A Real Expert Speaks about Syria

Experts seem to have vanished from British foreign policy. They gave unwanted advice before the Iraq war (they were against it) and so were sidelined in favour of political commissars, spin doctors and politicised ‘intelligence services’, whose huge unquestioned budgets are a reward for their loyalty to the government of the day and their willingness to sustain its claims and feed its fantasies.  This is easy for them since they don’t ever have to give public accounts of what they allegedly know, and can fend off all inquiries by claiming to have prevented all kinds of horrible attacks which would otherwise have taken place, claims that can never be tested. My own instinct is to mistrust them because they are both self-serving and secretive.

 

On Saturday, in a brief flash of knowledge and understanding, the BBC allowed an actual expert on Syria on to a major programme . I am not sure they bargained for what they got, a few brief minutes on concreted, well-informed scorn for the policy the BBC has itself been actively promoting through the nature of its coverage since the Syrian crisis began, thoughtless, emotive, utopian and one-sided from the start. Some of you may recall my appalled response to this coverage at the time, which seemed to me to be playing with fire. I didn’t know the half of it.  

 

This expert is Peter Ford, once Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to Syria ( a job not handed out to just anybody), genuinely knowledgeable about that country and the Middle East, and so utterly opposed to the British government’s current ridiculous policy.

 

 

He argued that the choice is quite simple, between Assad or the deluge. He said Russia’s policy was quite reasonable, wondered out loud  (as I do)  why the Labour Party does not make more of this very considerable British foreign policy failure . He described the Western powers as having ‘impaled themselves’  on their policy of calling for the downfall of President Assad.  He argued ( and this I had not heard before) that Western sanctions on Syria, by creating more misery there, were also causing people to flee destitution and become refugees.

 

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Peter Ford’s interview can be found in full  1 hours 35 minutes into Saturday’s Radio 4 Today programme, here:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06gtbj1

 

Justin Webb does actually ask him a question beginning ‘Are you seriously expecting…?’ Questions couched in this form , especially directed by generalists against experienced veteran diplomats who know more about the subject than the questioner, really are a breach of impartiality.

 

By the way, the phrase ‘barrel bomb’, a phrase always  enunciated in tones of horror, as if there is something intrinsically macabre about barrels, creeps into this exchange, as it crept into a recent statement on the subject by President Obama. Readers here will know that I am not an enthusiast for dropping explosives or incendiaries on populated areas.  Indeed, I am loathed and despised by many for my condemnation of the deliberate bombing of German civilians in their homes by this country’s political and military leaders in World War Two (not just Dresden , the whole lot).

 

So I am not in any way a defender of ‘barrel bombs’, any more than I am a defender of the NATO bombing of Belgrade, in which civilians inevitably died, or the Anglo-French bombing of Libya, in which civilians inevitably died, or of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which civilians inevitably died. If you don’t like atrocities, don’t start wars. It’s a simple rule, and one I hope to make popular in time.

 

But, while all such bombs are axiomatically horrible,  I cannot see what is so *exceptionally* horrible about ‘barrel bombs’ , which are simply crude improvised unguided bombs. In what way are they more barbaric than supposedly guided bombs, whose alleged accuracy is greatly over-rated. Is it nicer to die or be maimed by more sophisticated, more accurate bombing? To ask the question is to demonstrate the absurdity of such distinctions. High explosive, splinters, incendiary chemicals tear and burn the human body just as terribly whether they are 'sophisticated' or crude. Accuracy in aerial bombing is a pernicious self-serving myth. Anyone who catches himself using the mendacious term 'surgical strike' should afterwards be ashamed. 

By the way, I also note the absence of outrage over the current Saudi air attacks on Yemen. In what way are these attacks morally superior to Assad’s barrel bombing of rebel areas in Syria?

 

If you or I were being bombed from the air in our homes how much would we care about the shape of the bomb? Also, if we are so exercised about barrel bombs, when did you last hear through any British or US medium that ‘our’ ‘democratic’ Iraqi President, Nouri al Maliki,  had used these weapons in populated areas against Sunni militants in Fallujah in 2014?

 

My own guess is that this stuff about barrel bombs is a result of the failure to establish that Assad had used chemical weapons, and his subsequent decision to dismantle and abandon his chemical munitions.  Supporters of continuing efforts to overthrow Assad at all costs speak and write as if the case had been proved, but in fact it never was, and alternative theories have been put forward (also unproven) by the American journalist Seymour Hersh. So I advise care, and intelligent curiosity,  when you hear or read the phrase.

 

On Knowing What I am Talking About - my new e-book explains why I do.

My new e-book, ‘Short Breaks in Mordor’, for which I could not find a three-dimensional publisher,  now has 47 customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk ( 43 of them awarding it five stars). On Amazon.co.uk it has 11 reviews. ten of them 5-star.

 

If this is enough information for you , you should know that you do not need a Kindle or other e-reader to read this book. It can be downloaded in seconds on to any computer.

 

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But if you’d like some examples of what you will find in this book, here are a few below:

 

 

 

 

DATELINE BAGHDAD (May 2003):

 

‘The Anglo-American attack on Iraq was supposed to be a liberation, and perhaps one day it will turn out to be one. But for most people here it has meant a return to Year Zero. Everything that made Iraq a country has gone. The currency swoops up and down in value and satchels full of dinars are needed to pay for anything important.

 

There is no law to speak of. The schools do not know what to teach or who should teach it. The frontiers are controlled by foreigners, if they are controlled at all. All the national TV channels have disappeared. The telephones are all dead.

 

Most medicines are unobtainable.

 

And in the world's second greatest oil producer, mile-long queues mark every petrol station - and the fuel on offer is a filthy, rancid-smelling muck which wrecks engines and fills the air with noxious clouds.

 

There is no gas for cooking, the tap water is tainted with sewage. Many people have not been paid for weeks and are not even sure that their jobs or businesses still exist or will ever reappear. Imagine what it must be like to be the parent of small children in such surroundings. Many Iraqis are haggard with worry and lack of sleep.

 

And yet in their guarded compounds, where the power always works and air conditioning cools the 95-degree heat, the American rulers of the city continue to show the clueless complacency that has marked their occupation since it began. The big men ride about in armoured convoys, machine-gunners fore and aft glaring suspiciously about them, too scared of the people they have liberated to get out, walk and see for themselves.

 

The real reason for the mess is that Washington knew nothing about Iraq - and cared even less - before it attacked.’…

 

…If the Americans had studied Britain's long-ago experience in Baghdad, they might have learned that democracy cannot simply be unpacked from crates and set up in a place like this. They might have learned that if you take over someone's country you have to use the old institutions and elites, even if you do not like them.'

 

 

DATELINE GAZA (October 2010):

 

‘Gaza was bombed on the day I arrived in retaliation for a series of rocket strikes on Israel, made by Arab militants. Those militants knew this would happen, but they launched their rockets anyway. Many Gazans hate them for this.

 

One, whom I shall call Ibrahim, told me how he had begged these maniacs to leave his neighbourhood during Israel's devastating military attack nearly two years ago. His wife was close to giving birth. He knew the Israelis would quickly seek out the launcher, and that these men would bring death down on his home. But the militants sneered at his pleading, so he shoved his wife into his car and fled. Moments after he passed the first major crossroads, a huge Israeli bomb burst on the spot where his car had been.

 

The diabolical power of modern munitions is still visible, in the ruins of what was once a government building. It looks as if a giant has chewed and smashed it, and then come back and stamped on it.

 

If you can imagine trying to protect a pregnant woman from such forces, then you can begin to understand how complex it is living here, where those who claim to defend you bring death to your door.

 

For the Islamist rocket-firers are also the government here, supported by Iran and others who care more for an abstract cause than they do for real people. They claim that their permanent war with Israel is for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs. But is it?

 

Human beings will always strive for some sort of normal life. They do this even when bombs are falling and demagogues raging.

 

Even when, as in Gaza, there is no way out and morality patrols sweep through restaurants in search of illicit beer and women smoking in public or otherwise affronting the 14th Century values of Hamas.

 

So I won't give the name of the rather pleasant establishment where young women, Islamic butterflies mocking the fanatics' strict dress code with bright make-up and colourful silken hijabs, chattered as they inhaled apple-scented smoke from their water-pipes. Their menfolk, nearby, watched football on huge, flat-screen televisions. Nor will I say where I saw the Gazan young gathering for beach barbecues beneath palm-leaf umbrellas.

 

Of course this way of life isn't typical. But it exists, and it shows the 'prison camp' designation is a brain-dead over-simplification. If it is wrong for the rich to live next door to the desperate - and we often assume this when we criticise Israel - then what about Gaza's wealthy, and its Hamas rulers? They tolerate this gap, so they are presumably as blameworthy as the Israelis whose comfortable homes overlook chasms of poverty.

 

Then there is the use of the word 'siege'. Can anyone think of a siege in human history, from Syracuse to Leningrad, where the shops of the besieged city have been full of Snickers bars and Chinese motorbikes, and where European Union and other foreign aid projects pour streams of cash (often yours) into the pockets of thousands?’

 

DATELINE MOSCOW (February 2012):

 

This is where, 22 years ago, I came to live in a dark and secretive building where my neighbours were KGB men and the aristocrats of the old Kremlin elite. Here, in this mysterious and often dangerous place, I saw what lies just beneath our frail and fleeting civilisation - bones, blood, death, injustice, despair, horror, loss, corruption and fear. I grasped for the first time how wonderfully safe and lucky I had been all my life in the unique miracle of freedom and law that is - or was - England.

 

I learned to respect, above all, those who managed to retain some sort of integrity amid the knee-deep filth of communist Moscow. I also learned not to be too unkind to those who made compromises with it. I was there as a privileged person. Would I have been able to stay clean if I had lived as they did? Would you? I very much doubt it.

 

I saw the last hammers and sickles pulled down, and the braziers full of smouldering Communist Party membership cards the day the all-powerful Party died.

 

I saw the tanks trundle along my street as they tried to restore communism, and I saw them, and their cause, depart for ever. I witnessed oppressed peoples throw off Soviet rule. In the course of that struggle, I saw for the first time what a human head looks like after a bullet has passed through it, and also what a human face looks like when it is telling direct lies about murder.

 

When I finally left, I was sure that a horrible fog of lies and perversion had been scoured from the surface of the earth when communism ended. I am confident that it will not come back. From now on, it is just Russia - heartbroken, ravaged, afraid, desperate and cruel, but no longer a menace to us. Nor is Putin's frosty rule comparable to the gangster chaos of Boris Yeltsin - a drunken, debauched disaster that reduced millions of Russians to selling their personal possessions on the street to stay alive.

