Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Israel and Middle East Peace

Once again this hangs by a thread because of Israeli settlement building. This aggressive policy, without foundation in international law, is condemned by almost every government across the world including all Israel’s allies. It also offends countless Jewish people, integrated into countries in the West.

Nobody seems to be able to make the Israeli government see reason, not even the country upon which they depend for support, the United States. Essentially Israel holds all the cards. It can bully, oppress and occupy as much as it likes; this produces a terrorist reaction. That it turn is taken as licence to be even more obdurate and inflexible. This cannot go on.

First the West (not the U.S. because the Israeli lobby is too powerful for any politician to challenge successfully) must begin to distance itself diplomatically from Israel and make its isolation more obvious to ordinary Iraelis and those with dual citizenship. Next the Holocaust must be decoupled from modern Israel. The whole of civilised history will, till the end of time, look upon that unspeakable event as the worst of crimes against humanity. The suffering of Jews at the hands of the Nazis continues to provoke waves of justified sympathy for a people subjected to inhuman cruelty. The scars will never heal.

But what happened in Germany and Occupied Europe in the war years, has no practical connection with what happens in the territory occupied by both Israel and Palestine in the Middle East today. Only Israel has been given the status of recognition as a nation State and when this was granted it was on the assumption that it would conduct itself according, not to fundamental interpretation of Old Testament writings, but to the principles of International Law and the Charter of the United Nations. Unfortunately Israel is now governed by those who think that the former take precedence over the latter.

They should soon be told that if that approach persists it throws wide open the question, thought long settled, of the legitimacy of  the State of Israel itself.  These people will not listen until they realise they really do have something to lose. This is not anti Jewish, anti semitic or anti Zionist. It is not anti anything or anyone. It is purely an acceptance that in international affairs there has to be a fair basis for the rules which govern recognition, frontiers and friends.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 11:52 am and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.