Melanie Phillips writes an awesome open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron, who claimed on Thursday to be a friend of Israel. The letter deserves to go viral (and to be translated into French for French President Nikolai Sarcozy, who has issued similar threats to Cameron's).
I wonder, therefore, if you make a habit of threatening your friends? For you also said that unless Israel ‘engages seriously in a meaningful peace process’ with the Palestinian Authority, the more likely it is that Britain will endorse the ‘State of Palestine’ for which the PA is expected to seek recognition at the UN in September.
This is not the behaviour of a friend so much as the kind of intimidation that is more reminiscent of a Mafia protection racket.
First of all, you have incomprehensibly decided to pressurise the victim in this conflict to make peace with her aggressor, even though the victim is the one party that constantly tries to make peace while the aggressor does not. It is the PA which has refused to negotiate with Israel, not the other way round, on the spurious grounds that Israeli expansion of Jewish homes beyond the ‘Green Line’ is a bar to negotiations.
I wonder whether you might explain to both Britain and the Jewish people why you do not insist that Mr Abbas ‘engages seriously in a meaningful peace process’ by unambiguously renouncing – in both English and Arabic – his repeated assertions that his people will never accept Israel as a Jewish state, the casus belli of the entire conflict?
I wonder also if you might explain to both Britain and the Jewish people why you implicitly endorse the racist ethnic cleansing inherent in the putative ‘State of Palestine’ which the PA says it will declare – a state in which Mr Abbas has repeatedly declared that not one Jew will be allowed to live -- but which you have now threatened to support? I’m sure the British people in particular would be interested to know when you decided that racism and ethnic cleansing were part of your modernising programme for the Conservative Party.
Next, I wonder if you might clarify for us exactly why the British government has welcomed the alliance entered into between Hamas and Mr Abbas’s Fatah, and why you believe that this will advance the cause of peace. As you know, your government still regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation. More than that, Hamas is explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews, a platform from which is has explicitly stated this week that it will not resile. And as you know, following the killing of Osama bin Laden the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, condemned the ‘assassination of a Muslim holy warrior’ -- while for their part the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the terrorist department of the Fatah organisation that you do not appear to think is an obstacle to peace, called bin Laden’s death ‘a catastrophe’ and vowed to step up the jihad to establish the dominance of Islam in the world.
I’m sure we are all agog to learn why you, a Conservative Prime Minister and the supposed ally of America in the defence of the free world, have chosen not only to applaud and promote a coalition which includes genocidal fanatics who are in bed with both al Qaeda and Iran, but why you are also threatening their victim, Israel, that Britain will endorse a state run by this genocidal coalition unless Israel itself enters into negotiations with it. To carry on with the Mafia analogy, this is akin to threatening someone that if they do not put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger you will set the Mob on them to achieve the same result.
...
To arrive at a solution, it is imperative first of all correctly to identify the problem. The problem in the Middle East is not the absence of a state of Palestine. Were that the case, the problem would have been resolved when such a state was first mooted long before World War Two. The problem is instead that the Arabs wish to destroy the State of Israel. The solution, therefore, is to stop them from continuing to try to do so. And to achieve that, it is essential that the west stop rewarding them for their attempts.
For the single most important reason for the never-ending nature of the Middle East impasse is that, uniquely, for more than nine decades the west has rewarded the Arab aggressors and punished their Jewish victims. And from the start, the western leader of this infernal process, I’m afraid to say, was Britain.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: David Cameron, Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, Melanie Phillips, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome, unilateral declaration of statehood
posted by Carl in Jerusalem
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