 

It is not just me saying this. The distinguished Russian film director Stanislav Govorukhin - whose devastating documentary We Can't Go On Living Like This helped end the communist era - is now working for Putin. He recalls that the Yeltsin era was 'a thieving outrage, open plunder. Billions were stolen, factories and whole industry sectors. They destroyed and stole, they ground Russia into dust'.

 

But, now, he says, 'we have returned to "normal", "civilised" corruption'.

 

This is, on the face of it, an astonishing thing to say. But most Russians readily understand it. Their country, almost always subject to absolute power, has been corrupt from its beginning. One of the greatest of pre-revolutionary Russian historians, Nikolai Karamzin, asked to sum up the character and story of his country and people, replied with just one word 'Voruyut' - 'They steal'.

 

But in the communist era, the state and the Party stole their private lives, their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers, and dragged them to death camps. And in the Yeltsin era, when Western 'experts' stalked the land, the nation's rulers stole the whole country.

 

I am not arguing in favour of this state of affairs, just pointing out that if the only alternative is even worse, you might see its advantages.

 

But I can see no reason at all why Britain should seek to undermine Russia's government.

 

DATELINE SHANGHAI:

 

‘They are building the future capital of the world here at the mouth of the Yangtze River, a city so vast, astonishing and potent that it ought to be a warning to the soft, declining West that the 21st Century may well see the centre of global power shift from the free, English-speaking world to the tyrannical Orient.

Those who have not seen this place simply cannot grasp the scale and nerve of the endeavour. Each day a new tower surges towards the sky in a project so gigantic it makes the Pharaohs look cautious. Forget the buried era of boilersuits and red books, tractor factories, grey pitted concrete cubes and windswept parade grounds. Chinese Communism is now just a vast machine of power, privilege and money, with the children of the mighty building great fortunes for themselves and their friends, untouchable and beyond criticism. 'To get rich is glorious' has replaced 'The East is Red' as the governing slogan of the times.

And it has been taken very seriously. The contrast between wealth and poverty here is like a Victorian morality tale. Except that in a China which has never known Christianity or the sentimentality of Charles Dickens, nobody draws any morals from it.

Filthy beggars grovel on the pavements near to where Porsches and Rolls-Royces sit in shiny showrooms. Luxury of every kind is on shameless display in the city's heart, while destitute migrant workers labour for tiny wages in construction gangs, living in spartan dormitories and sending their money home to mudbrick villages in the distant interior. While private living standards soar, the rivers are dark with muck and the smoggy, hazy air stinks of sulphur.

China is an entire alternative planet of 1.3 billion people with a shared culture and a more or less common language, in which the Third World and the First World are within a passport-free train ride of each other. And in Shanghai, only a bus ride often separates the two.

Travellers arriving at the colossal new international airport can head towards the city on a futuristic magnetic levitation train capable of more than 200mph, so fast they can barely make out the thousands struggling along the roads on decrepit bicycles.

Smart young people pour into the city's four huge B&Q warehouses to equip their fashionable new high-rise apartments to the highest standards. Superb restaurants charge London prices to smoothly dressed businessmen and their polished women amid glossy surroundings. Volkswagen and Buick cars, made in Shanghai factories, provide the growing middle class with a symbol of independence and status.

Yet overlooked by the new city of towers, respectable, decent people are still living in alleyways, known as longtangs, carting chamberpots to communal sluices, hanging washing from their windows, confined to one room where they must sleep on a shelf and sharing dismal kitchens with nine or ten neighbours.

Young married couples are often forced to share the same bedroom as their parents, separated only by a curtain. These people are so poor that they sometimes fight with each other over who has been using too much expensive water, so that each family has its own metered tap. I saw one such place with a dozen taps projecting from a riot of plumbing over the grim tiled sink. At night the kitchen is almost unusable because it is full of bicycles which cannot safely be left outside.

You might think that such people would be glad to be rehoused. But often their homes are bulldozed by unscrupulous developers and they are simply driven away without compensation. They are unlikely to find flats in the new blocks which swiftly replace their demolished alleyways.

Their plight is barely noticed. China, which has just put a man in space and plans to follow America to the Moon, is using the same driven determination to build a great megalopolis which is plainly designed to rival New York and utterly overshadow Hong Kong - whose colonial past and lingering traces of Britishness make it distasteful to the fervent, unashamed patriots who now hold power in Peking.

The sheer size of it is almost impossible to take in - the official city limits cover 2,500 square miles containing more than 13 million people, not far short of the entire population of Australia and bigger than several European countries. The packed central core of 90 square miles somehow crams in nearly eight million humans, perhaps the highest population density in the world. That would be even bigger if ruthless pressure to keep families small did not lead to 300,000 abortions a year, twice the figure for the whole of the UK.

There is plenty of ruthlessness here. You can practically feel it. Ruthlessness has drawn in nearly 20,000 foreign companies glad to make use of the low pay and high skills available in this disciplined police state with its almost limitless supply of labour and its excellent education system. Ruthlessness has created Pudong, until recently a glum district of low-rent housing and rice paddies, now planned as Asia's Wall Street.

As yet it is an eerie, inhuman city within a city of extravagant, ornate towers obviously meant to copy and eventually surpass the skylines of Manhattan and Chicago. Two of them, the Oriental Pearl TV tower, with its globes and spire, and the Jin Mao Tower with its strange pagodalike spikes, top 1,400ft. The tallest skyscraper in the world will soon stand alongside them. At their feet sits a great stone engraved with the words of Deng Xiaoping: 'Waste no time. Do not waver until the development of Pudong is complete.' If you are surprised that a communist leader demanded the swift construction of a boastful zone dedicated to rampant greed, then it is time that you realised that the world's Marxists now believe that capitalism, not state socialism, will create the classless, global, multicultural world they have always dreamed of.

These arrogant towers stare down - and it cannot be an accident - on the ghostly grandeur of the Bund, the old Shanghai riverfront which was once the symbol of Western Imperial power in Asia. But its formerly majestic Edwardian and Twenties buildings, which long ago symbolised the fact that the West's foot was on China's neck, are now grimy, sad, dingy and pathetically small, preserved as a museum of a time which Chinese schoolchildren are still taught to remember with bitterness.

Here is the riverside park where, until 1928, a notice at the gates banned Chinese people from setting foot and casually added that dogs, too, were not admitted. Here are the old British and French concessions where Chinese law did not run and Westerners controlled their own special quarters of the city. And here is the place where a brief, savage and unequal artillery duel between a Japanese cruiser and a brave but tiny British gunboat in December 1941 signalled the doom of European colonial power in China.

You cannot help feeling that we in the West are being sent a message here. The whole project seems to say: 'You came here and taught us that if you are poor and weak, then the rich and strong can rule learning Chinese over you. Now it is our turn to be rich and strong.' For a moment, the image flickers through my mind of Chinese street signs in London and parts of our cities given over to Chinese law while we are kept outside.’

 

DATELINE GORLOVKA, EASTERN UKRAINE (September 2010)

 

'It is true that there are plenty of parts of Ukraine where people do feel and speak Ukrainian - mainly in the west around the city now called Lviv (though in the past 150 years it has also been the Austrian city of Lemberg, the Polish city of Lwow and the Soviet city of Lvov - in this part of the world you can move from country to country just by staying in the same place).

But travel east, as I did, to the old coal-mining region of the Don Basin, and you will find out why so many Ukrainian citizens did not support the 2004 Orange Revolution. I went to the decayed town of Gorlovka. Independence has done little for this place. Cut off from its Russian hinterland and its markets, it is expiring. All around are dead slag heaps and ruined mines and factories, and tragic landscapes of collapse under a ferocious sun.

Gorlovka’s coal mines and chemical works fed the USSR's industries. Now they are mostly dead and the town - twinned with Barnsley in the Eighties - is nearly as bereft of its traditional industries as its Yorkshire opposite number. Sad, empty playgrounds are melancholy evidence of a city condemned to die. There is still a statue of Lenin in the main square but on its flanks are scrawled graffiti - a thing I have never seen before in the former USSR. The image of Lenin was once revered, and later hated, but never trivialised by drawings of Bart Simpson.

The mayor, Ivan Sakharchuk, is proud of his treaty with Barnsley and also insists that there are no difficulties with being Ukrainian.

I am not so sure. Nobody uses the town's Ukrainian name of Horlivka. Many of the street signs are still in Russian. The names of shops are in Russian. The newspapers on sale are in Russian. In the rather smart Cafe Barnsley, the only beer on sale is Russian and the radio is tuned to a Russian station. I suspect the people are hoping for - and expecting - a Russian future.’

 

DATELINE HAVANA (July 2006)          

 

'Castro was to revolution what Mick Jagger was to rock, and his image (and Guevara's) had a lot to do with the strange student revolt that destroyed Charles de Gaulle's conservative France in 1968, and with the wave of cultural revolution that changed the morals and attitudes of the Western world and has now subsided into the weary swamps of political correctness.

Interestingly, the student revolutionaries who loved Castro and Guevara got Fidel wholly wrong. He loathed rock music as degenerate and only in recent years has he recognised it as an ally, permitting a John Lennon memorial park in Havana. They got a lot of other things about him wrong, too.

Castro matters so much to the fashionable liberal Left that they have tried to deny – to themselves – the true nature of his very nasty regime. A recent example of this was a March 2005 letter to The Guardian signed by, among others, Harold Pinter, Tariq Ali, Nadine Gordimer,Harry Belafonte and Danielle Mitterrand, which claimed that in Cuba 'there has not been a single case of disappearance, torture or extra-judicial execution since 1959, and where despite the economic blockade, there are levels of health, education and culture that are internationally recognised'.

This is almost total garbage and just shows what the Left will put up with when it likes someone. Castro personally reversed the verdict of an important trial when he disagreed with it. He used to round up homosexuals and put them in labour camps to 'make men of them'.

One of his old comrades, Huber Matos, confided after 20 years of brutality and starvation in Castro's jails that he was 'subjected to all kinds of horrors, including the puncturing of my genitals'.

Just three years ago, after a brief period of liberalisation, Castro threw 75 peaceful dissidents into dungeons.

Most are still there. Their wives demonstrate bravely every Sunday for their release and are attacked and abused by 'spontaneous' mobs of loyalist women.

