Candid friend? No -- morally bankrupt
Yesterday I wrote here that Gordon Brown’s brain didn’t seem to be in the same place as his heart over the role of economics in bringing peace to the Middle East. Today, after his speech to the Knesset, I’m afraid that his heart turns out to be a most warped and distorted organ.
For after a passionate panegyric about the miracle of Israel and its achievements, his own upbringing in a staunchly Israel-supporting household, the shadow of the Holocaust, his condemnation of antisemitism, his opposition to the academic boycott of Israel, his abhorrence of Iran’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his repeated declarations that Britain is Israel’s ‘true’ friend, he then lurched into pure Arab propaganda and told Israel it had to accept Palestinian demands if there was to be peace. Yup, that’s the Palestinians who say they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state, who teach their children from the cradle to hate and to murder Jews, who have tried to wipe the Jewish presence from the land of Israel for almost a century, who never cease trying to murder Israelis, whose maps, educational materials and insignia depict a state of Palestine that erases Israel altogether -- and that’s before we even start talking about Hamas. But according to Britain’s Prime Minister, who says that
for the whole of my life, I have counted myself a friend of Israel
it is Israel, rather than its Palestinian attackers, which is to be expected to make the concessions which will deliver peace. As my Mail colleague Ben Brogan who is on the PM’s tour reports on his blog about the Knesset speech:
But the longer he went on about his passion for Israel, the more you waited for the other shoe to drop. And it did when he offered the ‘honest analysis’ of a ‘constant friend’. By the time he had finished Israeli diplomats had their eyebrows up. One I spoke to seemed genuinely puzzled and disappointed. At the heart of the complaint was what many in Israel will say is Mr Brown's easy acceptance of key Palestinian positions: that Jerusalem must be shared, that settlements are wrong, and that the ‘right to return’ is acceptable.
Brown, the lifelong ‘friend’ of Israel, has thus told Israel that it must accept the agenda of its mortal enemies: an agenda designed to destroy it. As far as I can see, he has uttered not one word of reprimand to the Palestinians for their unending war of annihilation against Israel. He did not tell them that they have no right to expect anything at all unless they renounce their goal of destroying the Jewish state. He did not tell them that their ‘historic’ claim to any part of the land is based on a historic and legal lie, and that Israel is fully justified under international law to hold onto it against their unending aggression. He did not tell them that their misery is entirely of their own making and would end the instant they stopped trying to destroy Israel. He did not tell them any of these factual and moral truths. Instead, he parroted to the beleaguered Israelis in their own Parliament the disgusting moral inversion of Arab propaganda which turns Israel into the barrier to peace and the Palestinians into the seekers of justice.
He thus told Israel it must return to the ‘1967 borders’ – which are in fact the 1948 cease-fire lines and referred to in Israel as the ‘Auschwitz borders’ because they are totally indefensible. He told it that it must freeze and withdraw from settlements – thus endorsing the Arab agenda of ethnic cleansing which requires not one Jew to be living in a future state of Palestine. He told it that Jerusalem must be the capital of both Israel and Palestine – despite the fact that the Arab claim to Jerusalem is entirely one of conquest; despite the fact that Israeli Jerusalem would be under bombardment from enemies living just a few streets away; and despite the fact that it would mean a return to the desecration of Jewish and Christian holy sites in east Jerusalem that was such a dreadful feature of its previous occupation by Jordanian Arabs.
And although the published text of his speech does not use the explosive term ‘right of return’ which appears in Ben Brogan’s blog and which would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, he accepts that the Palestinian ‘refugees’ need a ‘just settlement’ – regardless of the fact that the descendants of no other displaced people are judged by the world to have ‘rights’ as refugees, including the 800,000 Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab lands after 1948; regardless of the fact that most of the Palestinian Arabs’ ancestors only
arrived in Palestine on the back of the Jewish immigration in the early 20th century; and regardless of the fact that in no other conflict in the history of this planet have those who have tried to wipe out a country been deemed worthy of reward and that the country that is the victim of their violent aggression been expected to accommodate them – even while it is still fending off their attacks.
This moral deformity is not just confined to Arab propaganda but is the signature belief of the left. Since the left believes that anyone who disagrees with it is ‘the right’, it dismisses the cause of truth, justice and morality in the Middle East as merely the thinking of ‘the right’ and thus not even worthy of consideration. That was indeed, after the unease displayed in the Knesset at Brown’s speech, the response by Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert -- a man who has done more to weaken Israel, both morally and strategically, and embolden and strengthen its enemies than any politician since the restoration of the State of Israel in 1948. It is also – tragically -- the view of many prominent Jews on the left in Britain and America. It is rooted in the left’s disdain for – or sheer incomprehension of – moral judgments, and their replacement by moral relativism and inversion camouflaged by self-righteous sentimentality. It is a view which actively strengthens the enemies of civilisation and makes continued violence and war absolutely inevitable. With his Knesset speech, Gordon Brown has shown himself to be just another creature of the morally bankrupted left, and what remained of his reputation as the rock of Caledonian granite now lies crumbled in the desert dust.