Removing Obstacles

“Defensive, not offensive”, says the EU Presidency. Where does that leave either the Europhile Arabists or the Eurosceptical Zionists?

The State of Israel is a fact (though not the fact that its most stalwart supporters tend to assume), but the rabbis have been proved right for condemning Zionism as a form of idolatry, and my own views on the matter owe much to two of my most formative influences, my late father and my Senior Tutor (still very much alive) from my undergraduate days, who served together as young conscripts in British Mandated Palestine.

Ah, yes, young conscripts in British Mandated Palestine. Britain and the Zionists have history, you know… In the run-up to the 2005 Election, someone quite important said in my hearing that Labour and the Tories “were each led by their most pro-Israeli members”, Tony Blair (currently a roaring success as Middle East Peace Envoy) and Michael Howard. But that was before Gordon “The Chosen People” Brown (he needs to read some more proper Calvinism) and David “There Is A Deep Strand In Toryism That Believes Profoundly In Israel” Cameron (where to begin?) took the stage.

Cameron’s position is laughably illiterate. The only such strand in any of Toryism, Labourism or Liberalism is the one that believes profoundly in Britain. And insofar as there is any Zionist sentiment at all among Tories (which most Tory MPs and their bag-carriers cannot properly be called), then it dates only from Margaret Thatcher’s Brown-like theological confusions (she needed to read some more proper Methodism) and from the previous ownership of the Daily Telegraph by Barbara Amiel’s husband. As for Labour, it extended its whip to Robert Jackson in the Commons, and still does so in the Lords, after he left the Tories specifically because he did not want to be in a party led by a Jew.

In full communion with the Latin, Melkite, Maronite and Syrian Catholic Patriarchates, yearning that the Photian Schism be healed, moved by the history of the Armenians (there are many persecuted peoples in the world, and some of them are very easily identifiable, unlike others), and concerned for continuing orthodox witness within global Anglicanism and Lutheranism, I have at least eight reasons to have no more time for the Likud State than for Hamas.

But Hamas is the point. With a decided absence of Arab condemnation either from Fatah or from the Arab states that have in any case been dealing with Israel for years in practical terms, Israel is taking out Hamas in Gaza, and is now doing so by means if ground troops. Israeli ground troops have also been waging now quite a long battle against the recalcitrant West Bank settlers, who despise Israel but are happy to live on her largesse even while raising their hands against teenage conscripts, conscription from which they have secured exemption for themselves.

It is now for the world’s Jews (Gentile Zionists are probably an uncrackable nut, like non-Arab Arabists) to do as Fatah and the Arab states have done, and at least hold back from condemning outright the forced evictions from the West Bank, just as the Arabs have held back from condemning outright any Israeli action against Hamas.

2009 could be the year when Hamas and the Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea are both taken out. The former by an Israel cheered on quietly (if that is possible) by the Arab world and loudly by the world’s Jews. And the latter by an Israel cheered on quietly by the world’s Jews and loudly by the Arab world.

That can only be a good thing for peace.

But only if both halves of it come to pass, at pretty much exactly the same time.