Others who defy the leader face similar misery short of jail. They lose their jobs. Their houses are trashed by government supporters. One incredibly brave dissenter, Oswaldo Paya, remains at liberty (NOTE: Oswaldo Paya has since died in a mysterious car crash)  but he is constantly watched and the state has placed an insulting poster near his house which says: 'In a country under siege, all dissent is treason.' Imagine the response of Pinter and his friends if a Right wing Latin American dictator had done half these things. No wonder one of the Alsatian guard dogs that patrol Castro's villa near Havana is called Guardian.

Or so I am told. Like all tyrants, Castro conducts his real life behind thick screens. After a long absence he has twice appeared in public recently.

During a rambling speech in Cordoba, Argentina, he continually plucked at his collar as if in some sort of discomfort.

The cameras swung away. Back in Cuba a few days later, he jokingly promised not to stay in power until he was 100.

A recent rumour that he had died was spread, as always, by Cuban exiles who yearn for him to go so that they can come back.’

The Secret War in Ukraine

You may have thought that the furious little war between Russia and the EU had gone away, or that the area had disappeared into a timewarp or black hole, and ceased to exist. 

 

It hasn’t.

 

Here is some news, as it were, from nowhere.

 

As a defender of Russia’s reaction to undoubted EU aggression in Ukraine, I have always been careful not to fool myself. I do not pretend that ‘my’ side is blameless, or that its activities are saintly. I also do not pretend that Russia is not directly aiding the rebels with advice, equipment , intelligence and manpower, though I await any sort of independent, verifiable proof of claims (accepted as fact by many western journalists)  that large weapons are being brought across the border from Russia into Ukraine  A recent UN report ( poorly covered in western media) which can be found here

 

http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_Report_15July2014.pdf

 

denounces the secessionist pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine for kidnapping large numbers of hostages and torturing them, both disgraceful and indefensible actions. But it also criticises the Ukrainian armed forces for using heavy weapons in built-up areas  (I have read elsewhere, in newspaper accounts,  that they have used ‘Grad’ rockets, one of the most indiscriminate forms of artillery known to man).

 

I would not dream of mentioning the one evil without mentioning the  other, as I believe that atrocities are committed by both sides in war, and that this is one of the main reasons to avoid war where possible. This view lies behind my condemnation of the EU’s resort to lawlessness and force, which licensed lawlessness and force by Russia and turned a diplomatic conflict into an undeclared war of great severity, whose horrors have also been visited on the innocent and uninvolved passengers and crew of MH17, and on their devastated families.

 

But I cannot see why the estimated 800 deaths of Ukrainian civilians in the war-ravaged East( and the 2000 wounded) should be taken any less seriously than the deaths of those aboard MH17.

 

In fact, there’s a disturbing moral calculation to be made here. I have said of Israel’s attack on Gaza that the civilian deaths caused by shelling and bombing populated urban areas are so predictable and so inevitable that they cannot really be described as accidental, even if they are unintended. They occupy a middle zone between deliberate killing and accidental killing. By contrast, the incompetent use of surface to air missiles (though indefensible)  was actually not as likely to cause innocent death (though on this occasion it did) as the shelling or bombing of inhabited residential buildings. I am not defending any violent action here. I am just urging you to be careful, when being outraged, that you do not confine your outrage only to the death that are caused by those of whom you disapprove.

 

 

 

I do urge you to read the whole thing.

 

Here are some extracts:

‘The current intense fighting using heavy weaponry in and around population areas, has devastated towns and villages, demolishing residential buildings and killing an increasing number of their inhabitants.

 

More than 86,000 have fled their homes

 

‘After the ceasefire ended on 30 June, the [Ukrainian] Government mounted an intense offensive, recapturing territory including the main strategic base of the armed groups in the Donetsk region - the city of Slovyansk - and stating it had regained control of the Ukraine-Russian Federation border areas that had previously been under the control of the armed groups. But the price was high with at least 30 civilian deaths, many wounded, and a great deal of destruction to the recaptured villages, towns and cities. And the control was tenuous, as evidenced by the continuing attacks by armed groups that have killed and wounded soldiers and many civilians.’

 

‘…there has not been sufficient precaution taken to preventing death and injury to civilians’ (My emphasis)

 

Interestingly, the UN says 103 protestors and 20 police officers died during the ‘Maidan’ protest which eventually overthrew the lawfully elected president last winter. I really cannot see how 20 police officers could have died if the protest had been entirely peaceful, and the demonstrators unarmed.

 

In a fascinating aside, the UN report notes : ‘It is believed that some suspects could be involved in the security operations in the east, hence the unwillingness to carry out meaningful investigations at a sensitive time’.

 

This draws attention to the widespread belief, little–examined in the Western Press, that militant Ukrainian nationalists from Western Ukraine, prominent in the Kiev putsch, have now been armed and formed into units alongside the official Ukrainian armed forces, and are fighting directly against militant Russian nationalists from the East.  I find it hard to believe that such individuals could have been sufficiently trained in such a short time, to be considered as disciplined troops. And I wonder who really commands them.

 

A search for the word ‘mongoloid’ in the UN document might also be instructive for any who think that the Ukrainian February revolution is made up entirely of Guardian-reading multiculturalists.  

 

Some of you might also be interested in this demonstration of the new Euro-Ukraine’s commitment to political pluralism, filled as it is with paradoxes for veterans of the Cold War. The Ukrainian Justice Ministry is said to have been trying to ban the country’s Communist Party.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ukrainian-government-moves-ban-communist-party-24690597

 

I have so far been unable to find out how the case went. Perhaps it is still being heard. Some of you may remember the unpleasant scenes in the Ukrainian Parliament in April when the Communist leader, Petr Symonenko, was physically seized while speaking by two deputies from the ever-charming ‘Svoboda’ party. They objected to his opinions.  

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/08/us-ukraine-crisis-parliament-idUSBREA370K520140408

 

 

 

Finally, I’d like to share with you the following two completely fascinating links, which I found by serendipity.

 

I have myself printed out both documents and spent some time reading and re-reading them.  They contain some very interesting claims. I cannot vouch for their truth or accuracy, though they use many sources and don’t have the strained urgency of conspiracy literature; in fact they are written in measured, sceptical and sometimes humorous tones. The author, Steve Weissman, is an interesting veteran of America’s sixties New Left about whom I’d like to know more.    

 

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22758-meet-the-americans-who-put-together-the-coup-in-kiev

 

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22940-focus-part-ii-meet-the-americans-who-put-together-the-coup-in-kiev

 

If what he says is so, then surely it is time for those who rightly draw attention to Russian involvement in the eastern separatists, to draw attention to US involvement with the Euromaidan. They might also wonder fi that involvement has since ceased, or intensified.  I offer them purely as a stimulus to discussion, and would welcome especially any factual contributions which throw light on their accuracy or otherwise. 

The Daft Non-Logic of the Supporters of Bombing and Shelling Gaza

Gaza continues to be the most pressing and violent issue on the planet. It has two interesting competitors for this position, in Tripoli and the area of Eastern Ukraine around Donyetsk, but most journalists simply dare not report from these places, even if they could get in, so we hear less.

 

And for the moment I feel I need to rebut or reply to readers’ opinions on the Gaza issue. This is frustrating, because so many of those comments are unresponsive and useless for debating purposes. Telling me I’m wrong in some general, unspecified way is useless.

 

Telling me that I know nothing without saying what precisely it is that I don’t know, since none of us is omniscient, and lack of knowledge is only important when it can be clearly shown and is relevant to the issue, is useless.

 

Telling me that other people with whom I disagree on other issues, agree with me about this, does not in any way shake my position. I do not care. If what I say is true and right, it does not matter if the same position is held by people with whom I utterly disagree. It will still be true and right. If what I say is false and wrong, it does not matter if I have the support of people I like and generally agree with. It will still be false and wrong. 

 

Telling me there are tunnels from Gaza into Israel has nothing to do with it. This is surely no surprise. There have been scores of tunnels into Egypt from Gaza for years (I’ve seen them and written about them). They are not a secret. Hizbollah used tunnels in its northern border war against Israel. So Israel’s Army and security service (Shin Bet) would have had to be hopelessly incompetent not have been watching for such tunnels between Gaza and Israel for years. (Why, such a tunnel was shown in the BBC thriller series 'The Honourable Woman' last Thursday, though I have to say I suspected the author of this scene wasn't very hot on Israeli geography. But if a BBC scriptwriter could imagine it, then surely Shin Bet could).

 

I’d be amazed if they aren’t already wired for sound, and mapped.I'd be amazed if they hadn't been known about for ages. (No doubt one or to of them may have been missed but they are not an existential threat to Israel, nor is it true that they can only be found by sending soldiers into Gaza).  They aren’t interrupted because any normal army would wait for his enemy to attempt to use such tunnels, and then trap him in them in the hope of catching useful prisoners for interrogation. Are we supposed to believe Israel doesn’t possess or know how to use equipment for detecting such things? How does the supposed discovery of these obvious threats justify bombing populated urban areas? Again, those who say that it does justify it are asked to explain why, precisely, as I genuinely cannot see the connection between these tunnels and killing women and children with high explosive.

 

Once again there’s a great gaping chasm in the logic of the defenders of this operation. Please, please explain to me, any of you, how shelling and bombing Gaza will prevent the digging of tunnels and the firing of rockets by Hamas? No doubt it will hamper these things, but only as long as it lasts. And it cannot possibly last indefinitely - so it won't stop them. Very soon after the bombardment stops, the rockets and the tunnels will begin again. Nothing has been achieved.

Just one attempt to explain the connection would be nice, instead of repeated emotional assertions that it is so,  as if it were self-evident.  Actually, it’s self-evidently false, in the short and medium term. The rockets have continued during the attack. And they (and the tunnels) have not been prevented by the previous attack six years ago, either. Only a re-occupation of Gaza (politically unthinkable and verging on mad) might stop them. In the long-term of course, the political damage done to Israel by this carnage is far, far greater than the military damage done to Hamas and Gaza by the Israeli armed forces. And that damage is Hamas’s aim.

 

After all, it really isn’t possible to claim that Hamas’s rockets have done much major damage to Israel, and the number of human casualties resulting from them is pleasingly small. This operation is simply not saving lives in significant numbers. No doubt it is terrible when you are the victim of a Hamas rocket, or when your family is the victim. But such victims are mercifully few.

 

Meanwhile, Israel is losing a significant number of young soldiers *only* because it has launched this attack.  

