Israel has the best spies in the world, and anyone could have foreseen that last night's and the subsequent events would have been attempted on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. But even by his standards, Benjamin Netanyahu currently needs a lot of political cover both at home and abroad. So here we are.
Plots of this kind are foiled all the time. Every Palestinian faction is riddled with Israeli informants, yet we are expected to believe that at least two of them, which despise each other, have managed to launch a land, sea and air (yes, air) war without anyone's noticing that it was coming. Has anyone been sacked for this failure of intelligence? Will they be? There you go, then.
Netanyahu has told the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip to leave, but he has not lifted the 16-year blockade, so they cannot do so. Does he think that they have remained there voluntarily hitherto? The Israelis seem not to realise how it sounds when they say that they have never experienced anything like what was now being inflicted on their civilian population. Not everyone can say the same.
For all the obeisance of the uniparty, Israel is not a British ally. In what specific way is it? And High Tories were ferociously pro-Arab until a petit bourgeois arriviste and Liberal entryist became Leader, causing the Wykehamist mandarins to despair that one weekend in Finchley was enough to undo 20 years of patient work in the Middle East.
But even some of Margaret Thatcher's strongest supporters, such as Geoffrey Wheatcroft and the late Andrew Alexander, never went along with that. In general, the Right in Britain was a lot more ambivalent about these matters until the summer of 2015, and really until the result of the 2017 Election. Yet look at it now. Call it Long Corbyn.
The proper Right has always been sceptical of Israel (Pat Buchanan called US Congress “Israeli-occupied territory”).
ReplyDeleteYes, that line annoyed all the right people. But paleoconservatism is not the historic American Right. It is in many ways a welcome reaction against that, but that is what it is. The Project for the New American Century was full of old Reagan and Nixon hands.
DeleteI respect Israel’s rejection of multiculturalism-an explicitly Jewish state being the basis of Zionism-refreshing in a Britain that condemns our Home Secretary for telling the truth that multiculturalism means people leading “parallel lives.” However Israel is also run by a government including Itamar Ben-Gvir who defends spitting at Christians as an ancient Jewish custom.
ReplyDeleteThe late great Alan Clark said of Labour’s Kosovo War, how can we bombard a Christian people who have never harmed the British. We could say the same of the Christian Arabs.
He didn't vote against it; none of his party did, and there was a vote. The same applied to Afghanistan.
DeleteYou are right about the founders of modern Palestinian identity, the Christians. But you are wrong about Israel, where different groups do indeed comprise the entirely separate and antagonistic societies that they do not in Britain.
Would that the Christians were integral to modern Palestinian identity-as opposed to Hamas who are even worse in their behaviour towards Christians than Israel is (and that’s saying something). Israel as an idea is based on a rejection of multiculturalism and a belief that Jews must have a state of their own (however that’s worked out in practice). Multiculturalism in this country means most ethnic minorities now live in self imposed segregation.
ReplyDeleteWhere? There is a lot of rubbish talked about that. Having a lot of a certain ethnic group in a particular area is not "self-imposed segregation". Nor will it look like that to anyone before long, because there is no longer any all-white ward or village in Great Britain, and most people are perfectly comfortable with that. Israel, on the other hand...
DeleteBut paleoconservatism is not the historic American Right
ReplyDeleteThat’s exactly what it is and indeed defines itself as such. “America First” was the essence of the historic Right and, as Buchanan never ceases to remind people, saved much American blood and treasure by keeping them out of World War Two.
No, it simply is not. Not in that foreign policy sense, at least. America First was never the mainstream of the Republican Party, and Buchanan himself went that way only against the Clinton Administration. Cheney and Rumsfeld were the real GOP, having been Chiefs of Staff to Gerald Ford, an old America Firster who had renounced it to become a mainstream Republican.
Delete“Where? There is a lot of rubbish talked about that. “
ReplyDeleteAs David Goodhart and co’s recent Policy Exchsnge paper points out: (Chapter Two: the new data on residential segregation) “almost half of non-white Britons live in wards that are majority-minority.
Minority populations continue to be highly clustered. There are “two Britains.”
https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Whatever-happened-to-integration.pdf
So more than half of them do not.
DeleteNo, there are not. You must be thinking of Israel. There are at least four of those.
“Having a lot of a certain ethnic group in a particular area is not "self-imposed segregation".”
ReplyDeleteThat’s precisely what it is-as the great Oxford economist Paul Collier notes in his great book “Exodus”, immigrants don’t believe in multiculturalism themselves since they always move to their own diasporas to live amongst people like themselves. As David Goodhart and co’s recent Policy Exchange paper points out: (Chapter Two: the new data on residential segregation) “almost half of non-white Britons live in wards that are majority-minority.”
So more than half do not. At least some now live absolutely everywhere in Great Britain.
DeleteI live in London and the self-segregation that Suella Braverman speaks of is known to everyone. Everyone knows Tower Hamlets is a Bangladeshi area, Finchley/Golders Green is a Jewish area, Tooting is an Indian area, Brixton is Afro-Carribean and I could go on.
ReplyDeleteImmigrants don’t believe in multiculturalism. They prefer to live amongst people like themselves.
Like Braverman, you do not know what the words mean.
Delete“there is no longer any all-white ward or village in Great Britain”
ReplyDeleteJust read this. What planet are you on? Britain is still one of the least diverse countries in the West with an 83% white population-compared to only a 69% white population in Canada for example. Outside London there are many almost all white towns and as a Policy Exchange report shows “almost half of non-white Britons live in wards that are majority-minority.”
There is no longer any all-white ward or village in Great Britain.
Delete