon for its recent ceasefire breach was nearly scuppered by Libya who sat in the chair that week. Perhaps someone could tell us of any single act by the Palestinians that is a positive move towards peace.

Stuart

January 14th, 2008 4:56pm

"This is completly detached from reality. I wonder when Ms Philips last visited the region?" Well since Bush only went last week your comment has "nasty" written all over it. Following Melanie's blogs I believe the last visit by her to Israel was within the last six weeks. Of course, we all have to go regularly to get our orders and collect our money! LOL! BTW I've never been.

Frank Pulley

January 14th, 2008 5:17pm

Adam L Judging by Melanie's excellent analyses of the Near East over the years (read her archives and wise up!)I suspect that she has visited the area much more frequently and more recently than yourself, if you think what she is writing is ill-informed. I suggest that if you wish to make a point by a presumptive question, you prat, that you find the answer before you ask it. Hereford: I wouldn't worry too much about the trolls that plague Melanie's blog from time to time. They are inevitably Guardianistas who resent the fact that she once wrote for that egregious rag and is therefore, in their jaundiced eyes, an apostate. Moreover they never succeed in besting her logic, not only because they are devoid it themselves, but because they don't even try. Best dealt with by ignoring them.

Achad Ha'amoratzim

January 14th, 2008 5:25pm

Stuart, while I agree with much of what you said, this is not a case of "and its a reward for terror to force peace on Israel." Israel offered land for peace in 1967, The Arabs rejected that offer. Ten years later, Israel gave Egypt land for empty promises. When that did not lead to peace, they offered Arafat land for recognition in 2000. That offer was rejected and was met with increased violence. Israel recently pulled out of Gaza thinking were giving land for nothing. Instead, they got worse than nothing -- they got an exponential increase in terrorist attacks, and now they are being offered more of the same. Adam, I don't know when Melanie was last in the region, but I was there in October and am in touch with those who live there. It is not Melanie who is divorced from reality, it is you, President Bush, PM Olmert, and anyone else who thinks that you can get peace by giving land and sovereignty to terrorist who refuse to stop their terrorism, continue to call for your destruction, object to your very existence, and who have neither the power, the will nor the desire to stop terror attacks by other armed gropus within the territory that they demand sovereignty over.

Corin

January 15th, 2008 12:31am

Wonderkid, FYI, Bush is a Methodist and Blair is now a Roman Catholic. Neither denomination subscribes to the doctrine you so blithely misrepresent. (The dangers of trying to do theology from Google rather than the Bible). Modern Methodism and Ancient Roman Catholicism both subscribe to Replacement Theology. In essence, The Church has replaced Israel in God's favour and Israel is not a fulfilment of prophecy. Consequently, they can both sacrifice Israel as it doesn't matter to their theology. Logically, the Muslim argument that Islam has replaced the Church cannot be refuted by these people. Hence, the dhimmi-cringe. People who believe that Jesus will come for the Church (the Rapture)tend to believe that Israel is a separate entity with its own destiny and promises. It will eventually recognise the True Messiah (which is what the debate is all about) and Jew and Gentile will be reconciled. At the moment, Jews feel threatened by this as they do not believe that Jesus is The Messiah. However, this view believes that the current situation is a fulfilment of prophecy. If Bush and Blair believed this, they would do their best to defend the integrity of Israel and Jerusalem. It's because Blair and Bush are NOT fundamentalists that they are prepared to sell Israel down the river.

wonderer

January 15th, 2008 9:19pm

It's not that clear-cut, Corin. Many in the C of E support Replacement Theology, sadly, as mentioned by Melanie in a Spectator article a year or so ago. Not all Catholics do. Clifford Longley on Thought for the Day yesterday is a case in point: http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thought/documents/t20080114.shtml

B MacLeod

January 16th, 2008 9:04pm

Wow, so many Zionist columnists to keep up with! Hey Mel, when are the Zionists going to recognize the Palestinian Arabs? For years the Zionists said that there were no such people as Palestinians; 'We made the desert bloom' and other non-sense. But now that there are over 4 million 'non-existant' Palestinian Arabs (Christian and Muslim)the Zionists charge that THEY won't recognize the Zionist state. Why should they, eh Mel?

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Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by Encounter and Gibson Square.

For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here

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