 

Hamas certainly doesn’t mind civilians dying on its own side, as it knew would happen when it began its rocket campaign.  Many Hamas militants don’t mind dying themselves. As its Al Qassam brigades have said : ‘From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love life.’ This is why applying European, secular concepts of deterrence to this confrontation is so mistaken. If your enemy loves death, and he says he does,  then threatening him with death isn't going to deter him. 

 

Then there’s the utterly bizarre behaviour of certain critics of Israel, such as Mr Gribben, who use my criticism of Israel as an opportunity to argue that I don’t criticize Israel *enough* . This has its amusing side, as it wings towards me while I am fending off exasperated condemnation from fellow-Zionists who regard me as little better than a traitor for my condemnation of the attack on Gaza.

 

But the whole point and purpose of what I am now doing, and the reason why I did it, and the reason why I persist in it,  is that it has more validity, precisely because I am not part of the powerful well-financed choir for whom every Israeli action is wrong under all circumstances. Likewise I am not part of the other choir, nearly as well-financed, for whom nothing Israel does is ever wrong.

 

And I was careful to set out my logic for my reluctant but unshakeable acceptance of the case for a Jewish state in control of its own borders and immigration, as the last resort for Jews fleeing the murderous persecution which appears to be the unavoidable, unpredictable but effectively permanent threat under which they live. I have not got myself into any kind of tangle, as alleged, in explaining why Israel must have its specifically Jewish character, and in explaining why this is not racial bigotry, but a defence against it.

 

It is a necessary response to the undeniable and ineradicable existence (even in the most civilized parts of the world) of a potentially murderous Judophobia. I really do not know how to explain this more clearly. I must ask those who glibly reject the idea of a Jewish state as racist to imagine yourself as the reluctant star of the following personal melodrama:

 

You are living in happy but modest prosperity in, say, Frankfurt-am-Main in 1932,  as a normal German Protestant. Not long before the National Socialists come to power, documents are uncovered (perhaps unearthed by accident, perhaps by a business or professional rival. Who knows? These things happen)  which show that you have Jewish ancestry previously unknown to you. You have not changed. Your beliefs, culture, everything about you, remain the same. But a file containing incontrovertible facts about your ancestry has, though you do not realise it yet, condemned you to death.

 

Being well-informed and prescient, and having studied the speeches of Herr Hitler and his colleagues, and read their books,  you immediately seek to emigrate. Nobody will take you. SO Sorry. Soon, the problem grows more serious. Hitler comes to power. The Nuremberg laws are promulgated. You continue to seek emigration as the persecution intensifies and the world darkens. But there is nowhere to go, not even the British colony of Palestine , officially ‘A National Home for the Jews’, where tight limits have now been placed (by the British government) on Jewish immigration. You know the end of this story.  You and your family will be first starved and made miserable, then taken away and murdered, by the state, because an official  document says you are a Jew. As far as I am concerned, if you do not actively wish that end, for yourself or anyone else,  then you must see the sense in there being a Jewish state which will take people in your position, unconditionally.

 

 

By the way, it needs to be stressed again and again especially when people complain that the West Bank 'settlements', in reality towns, are exclusively Jewish, that Israel itself is not exclusively Jewish, but contains a large number of Arab citizens, about whose complicated status I have written a great deal. There are places where they live alongside their Jewish fellow-citizens, but usually in circumstances of urban anonymity (much as happens with Black and White Americans in the still-informally-segregated USA).

 

Israel's Arabs are better off by a mile than their neighbours living under Arab Muslim rule - though you won't often get them to say so publicly - both in material terms and legal and constitutional terms. But those who attack Israel for being an 'apartheid' or 'racist' state really do need to take a look at the treatment of Jews In the Arab and Muslim world, when they are permitted to live there at all, and of Christians. There is no possible excuse for this. Talk about mote and beam. Yet Israel's critics, voluble on Israel's alleged bigotry, are silent about this.  

 

 

My point is quite simple. I recognise and condemn the undeniable wrongdoing involved in the establishment of Israel. I recognise the diplomatic cynicism involved in its foundation. I condemn terrorist actions whoever does them, rather more consistently than most people do. I refuse to pretend that wrong actions were right.  But I point out that no nation, old or new, is free from dispossession, blood and pain in its foundation, and so it will always be. So, to condemn Israel into non-existence for this reason is absurd.  Rather than using this past grief as an excuse to destroy, and to tear up a settled existing society, we should use it as a guide to minimising suffering in the future.

 

I’d also like to answer one particular charge made against me by people who imagine they are helping Israel by defending this idiotic attack.

 

I am told ‘You are playing into the hands of the anti-Israel bigots’

 

I reply *** ‘In what way?

 

Those bigots are certainly glad of this opportunity to portray Israel falsely as a bullying Goliath in a region where it is in fact a tiny enclave, surrounded by tens of millions of Arabs whose governments and peoples (often subject to unceasing official propaganda against Israel from childhood onwards)  are hostile to its very existence, and unwilling to recognize that existence at all. One might also point out that the Arab and Muslim world is enormously rich, thanks to oil, and very well-armed (especially in the case of Saudi Arabia and Egypt), having been helped in this way by enormous financial and technical aid from the USA. There is even an Islamic bomb, in Pakistan. There may well soon be others, though I personally suspect that Saudi Arabia is more likely to go nuclear than Iran.

 

I condemn Arab brutality to Arabs, as well as Israeli brutality to Arabs. Readers of my column and blog, for instance, will have known for many years of the Assad government’s 1982 attack on Hama, at least as brutal as anything now taking place in Gaza, and in my view much more so.  The oldest reference to this in my writing that I can find goes back 12 years , to 2002, long before Assad-bashing became fashionable, as I pointed out in this posting:

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/08/my-response-to-allegations-that-i-am-an-apologist-for-syria.html

 

I also condemn Western brutality to Arabs, as I did during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which I (again unfashionably) opposed from the start. The fashionable people all found that they opposed it later after it was obvious even to them that it was (like the Israeli attack on Gaza) a stupid and self-damaging disaster. At the time I got letters telling me I was a ‘traitor’.

 

As I wrote from Cairo in April 2003: ‘The elderly man in the Al Borsa coffee shop, a pleasant, friendly, airy place near the majestic Hassan mosque in the vast, dusty wilderness of southern Cairo, asked me: 'Are you proud to be British right now?' I could not honestly tell him that I was. For him and almost everyone in the Arab world, Britain is now one of the countries killing innocents in Iraq, in what they all see as a crude colonial venture that will do no good to anybody.

‘While our TV stations show the guns firing and the missiles being launched, the ones here concentrate far more on what happens when the shells strike and the missiles land. Footage of dead and dismembered babies, too horrible for us to see, is ruthlessly screened. Nobody much cares that such things are accidental or unintended and they do not believe our claims to be liberators.

‘Fury, bitterness, resentment, impotence, wounded pride and trampled dignity all boil together in the minds of Arabs. And when they see bomb damage and casualties in Arab towns, they see landscapes, streets and houses almost identical to the ones they live in. They see people who look and speak and think and worship and eat precisely as they do, and hope for and fear the same things. They can understand the screams of the mourning women.’

 

I added; ‘All in all, it is amazing that here I have encountered nothing but politeness, consideration and generosity - with one alarming exception that I will come to later. Each person I have spoken to has been utterly courteous, but frantic to press on me that the war is a serious mistake which will damage Britain in their eyes for decades to come.

'If those in the British newspaper industry who noisily and militantly support the war looked at their counterparts in the Egyptian Press, they would see their own methods used to achieve exactly the opposite effect. Whole pages are given over to pictures of dead and wounded children, wrecked homes, weeping parents. They have faces, unlike the British and American soldiers, who appear as distant, dehumanised figures in helmets and goggles.

The headlines in the Cairo papers say: 'Horrible massacres of civilians', 'Mosques, holy shrines and hospitals bombed'. Yet another picture of blood-encrusted infant bodies carries the caption: 'Victims of brutal aggression as a result of the random bombing of civilians'. Another says: 'Anglo-American frenzy cost this child his eyesight'.

'Every page of war coverage in Al Akhbar bears the words: 'A war against international law'. A columnist sneers that the slogan of the Coalition forces is: 'Please allow me to kill you so that I can liberate you'.

'It would be a good deal easier to take if there was not so much truth behind it.’

 

Likewise, I have condemned the horrors of Arab terror against Israel, such as this from my column in April 2002 : ‘In Israel, it seems, we must treat the world's goriest terror organisation as the equal of an elected, lawful government.  In Israel we do not hunt down terror. There, we talk to terror and feed it sweeties.

‘What is wrong with my trade? Why do so many reporters, all doubtless supporters of the battle against Osama Bin Laden, fall for the grotesque propaganda of the Palestinian terrorists?

‘Did you know that the Muslim gunmen who cynically hid in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem shot the locks off the door to get in? Did you know that they were offered food, medical supplies and a doctor by the Israeli Army? Did you know that Arab Christians in the area are persecuted by Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation but are, of course, too scared to say so … And did you know that on March 17, a Palestinian gunman deliberately fired into a crowd of children leaving a school in an Israeli town, killing a girl aged 17 and injuring others?

‘If you didn't know any of these things, ask yourself why. The reporting of the Middle East is a disgrace.
The bias and ignorance of many of those who do it is appalling. They should be ashamed of themselves.’

 

The fact that I, and the anti-Israel bigots,  both tell the truth about what is now happening in Gaza does not make me an anti-Israel bigot. At least, if it does, I would love to know how. As it happens, I also attacked Israel’s last assault on Gaza, which wasn’t as sustained as the present one. Yet (to my surprise at the time)  I did not get much criticism.  I don’t know why. 

Still Clueless in Gaza - Six Years Later

I’ll devote this post to general points about Gaza, many of them arising from letters I’ve received or points made here. First of all I’ll just dispose of a couple of comments that stand out.

 

John Edwards writes ‘When discussing Ukraine nobody talks about "the Slavs of the region" but Peter Hitchens still insists on referring to the Palestinians as "the Arabs of the region". Why are Palestinians, uniquely, denied their national identity and a link with a geographical place? Perhaps because someone else wants their land.’

