Rupert Murdoch [2010] & Vladimir Jabotinski [1937]

For Mr. Murdoch, what this underlines is the importance of good relations between Israel and America. “Some believe that if America wants to gain credibility in the Muslim world and advance the cause of peace, Washington needs to put some distance between itself and Israel,” he said. “My view is the opposite. Far from making peace more possible, we are making hostilities more certain. Far from making things better for the Palestinian people, sour relations between the United States and Israel guarantees that ordinary Palestinians will continue to suffer. The peace we all want will come when Israel feels secure — not when Washington feels distant.”

The most significant part of Mr. Murdoch’s speech, by our lights, came toward the end, when the man who owns the biggest newspaper in Britain reached down deep and spoke of the testimony presented to a British commission back in 1937 by the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who urged Britain to open up what Mr. Murdoch called “an escape route for Jews fleeing Europe.” He quoted Jabotinsky, who went on to write a famous book called The Jewish War Front and emerged as one of the Founding Fathers of Israel, as saying that only a Jewish homeland could protect European Jews from the coming calamity. Then, calling Jabotinsky’s words “prophetic,” he quoted one his most famous formulations: “It is not the anti-Semitism of men. It is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer.”