The litmus issue

Wednesday, 19th December 2007

Those (and there are many) who don’t know the history of the Jewish people and who have fallen for the propaganda lies that Israel was only created as a result of the Holocaust or that Jewish immigration to Palestine started in the 1880s would do well to read this concise historical account by Dore Gold and Jeff Helmreich. The key point it makes is that Israel was not a new creation but the restoration of the Jews’ ancient national home, to which the international community recognised in the early years of the last century that they and they alone had an overwhelming legal and moral claim.

This was specifically on account of the fact that they had never renounced the land -- which had only ever been the nation state of the Jews alone -- but had been driven out; and that throughout the period of their exile they had repeatedly returned and established majorities in different parts of the land including Jerusalem. It should also be borne in mind that the present state of Israel is merely a small fraction of the original Jewish nation state; most of it was given away by the British to the Arabs in 1921 as a piece of regional realpolitik, and the remainder was to be divided between Jews and Arabs – the original two state proposal which the Arabs rejected in order to drive the Jews out of their rightful and internationally recognised home, the project which continues to this day.

The Jewish claim to the land of Israel was based on justice, international agreement and law. As a result, it is the only nation state whose legitimacy was agreed by the League of Nations and its successor, the UN. The reason I bang on about this so much is because the Big Lie of Israel’s alleged illegitimacy and presumption lies at the heart of the wider war against the western world. It incites hatred and murderous hysteria in the Arab and Muslim world, and has turned many otherwise decent western liberals – who now openly say Israel should no longer exist -- into the intellectual accomplices to a second projected genocide of the Jews as well as making more likely their own eventual defeat as a civilisation.

As Dore Gold writes in his outstanding book, The Fight for Jerusalem, the jihadis see the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem as the essential prerequisite to their conquest of the world and the arrival of the end of days. Unless the west comes to understand this, and to understand the way in which this conflict has been so shockingly misrepresented for so long in the western mind and with what terrible consequences, it will itself be defeated.

The fate of Israel is intimately tied to the fate of the free world. Attitudes towards it are the litmus test of civilisation. It is, quite simply, the biggest moral issue of our times.