 

***Even I, who argue that Ukraine does not properly exist as a sovereign nation, readily recognize that there is a Ukrainian language and culture . The trouble is,and I thought we had got past this by now, is that neither language nor culture is universal among the people in the current version of ‘Ukraine’, which has simply inherited the largely meaningless borders of Stalin’s and Khrushchev’s Ukrainian SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic). Many of the citizens of Ukraine, especially in the East, are to all intents and purposes Russian.  Many are mixed, speak both languages and have family which is Ukrainian and family which is Russian. The only part of the country which is pretty much wholly Ukrainian is the far West, much of which used to be part of Austria Hungary and then of pre-1939 Poland.

 

I explained in a recent posting here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/07/some-thoughts-on-the-use-of-the-word-palestinian.html why I am reluctant to employ the term ‘Palestinian’, believing its careless use to a be a propaganda victory for a cause with which I do not sympathize.

 

 

 

 

The idea of a ‘Palestinian’ nationality is a propaganda invention of the 1960s and 1970s, which (amongst other things) cast Israel as a dominant majority overpowering an Arab minority. Until then, Israel had been seen (to its great propaganda advantage) as a tiny Jewish state surrounded by hundreds of millions of mainly Muslim, mainly Arab enemies.

 

But by separating the local Arabs into a ‘Palestinian’ nationality, this was overcome. David became Goliath and Goliath apparently shrank to become David. Leaving aside the lack of evidence of the use of the  term ‘Palestinian’ by the Arabs themselves before about 1970, I have not heard of any notable distinction between the culture and language of Arabs in the West Bank and of the non-Bedouin Arabs in Jordan, both of whom are descendants of inhabitants of the original ‘Palestine’ mandate. On the other hand, I think the Arabs of Gaza probably have more in common, cuturally,  with their Egyptian neighbours than they do with the Arabs of the West bank.

 

 

’Jim New’ writes : ‘Palestine was never in any shape, form or stretch of the imagination, a British Colony’

 

***This is an extraordinary statement. I would love to hear more of his justification for it. It is true that the official designation was a ‘Mandate’, but it had all the trappings and appurtenances of a colony and was governed as such by the Colonial Office. My father, a naval officer, was rather surprised, in 1936, to find himself in Haifa putting down Arab riots, when he was supposed to be patrolling the South Atlantic aboard HMS Ajax. If Mr ‘New’ had told him that Mandate Palestine wasn’t a colony in any shape, form or stretch of the imagination, I rather think my father would have laughed.

 

Anyway, now we’ve got past that, and I’ve duly infuriated any pro-Arab fanatics who read this blog, I must return to infuriating the pro-Israel fanatics. Oddly enough, they didn’t pay much attention to my last essay on this problem, back in December 2008. The internal politics of Israel were slightly different, but otherwise it was more or less exactly the same controversy.

 

You can read it here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2008/12/clueless-in-gaz.html

 

Its central point could have been written today : ‘ Even though all the usual suspects, the Judophobes, the diplomats, the gullible liberals, say that what Israel is doing now in Gaza is wrong,  it really is wrong.

My position, as a strong supporter of Israel in general,  is that Israel's action is wrong morally and gravely mistaken politically.  Attacks from the air always kill innocents. It is no good pleading that you regret such deaths, when you knew perfectly well that your actions were bound to cause them. This was equally true of our own adventures in Iraq and Serbia, and is true of American bombing in Afghanistan.  Israel's moral position is seriously weakened by the deaths of these innocents, and also by the flanneling and evasion of its spokesmen over this.’

 

Now let me turn to a comment from ‘John Main’ , who asks : ‘The fate of Israel will not be decided in people’s minds by people like us watching TV. We watch TV all the time, we disagree with much that we see, but we are powerless to decide anything. Why should the fate of Israel be an exception to that rule?’

 

***The answer is actually very simple. Israel has from its beginnings depended on powerful sponsors in democtratic countries who are very much influenced by what people watch on TV, and what they make of it.

 

The original ‘National Home for the Jews’, (not a state as such) in Mandate or Colonial Palestine, existed under increasingly reluctant but actual British sponsorship, upheld and sustained by British imperial power.  Arthur Balfour’s decision to make the declaration had been made at a very bad moment in the First World War, where it was thought that it would weaken Germany and Austro-Hungary (similar belies led to the Allies’ endorsement of Czechoslovak independence).

 

When Britain began to fear that Arab resistance to Jewish immigration threatened her standing among the Arabs in the entire Middle East, British support for the ‘National Home’ cooled very fast . I personally don’t think it misleading to say that many British officials in the 1920s and 1930 worked quite actively to encourage Arab opposition to the National Home. The (British) appointment of the committed anti-Zionist Haj Amin al Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, over the heads of the local Arab hierarchy,  in 1921, might have been designed to undermine Balfour.

 

 

When Britain eventually pulled out of the Twice-Promised land in 1948, leaving behind an impossible contradictory mess caused by its own policies, it was only Harry Truman’s strong support for Israel which allowed its successful creation as a state (plus the temporary willingness of Czechoslovakia to provide arms). Without those sponsors, Israel would not have survived , and without American sponsorship it would not have survived the long and difficult period of economic hardship and constant danger which then began.

 

The importance of the sponsorship is not just military and economic, though of course these things matter hugely.

 

Israel’s very nature runs against much of the dogma of the modern world. Enemies of Israel describe it as a ‘racist’ state, an extraordinary and almost total inversion of the truth, which si that it is *A state born out of the racialism of others*.

 

To my amazement, there are still people in this world who think that being Jewish is about religion, a matter of individual choice like Baptism or Unitarianism, and even people who think that Judophobia arises out of religious quarrels.

 

The people who hate Jews ( and there is no reasoning with such people, who are in often in all other respects perfectly rational, and even charming or humorous, but in this matter quite beyond the edge of sanity) couldn’t care less about religion. It’s Jews they don’t like, and that’s that. Many Jews are atheists, or just non-religious. Neither the Tsarist Black Hundreds, nor Hitler, nor Vichy France, could have cared less about what people believed. It was their bloodlines they wanted to check on, not their religious opinions.

 

The single most blatant example of this will always be the late Edith Stein, a prominent Roman Catholic theologian and Carmelite nun, German born, who was vindictively dragged from her convent in the Netherlands in 1941, and hauled off to Auschwitz to be murdered, because she had Jewish blood. I do hope this is clear.

 

It is because people were prepared to do things like that, on logic of that kind, that Israel was founded – to be a place where people could go when other people wanted to kill them because of their blood.

 

So to say it is a racist state is not just a slander. It is the opposite of the truth. But, given the general unwillingness of the civilized liberal democracies to take in more than  a very few rich prominent Jews (and a small number of children, cruelly separated from their doomed parents, on the famous Kindertransport), Israel was determined that it should be able to hold its doors open for the foreseeable future to all people in that position.

 

The scheme, though not exactly utopian, was certainly idealist, and had all the ruthlessness of idealism. We now know, mainly thanks to Israeli historians who refused to allow the truth to be buried any longer, that the birth of Israel was achieved at the expense of many thousands of innocent Arabs, driven from their homes.

 

This is horrible, but, as I’ve said before, the USA, Australia, the Caribbean, and many other modern countries arose out of similar brutal drivings out of existing populations. This sort of thing is not unique even in the 20^th century, which saw similar horrors (though much greater in scale) in the ‘exchange of populations’ between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s, and in  Eastern Europe and India during the Potsdam deportations and the Partition, in 1947 and 1948. My point here is that the other comparable actions are forgotten and nobody seeks to reopen them, and one must ask those who wish to reopen the 1948 expulsions why they ( and the UN) concentrate on these, and these alone – and why they don’t take the view generally held in Germany, Poland, the Czech and Slovak lands, East Prussia,  India and Pakistan, that no good purpose would be served by reopening such a wound.

 

But in these complex and unlovely origins lies the increasingly widespread claim that Israel, like South Africa , is an ‘apartheid state’ and so not deserving of UN or US sponsorship. This is not confined to small and sordid corners. The former American President, the much-admired Jimmy Carter, has used the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israeli action in the occupied West Bank.

 

http://www.haaretz.com/news/jimmy-carter-israel-s-apartheid-policies-worse-than-south-africa-s-1.206865

 

This is not as bad as those who suggest that Israel’s actions are comparable with those of the Nazis. But it is surprising how powerfully this obviously false, rather dangerous and hysterical claim (There is not the slightest evidence that Israel has any sort of exterminationist policy towards non-Jews. I put this refutation as  mildly as I possibly can) gains acceptance in the minds of those who have decided that Israel is an evil racial state.

 

Actually the ‘apartheid’allegation (which I attempt to rebut here) http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/02/apartheid-a-few-notes-on-the-use-of-this-word.html

 

Is probably more damaging, because it has gained acceptance well outside the ranks of the swivel-eyed and the hopelessly bigoted.

 

And it is because of its power and implications that Israel’s current policy in Gaza is so very dangerous.

 

I’ll come to that, but first I must deal with a claim repeatedly made by defenders of Israel’s attack on Gaza.

 

It is that in some way shelling and bombing Gaza ‘protects’ Israel from Hamas rockets.

But it simply doesn’t. Days of shelling have not stopped the rockets in the short term. Weeks of shelling will not stop them in the long term. Just as the 2008 shelling failed to stop the 2014 rocket attack, the 2014 shelling will not stop the next rocket attack from Gaza in – let me guess – 2017? Hamas will actually have gained both recruits and international support as a result of this week’s events, when it was losing both before them, and the Gaza Strip is not, and never will be so closed off that the making of rockets will be impossible.

 

I might also mention that Hamas’s rockets are inaccurate, carry small warheads (not to mention the fact that Israel has a seemingly effective anti-missile shield which deals with many of the Hamas rockets before they can hit their targets) and have, I’m glad to say, done remarkably little damage and killed and injured remarkably few people despite the length and extent of the bombardment. This is no comfort, I know, to those who have suffered – but on the other hand, there is absolutely no evidence that Israel’s attack on Gaza has prevented a single Hamas rocket from flying, or will do so in the future. To characterize this attack as defensive is just misleading.

 

I really don’t see why it’s so shocking to suggest that Israel would have done better to endure this attack. It’s often wiser not to be provoked. Franklin Roosevelt wouldn’t allow himself to be provoked by German attacks on US Navy ships (especially the Reuben James)  during the undeclared convoy war from 1939 to 1941. Was he weak or wrong? I’m sure there are other instances of the strong not allowing themselves to be provoked by the weak into doing what the weak wanted them to do.

 

But the propaganda effect on Israel’s public standing, resulting from the scenes of civilian death in Gaza, is enormous and longstanding.

