Many Happy Returns?

Sometimes, I could despair of my friend Ed West, who presents himself, in all sincerity, as a defender of the Christian Middle East, but who has a blog post today marking the sixty-third anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel by listing the things created or discovered by Israelis, all of which Jews would have created or discovered anyway. Indeed, they are now going back to Europe in droves so as to carry on doing precisely that. The Middle East was never going to suit them. And it doesn’t.

So, Ed, too bad for the various types of Catholics and Orthodox, as well as the Anglicans and Lutherans, violently displaced in order to create this thing? After all, there are no indigenous Christians in the Middle East. Are there?

So beleaguered is now the Ashkenazi secular nationalist project that goes by the name of Zionism, that its remaining adherents in Israel are reduced to voting for Avigdor Lieberman, while those elsewhere are so angry and touchy, knowing that the dream in which they have invested such emotional energy, if nothing else, is not so much ending as ended.

And it has not even come to a dramatic end. It has ended with little more than a damp squib, accompanied by such unseemly spectacles as that of Ehud Barak’s choice of Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas over Labor. Are there still any left-wing Zionists out there? If so, then why? You must know that that particular game is up. What has to happen before you will acknowledge this reality?

Muhammad is now the single most common name for newborn boys within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. About 14,000 Jews left Israel annually between 1990 and 2005. Half of Israelis aged between 14 and 18 express the desire to live elsewhere. A huge percentage of Israelis holds, or plans to inquire about obtaining, foreign nationality. The Berlin synagogue has 12,000 members, and there are now perhaps 55,000 Jews in Poland, many of whom are immigrants from Israel. Curzon was right when he bemoaned the Balfour Declaration on the grounds that the “advanced and intellectual” Jews would have no desire to live in the Middle East. They cannot wait to go home.

Desperately, Israel is instead flying in Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, Russian Nazis, East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, Peruvian Indians, absolutely anyone at all. Such Jewish births as there still are, are largely and increasingly to ultra-Orthodox who so disdain the Zionist State that they will use physical force against its teenage conscripts of both sexes.

If Israel does not want to become a haven for Russian Nazis, then she needs to repeal the Law of Return, declaring that she is now a settled culture and society in her own right, and precluding any wildly impracticable demand for a corresponding right on the part of Palestinian refugees or their descendants. The people who will do anything for Israel except live there, and who throw their weight around in demanding policies that suit their prejudices expressed from comfortable berths thousands of miles away, can thus be told where to go, or not to bother trying to go.

Now is the moment for a Palestinian Declaration of Independence. It must explicitly lay claim to the whole of the viable Palestinian State created on both sides of the Jordan in 1948. Furthermore, it must mirror the Constitution of Lebanon in guaranteeing the Presidency to a Christian even if it guarantees the Premiership to a Muslim (as would have happened electorally anyway), and it must mirror the Constitutions of Lebanon, of Iran, and of Palestine east of the Jordan, the present Hashemite Kingdom, in guaranteeing parliamentary representation to Christians, as well as mirroring Syria is establishing Christian festivals as public holidays. And it should place the new state - not only the Christians, but the State and everyone in it - under the protection of each and all of the remaining sacral monarchies, there being no other kind, in Christendom.

Thus would that State, and those who looked to its creation, be placed under the protection of the world’s Christian monarchs and of all who professed allegiance to them. Those are the monarchs of Andorra, of Antigua and Barbuda, of Australia, of The Bahamas, of Barbados, of Belgium, of Belize, of Canada, of the Cook Islands, of Denmark, of Grenada, of Jamaica, of Lesotho, of Liechtenstein, of Luxembourg, of Monaco, of the Netherlands, of New Zealand, of Norway, of Papua New Guinea, of Saint Kitts and Nevis, of Saint Lucia, of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, of Spain, of the Solomon Islands, of Swaziland, of Sweden, of Tuvalu, of Tonga, of the United Kingdom, of the State of the Vatican City, and the Paramount Chief of the Great Council of Chiefs of Fiji, together with all Christian subnational monarchs throughout the world, and together with all Christian Heads of deposed Royal Houses. 18 of those figures are the same person. Guess who?

This would also be a wider appeal, an appeal to any and every country that regarded Christianity as fundamental to its identity. Does the American Republic so regard itself? Does the Russian Federation? Do the republics of Europe? Do the republics of Central America, South America and the Caribbean? Do the republics of Africa? Does any other country? In each country’s case, how it responded to this Declaration would be its definitive answer to that question.

At the very least, this needs to appear over the names expressing the full authority of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Latin Patriarchate, the Armenian Apostolic Orthodox Patriarchate, the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate, the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, the Greek-Melkite-Catholic Patriarchate, the Ethiopian Orthodox Patriarchate, the Maronite Patriarchal Exarchate, the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, the Syrian Catholic Patriarchal Exarchate, and the Armenian Catholic Patriarchal Exarchate. That would have an immediate and a very dramatic impact in all of the countries named or referred to above. But time is now of the essence.