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Not just wrong, but dull

Tuesday, 5th June 2007

Perhaps I should start a strand: phrases you'll never hear. I have in mind such things as

Gordon will be out of contact - he's spending next weekend at Glastonbury

Have you read Sir Cliff's latest article on game theory?

Steve McClaren: competent

(They remind me of a New Statesman competition from twenty years ago or so, for the most depressing thing to hear on arriving at a party. The winner was: "Sir Geoffrey's on fine form tonight". His reputation was, I think, undeserved; I sat next to Lord Howe at a lunch last year - the first time I had ever met him - and a more delightful man you could not meet.)

Here's another one you'll never hear: Martin Woollacott's column is a must read. The Guardian's foreign columnist is usually not just wrong but wrong and deadly dull. He has a cracker of its type today: it takes a special talent to write a dull piece about the Middle East, especially when it's totally off beam:

The completeness of Israeli victory in 1967 shackled the peoples of the Middle East to a ball and chain which has ever since crippled their development. The shackle was Israeli military dominance, the chain was the unwavering alliance between Israel and America, the ball was the ever more oppressive and onerous occupation of Palestinian lands.

I wouldn't bother reading the rest. Life's too short. Do, however, read Brett Stephens in th WSJ, who takes on directly the Woollacott view that 1967 was a disaster:

The Six Day War is supposed to be the great pivot on which the modern history of the Middle East hinges, the moment the Palestinian question came into focus and Israel went from being the David to the Goliath of the conflict. It's a reading of history that has the convenience of offering a political prescription: Rewind to the status quo ante June 5, arrange a peace deal, and the problems that have arisen since more or less go away. Or so the thinking goes.

Yet the striking fact is that all of Israel's peace agreements -- with Egypt in 1979, with the Palestinians in 1993, with Jordan and Morocco in 1994 -- were achieved in the wake of the war. The Jewish state had gained territory; the Arab states wanted it back. Whatever else might be said for the land-for-peace formula, it's odd that the people who are its strongest advocates are usually the same ones who bemoan the apparent completeness of Israel's victory in 1967.

...[W]hen the sun rose on June 5, 1967, Israel was a poor, desperately vulnerable country, which threw the dice on its own survival in the most audacious military strike of the 20th century. It is infinitely richer and more powerful today, sure in its alliance with the U.S. and capable of making concessions inconceivable 40 years ago. If these are the fruits of Israel's "Pyrrhic Victory," it needs more such of them.