 

Readers here will know that I do not accept excuses from anybody for the killing of innocent civilians in bombing and shelling of populated areas. Only three generations ago such behaviour would rightly have been viewed with utter horror. Gazans I spoke to directly (who live in what is virtually a police state) were privately horrified when Hamas set up missile sites near their homes, but dared not protest. We cannot blame them, or view their death, injury and ruin as just punishment for their failure to protest – because in the same circumstances we too would not dare to protest.

 

But this is, as Talleyrand once said in another context, not just a crime. It is a mistake. Israel, back in 1967, had a huge credit balance in the propaganda war, not least in Europe where it has now almost wholly lost it.  Bit by bit, it has let that drain away, relying increasingly on the reeking tube and iron shard of unrestrained force, its supporters given to macho statements about how they don’t care if no-one likes them, they will defend themselves. Support remains strong -for now -in the USA - but for how long can this endure unless Israel gets a *lot*more clever? 

 

In modern diplomacy, small and unpopular countries have to have enough friends simply to stay alive.

 

As I say above, I absolutely reject the claimed parallel between Israel and apartheid South Africa.

 

But others do not. And their realistic and achievable aim (an aim, alas, much advanced by Israel’s crass flailing in the past two weeks) is to isolate Israel, diplomatically, economically and culturally,  as South Africa was isolated, until all the weapons and tanks in the world cannot save it from the pressure form within and without, and from signing itself into non-existence through acceptance of a ‘right of return’ or a ‘one-state solution’, which would end the Jewish state for good. This is a very real danger. The USA is changing very fast, and it is time Israel's overconfident supporters understood just how fast.

PETER HITCHENS: Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza is a dream come true for Hamas

This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column

Israel exists only because quite a lot of people hate Jews for being Jews, and sometimes that hate turns into murder.

It is a place where Jews can go when other people want to kill them for being what they are, not for what they do, and when nobody else will take them in.

But it also exists because we in Britain set up a Jewish ‘national home’ in what was then our colony of Palestine, though we spent the next 30 years trying to go back on our word.

And it also exists because when we were too poor to hang on to our empire and quit Palestine in 1948 – leaving it in bloody, unfinished disarray – the USA backed the Jewishstate that emerged from the mess.

It may all have been a terrible mistake. I’m not sure what choice there was back then. But it is there, like many other lingering injustices done in the 1940s, in India and centralEurope, and it seems to me that wise and civilised people should try to accept it and make it work.

The alternative is endless blood and screams, stretching for miles and for years.

I made up my mind some years back, after many visits to the region, very much including the West Bank and Gaza, that the only honest position a British person could take was absolute defence of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. It must be that, or it cannot serve its grim ultimate purpose as a refuge against hate. And that once that is accepted, everything possible must be done to improve the position of the Arabs in the region.

It’s not always easy. Israel’s government and army have done and still do many wicked and stupid things. Its small elite is not really up to the huge responsibilities it faces. But I’m not budging.
And it is from that position that I say Israel’s attack on Gaza is idiotic, wrong and probably fatal to the future of the state its leaders claim to be defending.

Hamas, still clinging to its increasingly unpopular rule in Gaza, is overjoyed by Israel’s moronic, babyish response. It is all they dreamed of.

The world’s TV screens are full of pictures of dead and wounded women and children, weeping, gore and rubble – exactly what Hamas hoped to provoke.

Israel may bray that it did not intend to do this. I’m sure it didn’t. But if you shell and bomb a confined space such as Gaza, it will happen, and shame on you if you pretend that it’s not your fault when it does.

It is ludicrous to claim that this action, which makes future conflict certain, protects Israel in any way.

The fate of Israel will be decided in people’s minds, in countries like ours, and on TV screens, not by bullets and high explosive. Each episode of this kind makes that future more doubtful.

It is an illusion that a violent toughness is the only answer to threats. The really strong and brave man knows when to hold back.

Just as it would have been more sensible to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza when they captured them in 1967, it would have been far, far better to let the Hamas rockets fall, to shelter from them and to let the world see how much better Israel is than its aggressive despotic neighbours.

But the chance was missed, and it may, alas, have been missed for ever.

Having lived all my life in a world that was largely sensible and reasonable, I sense that the bad times are on the way back.

Peaches: poisoned by pious rubbish

Did you help Peaches Geldof to die? Quite possibly. Everyone who lazily accepts the conventional wisdom about drugs played a part in this and many other similar tragedies.

Many years ago, we decided to treat heroin abuse as an illness. We wouldn’t punish those who did it. Instead, we ‘treated’ them, in many cases by mugging taxpayers to give them free drugs.

Most people still agree on the idea that the drug user is a victim. The main problem with it is that it’s not true. The next problem is that it makes it much easier for people to become drug abusers.

I don’t believe in ‘addiction’, but I’ll leave that for another time. Even if I did, it would only strengthen my point. If it really is true that once you start taking heroin you can never stop again until you die, shouldn’t we be devoting huge efforts to making sure nobody ever starts?

And wouldn’t a severe deterrent law, one which (for a change) we actually enforced, be the best way of doing that? A few examples work wonders in changing people’s behaviour, as we found when the breathalyser and seat-belts came in. 

If we’d very publicly locked up a few famous heroin abusers in the 1960s and 1970s, there’d be many fewer of them – famous or obscure – now. Because we didn’t, there are plenty more of these cases to come, plenty more ruined lives, plenty more orphans and plentymore pious rubbish.

So what’s boosted Ukraine’s army? Yoga?

I'm pleased to see that the wild, simple-minded anti-Russian hysteria of last weekend has cooled a bit, as the complicated truth has emerged and the intelligence briefings have calmed down. 

I trust our Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, has had a moment to lie down in a darkened room with a cold compress, reconsidering his outburst about ‘state-sponsored terror’. He’s probably found out by now that his colleagues have scrapped or sacked most of our Armed Forces, making his belligerence look funny to anyone in the know.

By the way, I am quite sure that Russia has been helping the rebels in Ukraine. It’s obvious.

But it’s also fairly obvious that Ukraine’s revolutionary government, which came to power in an EU and American-backed mob putsch in February, is getting help too. 

Who from? Perhaps they’re doing yoga or taking vitamin pills, but your guess is as good as mine. 

A few months ago, they were a decrepit shambles. Now they’re fighting and winning a violent battle to regain Luhansk and Donetsk. And it is very violent. Credible sources (local doctors) believe that 250 civilians have been killed and 850 wounded in Luhansk alone, during June and July. 

Much of this is the result of the shelling and bombing of populated areas (just like Gaza) by ‘our’ side. 

If you have any moral outrage left over after last week, you might want to expend it on that fact.

***

What I don’t understand is why it is supposed to be good for British politicians to humble themselves in the White House before whoever happens to be President of that foreign and not specially friendly country.

I suspect that the first party leader to say he doesn’t want such a visit will win the hearts and minds of the British people.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

 

NB, owing to a technical error, comments were closed on this item until about 2.20 pm. The error has now been corrected.

Hamas wants Israel to Bomb and Invade Gaza. So don't do it.

One or two people have asked me what I think of the current state of affairs in Gaza. More or less the same as I did the last time – see here

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1104697/PETER-HITCHENS-Will-Israel-learn-Each-bomb-gift-enemies.html

 

 

I am distressed by the way in which supporters of Israel feel the need to be so uncritical about such things.

 

I remain a hard-line Jabotinsky Zionist, unmoved by megatons of Arab and Muslim propaganda on this issue, sceptical of every ‘peace process’ so far suggested and unconvinced that there is really a ‘Two-State solution’ available.  No Jewish or Arab leader could agree to a truly fair and workable deal, without enraging his own side.  Much better to develop an informal compromise at low level.

 

And even I can see that Israeli bombing and shelling of Gaza is *exactly what Hamas wants*.

It will solve nothing. Israel has done very well with its missile shields and being far less densely-populated than Gaza can protect its people reasonably effectively.  Any losses will of course be tragic, but the tragedy will not be lessened by matching tragedies in Gaza.

 

I also (having many times visited Israel and the neighbouring territory, including Gaza itself) rather like the peoples of the region, sympathize with them, living in fear in their homes, want to spare them from death and terror.

 

Hamas, as all experts know, is in quite a lot of difficulty since it lost its friends, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood government. An Israeli attack is about the only thing that could once again unite the people of Gaza under Hamas’s banner. So why do it?

 

Don't be duped, Demon Gove's a softie inside

My old friend Michael Gove would do well as a professional magician. He is so clever at distracting people that hardly anyone ever notices what he is really doing.

Amid huge clouds of green smoke, and the noise of thunderflashes, he stands there wearing his cruel heavy-rimmed glasses and posing as the nation’s Demon Headmaster.

Teachers supposedly tremble. Badly behaved schoolchildren supposedly bow their heads and learn their times tables, before hurrying to Bible classes.

Actually, they don’t. Mr Gove is not a conservative. In education and other matters, he seeks to follow the (almost wholly useless) agenda of the Blair creature, whom Mr Gove has long admired, almost as much as Wendi Deng, former wife of Rupert Murdoch, admires him.

For Mr Gove, it’s not Mr Blair’s piercing blue eyes or his ‘good legs and butt’ that do the trick. It’s his stylish way with bombers, tanks and troops, plus his agenda of equality, diversity, and bureaucracy.

Back in February 2003, Mr Gove penned a love letter to the then Premier which is almost as embarrassing as Wendi’s girlish jottings.

Beneath the headline ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony’, Mr Gove gushed: ‘All I can say looking at Mr Blair now is, what’s not to like?’

He described Mr Blair as ‘right and brave’ on university fees, ‘impressive’ and ‘braver in some respects than Maggie was’ on Iraq, ‘resolute’ in his stand against strikers, and ‘correct’ on asylum policy.

In fact, he has even been holding meetings with Mr Blair, who is also privately admired by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor (he refers to him as ‘The Master’). His entirely empty row last week over the removal of the Blairite Sally Morgan from the chairmanship of Ofsted is privately described by Tories as what it was – ‘a staged smash-up’.

It is yet another pretext for a fake squabble between Tories and Liberal Democrats, who don’t really disagree but must now pretend to do so to win back lost voters.

As for the schools, they need what they have needed since they were actively ruined by Labour and the Tories between 1965 and 1980. They need the restoration of the authority of teachers, the resumption of tried and effective methods of teaching (especially of reading), and the reintroduction of selection by ability rather than wealth.

As for the opening up of the private sector to state pupils, nothing could be better than the scores of Direct Grant schools that used to do this so well.

They were spitefully destroyed by Labour 40 years ago, and not reinstated during 18 years of Tory rule. But all these things are either illegal or unthinkable in the Blairite universe, with its useless, destructive targets, its incessant tests, its Stalinist inspections, and its stealth selection, available to the wealthy and cunning.

Under the Blair-Gove arrangement, education favours the rich and the sharp-elbowed, and leaves the bright child of a poor home struggling far, far behind.

So instead, Mr Gove makes another speech, about writing lines, or the wonders of traditional history, or the Bible, or whatever it is. And The Guardian newspaper attacks him for it. And nothing happens.

It’s good soap opera. It entertains and diverts. But it is a big fat fake, and if you go on being fooled by it you will get the country you deserve.

►► When will coroners notice the  apparent correlation between suicide and ‘antidepressant’ drugs? We will never  know if this is significant until it is centrally recorded.

This is very difficult, partly because coroners often don’t ask about it, and also because many suicides are not recorded as such thanks to modern ‘narrative verdicts’.

Read any inquest report carefully, and almost always you will find the dead person was taking these pills, which are known, especially in the US, to carry this risk.

The West Bank needs Scarlett, not dogma

One of my favourite people in the Middle East is a witty and wry Arab citizen of Israel (yes, they do exist and very interesting they are too). On my last visit to Jerusalem, he drove me up to Ramallah through the wearisome security barriers that now divide Israeli territory from the West Bank.

And he sighed: ‘Oh, for the good old days before we had “Peace” .’ What he meant was that, until the world began seeking to solve the Israeli-Arab question, the two peoples lived reasonably happily together.

Arabs worked in Israel, crossing freely backwards and forwards and supporting their families instead of relying on political handouts.

Incredibly, Israelis used to go to Gaza (now behind an impassable barrier) for its beach-front nightlife (now suppressed with Islamic ferocity).

Actually, some of this sensible human pragmatism has recently begun to return. Israeli settlers help Arabs decode the Hebrew labels in a cut-price supermarket on the road to Hebron. Ramallah’s town centre, once gruesomely adorned with the dangling corpses of alleged collaborators, is now a pleasant spot for an evening out. It has a shopping mall with a cinema multiplex, just as Israeli towns do.

This is why I side with Scarlett Johansson, right, and against Oxfam, which has condemned her for promoting an Israeli-owned factory in the West Bank.

She is right. Helping to promote and sustain the normal things of life – work, homes, ordinary pleasure, mutual interdependence – is the road to peace. Oxfam’s dogmatic utopian desires lead to murder and terror. Oxfam was not founded to preach politics, but to relieve hunger. It should go back to doing that, and I for one won’t give it another penny until it does.

BBC 'neutral' in bogus war

What should BBC impartiality cover? Is strict neutrality between our (identical) political parties enough? Or should its staff avoid taking sides on other big controversies?

I ask because the Today programme presenter Justin Webb last week wrote a newspaper article on the so-called ‘War on Drugs’, giving full weight to polls and figures which support the view that there is a ‘war’, and that it is failing, and saying, among other things, that ‘on cannabis the game is surely over’.

Funny that he didn’t mention that (for instance) first-time cannabis offenders form a tiny proportion of prisoners in the US, and that the funky American magazine Rolling Stone recently dismissed as a ‘myth’ the claim that the USA’s prisons are full of people convicted for marijuana possession.

I can supply Mr Webb with plenty more information of this sort – if he wants it. But does he?

►► This column’s ‘I told you so’ department would like to point out that a month ago I attacked ‘the grandiose quango called the Environment Agency’, adding: ‘The Agency’s great at issuing statements, but does it do much dredging of ditches and streams?’

Nice the way everyone’s caught up.

Gaza, Islam, Peace and Concessions

A few points arising from comments over the weekend ( I shall of course be replying to Professor Millican at length in a separate posting).

 

Is there an Islamist threat to this country? I don’t know for sure. What shape would such a threat take? Is ‘threat’ even the right word? Presumably, the alteration of this country into one where Islamic ideas predominated, or played a very large role in our laws and culture,  might alarm many people, or seem undesirable to them.  Then again, can this be described as a ‘threat’?  This will be a matter of preference. Some people will very much desire it, for sincere reasons. Others most definitely will not.

 

Personally I would not wish this to happen. I have many disagreements with what appear to me to be Islamic practices and policies. Viewed simply as a political programme, without any thought given to its religious claims, Islam would seem to me to be less tolerant of disagreement, less sympathetic to the separation of powers, less pluralistic and considerably more patriarchal than Christianity, likewise viewed as a political programme.  I also think its attitude towards marriage is significantly different, and I much prefer the (Anglican) Christian approach to that subject.  I think these differences can be shown to exist, with reference to several existing societies where Islam, Sunni or Shia, is now established in authority.

 

 

What I am sure about is that, if there is such a threat, or promise as some might see it, or let’s describe it neutrally as a ‘possibility’, it comes from the growing numbers of Muslims now peacefully settled, living, and nurturing families in this country, far more than it does from the mythical ‘Al Qaeda’ .

 

Terrorist attacks are horrible, and grievous, but generally they cannot influence a strong-willed properly-led free society. It is only the modern habit of Western governments, of strengthening their own authority by claiming the ability to defend us against ‘terror’, or even to make wars upon it, that have fostered the illusion that terrorist acts are a major threat to Western civilisation, alongside the illusion that these can be reliably prevented or protected against by state action, new laws, surveillance etc.

 

I believe it is almost infinitesimally unlikely that I or any reader will be the victim of a terror attack (as unlikely, as I have said before, as that an eagle will kill me  by dropping a tortoise on my head from a great height). Likewise, I think it most unlikely that our various ridiculous and overblown security organs can do anything to stop it, any more than the vast array of silly ‘precautions’ against ‘terror’ which have made life so much less convenient, and officials so much more arrogant, in the last 30 years or so.

 

 

In truth, even an attack such as the 2001 outrages in New York did not derail the US economy, incapacitate the operation of the state and its laws or damage the military power of the USA. Certainly the deaths involved were harrowing and horrible, and the methods adopted by the killers hocking and disgusting in the extreme. But compared with the actions of both sides in the later stages of the Second World War, even this , the worst Terror atrocity of modern times, is in fact quite small. Terrorism ultimately is propaganda, not warfare. Modern states too often aid that propaganda by giving such acts a political status (exactly what they seek) , instead of simply treating them as the crimes they are.

 

One of the reasons why neo-conservatives are stuck with this question is that they are mostly North Americans who support free movement of peoples (through open borders) for simple economic reasons (neo-conservatives are economic and social liberals, ‘conservative’ only about waging war, if that is in fact conservative)  .They  fondly imagine that it is politically unimportant. They are wrong.  In North America, mass immigration has most certainly been driving a strong political, cultural and moral revolution, as those neo-conservatives are rapidly discovering at the polls.  But in the USA it is overwhelmingly Latin American. There is a small amount of Muslim migration to the USA (mostly in Michigan) and also into Canada via Quebec, where French-speaking North Africans have been encouraged to settle by the local government, anxious above all to keep the French language on top. But they have nothing like the Islamic migration into Western Europe, which is driving social change in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium , Italy and Germany.

 

This is already having a noticeable effect – and, while I haven’t yet read the book recommended to me on the subject, I’d point out that our establishment seems to have a strong desire to please Islam, in schools, in broadcasting, in the civil service, in foreign policy and in its general pursuit of multiculturalism and ‘equality and diversity’ which makes Christianity just one among many religions and robs it of its previous secure role as the established (if not widely practised) religion). For me it is the British state’s insistence on multiculturalism, rather than the migration itself, which has created this situation.

 

My guess is that, as the Muslim population grows, this process will continue more strongly. The moment at which we might have said ‘Yes, you are welcome but this is and remains a specifically Christian society’ seems to me to have passed. It will be very interesting to see how this is dealt with at the Coronation of our next monarch - which must inevitably come, sad as it is to contemplate the loss of our present Queen.

 

Likewise, the moment at which we could have limited the levels of migration has probably gone. It would now be politically far easier to leave things as they are than to place new limits of migration. This means that the current arrangement, under which more or less wholly Muslim communities now exist in several parts of the country, into which there is continued migration of young husbands and wives from these communities’ ancestral countries, will continue indefinitely. To some extent this will mean that these communities always remain at least partly first-generation.  

 

***********

 

I’m grateful for many of your comments about Gaza. I do once again urge people to read the original report, which also mentions one or two other aspects of the Israel problem. I’m struck, by the way, by Israel’s propagandist naming of its current military actions ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’. This is obviously a propaganda name, dreamed up by a politician. The previous attack, wrong-headed though it was, had a suitably incomprehensible military name, chosen because it gave precisely no clue to the nature of the action - ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

 

I’m asked about Israeli settlements, as they are called, on land captured in 1967.First of all, let us remember that this territory doesn’t really belong to any nation. The last recognised legal holder, under a League of Nations Mandate, was the British Empire. Jordan occupied it illegally in 1948. Israel occupied it illegally after 1967. In the original SanRemo accords(which put the Balfour Declaration into practice), all this territory was designated for ‘Close Jewish Settlement’, a position which as far as I know persisted until the collapse of the Mandate and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.  If this is wrong, I’d be interested to hear. If that’s so, it’s rather hard to be rigid about the matter.

 

By contrast, all the land east of the Jordan, abruptly sliced off the Palestine Mandate and given to Abdullah by Winston Churchill (an episode brilliantly and rather hilariously described by Samuel Katz in his informative but propagandist book ‘Battleground’  and rather skirted round by more conventional historians) was originally designated for Jewish settlement, but then undesignated.  Jews are now actually forbidden to live there. To the extent that there ever was a political entity called ‘Palestine’, a great deal of it is already firmly in Arab hands. The quarrels have all been about what was left over after ‘TransJordan’ was created and recognised by the League 90 years ago.

 

What I suspect the Likud government intended by building the ‘settlements’ (in reality solid stone and concrete commuter towns with every appearance of permanence and frequently located on defensible hilltops) was de facto possession whenever a final settlement came to be made. In diplomacy as well as in other matters, possession is nine points of the law, and since the Potsdam Expulsions and the Indian expulsions of the 1940s, world leaders have been very unwilling to embark on any more ethnic cleansing. I might add that quite a few Christian Arabs have quietly packed up and left the Middle East, as a result of unpublicised, salami-slicing religious cleansing by Muslims, and nobody much has protested, least of all the Western Christian Church which tends to view the Arab Muslim cause in this region as worthy of uncritical support.

 

We will have to guess how far Likud might be prepared to go in withdrawing from any of these new towns. It certainly won’t quit all of them, or relax its grip on Jerusalem itself. The secret of Ariel Sharon’s views on this topic has been locked in his mind since he was felled by a stroke nearly seven years ago. Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza (opposed by the current premier, Bibi Netanyahu) made many wonder if he might not at some stage do something equally bold with parts of the West Bank .

 

It is interesting to speculate on whether Sharon, Israel’s canniest and most brutal politician, and in my view an undoubted war criminal, might have used the Israeli Army and police to force Israeli citizens out of some of their West Bank homes, what the world would have made of it,  whether his government could have survived it or even whether Israeli forces would have been prepared to force such a policy through. On the other hand it is hard to think of another figure in Israel who could actually have achieved any kind of withdrawal from the West Bank.

And yet, as I suggested in the original article, a practical  compromise between the 1948 borders and the 1967 borders is probably the only realistic basis of a workable peace, whether negotiated or (much more likely and practical in my view) unrecognised and de facto.

 

No such covert deal is possible if things go on as they are. For anyone who likes all the peoples of the region, and wishes them well in their lives, it is all rather sad. But the sarcastic person who suggested that I supported the view that Israel had to make all the concessions needs to realise that support for Israel does not necessarily require a slavish swallowing of all the propaganda that Israel sends out.  Everyone has made concessions for years, in many cases conceding their lives. If a lasting peace were available (and I’m not sure that it is) a concession or two would be worth making to get it. 

Reflections on Gaza

Since the last time Israel got really angry about Gaza, I have visited the place itself (an account of this is to be be found here  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/10/lattes-beach-barbecues-and-dodging-missiles-in-the-worlds-biggest-prison-camp.html

 

I find this helps me a little in deciding what to say now. My main feeling has always been that neither side is working for the interests of the people of Gaza. But I would add that the Israeli state has never really claimed that it did. The current government of Gaza, which presumably does claim to be working for the good of the people of that place, has rather more to be ashamed of.

 

The origins of the mess lie in the 1948 war, in which Israel established itself by right of conquest in the pre-1967 borders that the Arab world now loves so much, but loathed at the time. And, as we know, or ought to know the 1948 war originated in the British government’s duplicitous promise of the area to both Arabs and Jews. And that originated in the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain and France thought they could parcel out between them. In the end they were too weak to hold on to their conquests, all of which passed out of their control soon after World War Two.

 

And then alas ther region became involved in the Suez debacle of 1956, and was soon afterwards caught up in the global rivalry between the USA and the USSR, made still more complex by the West's hunger for Arab oil, and by the collapse of the Shah of Iran. None of this is very nice, and if we had all known in 1917 what was going to happen next, we might have come up with some better ideas. But of course we didn’t, and we have what we have and must deal with that. I should have thought the main aim of anyone involved would be to ensure that we did not make things any worse, or cause any more needless deaths , or human grief.

 

If you go to Gaza you can still, in places, just make out the remnants of the railway line which once linked Cairo and Jerusalem, going on northwards to Beirut, Aleppo and ultimately Istanbul - and from there across a short stretch of water to Europe. It is a dream journey, never likely to be possible in my lifetime (I once thought of writing a book about an imaginary railway journey from Jerusalem to Moscow, another politically impossible dream). The only passage from Gaza to Israel now is a rather alarmingly exposed slog on foot between the enormous and errily empty customs and passport sheds of Israel’s Erez crossing to the good-humoured if rather basic hutments of the Hamas border control. How it must gall the Hamas officials, each Islamically-bearded, to handle and accept passports bearing the stamps of the hated Zionist Entity. Many Arab Muslim states (not to mention Iran) would turn you away for that. But Gaza wants Western journalists to visit, and the other way in, through Egypt, is far harder for Westerners to use.

 

Oddly enough, there was another time when Gaza was technically independent. This was between 1948 and 1959, when there was something called the All-Palestine Government. Despite its grandiose name, this controlled only the Gaza strip (and was itself a puppet of the Egyptians). The vast bulk of the original Palestine Mandate was (as it is now) incorporated in the Kingdom of Jordan. That Kingdom had after 1948 annexed what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan and a large chunk of Jerusalem, including the Christian,  Jewish and Muslim Holy Places. Although the annexation seems to have had no basis in international law, it was recognised by Great Britain and Pakistan and not greatly protested against by the rest of the world.   People forget these things. What was left was in the hands of the State of Israel.  Anyway, the claim that there was any sort of Palestine government was abandoned by Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1959, when he placed it under Egyptian direct rule, in the form of a military governor. Again, I’m not quite sure what lawful right Egypt had to make this annexation, but there doesn’t seem to have been much fuss about it. Then Israel captured the Strip in 1967. Then it pulled out in 2005.

 

I am myself fascinated by this question of national title to land. How is it settled? How far can one go back to reopen the case? These days we tend to frown on conquest by force, but it was such conquest which fixed (for example) the current very odd borders of Poland (1945) and the even more fascinating Southern Frontier of the United States (1848), not to mention the boundaries of Denmark, Italy, and the entire title deeds of Australia and New Zealand, all very recent.

 

And of course it was the British defeat of Turkish arms (who would have thought that this great structure, sprawling across the centuries and half as old as time,  would be brought down by British Tommies and Woolwich artillery?). This was achieved in 1917 by Edmund Allenby, and it created the general parcelling out of territory into the states now known as Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (modified slightly by Mustafa Kemal’s brilliant leadership of his nation, so converting the humiliating Treaty of Sevres (1920) into the much-less-humiliating Treaty of Lausanne (1923) ). Not to mention Saudi Arabia, another longer story for another time.

 

Quite how, out of all this seizure and gobbling, and counter-seizure, followed by yet more gobbling and counter-seizure, anyone can come up with clear statements that anyone’s settlement in such and such an area of Mandate Palestine is definitively ‘illegal’ rather beats me.  

 

Significantly, the refugees from the 1948 war were not allowed to settle freely where they chose in Egypt (or in any other Arab neighbour country), but were kept in cramped and squalid conditions in so called ‘camps’ (actually grimly permanent slums ), where their descendants remain. This seems to me slightly to contradict Arab propaganda in solidarity with, and in support of the displaced Arabs of the Palestine Mandate.  As I have pointed out before, the other victims of mass ethnic cleansing of the 1940s – the millions of non-Muslims who fled Pakistan for India or the millions of Muslims who hurried the other way, and the millions of Germans driven (with British connivance) out of central Europe –were long ago resettled and given citizenship of their new states. The curious will have to wonder why it is in the Holy Land and nowhere else that the descendants of refugees still live in cramped penury and misery as citizens of nowhere. I have my own theory, but I won’t force it on anyone.

 

I concentrate on these questions because it is these two features – the refugee crisis and the question of who owns the land – that lie beneath all the quarrels in this region.

 

Nobody really wants Gaza. Israel very foolishly tried to incorporate it after the war of 1967, when it had no real idea what it was doing. I am fairly sure that the 1967 borders were unworkable in central Israel, being more or less indefensible. And I think that the pre-1967 division of Jerusalem was unjust and enforced in a  disagreeably sectarian manner (limited access to Christian sites for Christians, no Jewish access to Jewish sites. The Israeli control of the Holy Places, though far from faultless, has I think been more generous than the Jordanian period). But the attempted Israeli takeover of the entire West Bank and Gaza  (remember that in 1967 Israel had also captured the Sinai) was unrealistic and wrong. No occupying power can remain popular, simply because it is an occupying power. And occupation weakens and corrupts the occupier.

 

The question is whether a permanent compromise between the 1948 and 1967 boundaries was ever possible. I suspect not. And one of the reasons for my suspicion is that Israel’s departure from Gaza in 2005, has not led to peace of any kind, but rather to the current futile and miserable war. It is a cliché, but do look at a map and see where the 1967 border ran. And then imagine how it would be if Israel withdrew from the West bank as it has from Gaza, and militant groups began to site missiles in the formerly occupied areas. Just look at what they could hit.

 

Often when I listen to the BBC reporting on Gaza,  I note turns of phrase in the reports which suggest that the reporter has forgotten, or never knew, that Israel left Gaza, bag and baggage, seven long years ago. I sometimes almost forget it myself, even though I have travelled the length of the Gaza Strip, from the Erez crossing to the tunnels at Rafah.

 

So why do Hamas launch rocket attacks into Israel? If they say it is because of Israel’s blockade, we should be sceptical because the blockade is not that stringent (see my article) , and also because a lot of people (many of them friendly to Hamas) make a lot of money out of the enormous amount of smuggling through tunnels which results from it.

 

And why does Israel react to these rockets with air attacks and talk of invasions? Of course it is tragic and appalling when an innocent person is killed in her home by one of these weapons, but it is equally tragic that innocents in Gaza die thanks to ‘collateral damage’ in Israeli attacks. I wonder if more effort could be spent on blocking or shooting down the often very crude rockets which are launched from Gaza.

 

And many more will, inevitably die in any Israeli ground assault, with its accompanying shelling. Could the approaching general election have anything to do with it? Could Hamas’s affiliation to Iran, and its dislike of the rival Fatah (now cohabiting rather well with Israel) have anything to do with it?

 

What would I know?

 

All I’m sure of is that the rentacrowd anti-Israeli protests are selective and disproportionate (Have the same people protested against Arab killing of Arabs on much larger scale, in several places? No. Why not? You work it out) . And also that another round of American-sponsored ‘peace’ talks will make things worse, because of their insistence on pursuing the Utopian ideal of a ‘final settlement’ when that is precisely what there will never be, and precisely what the leaders on both sides most fear to conclude, because such a settlement would certainly destroy them. I’m also sure that another Israeli invasion of Gaza will rebound on Israel in many ways, and will not in the end solve the problem( as I said last time they did it)

 

Left alone, the peoples of the area have proved rather good at creating a practical, unacknowledged sort of peace, under which the people of (say) Ramallah have recently begun to experience a far more abundant and settled life than they have known for many years, in fact since the last great push for ‘peace’ by Washington, which got us where we are now. This strikes me as a good thing. As an old acquaintance of mine, an Israeli Arab said to me when I was last in Jerusalem (I quote him in the Gaza article) ‘Oh, how I long for the good old days before we had peace’.