A Letter to the Leader of the UK Green Party

To Caroline Lucas MP
Leader of the UK Green Party


Dear Ms Lucas,

I have just finished the short but intriguing interview you gave to Martin Bright for the Jewish Chronicle, and I feel there are points I should make about some parts of it. Let me say a few words about myself first, so you understand where I am coming from. I’m a former academic in the broad area of Persian, Arabic, and Islamic Studies. Politically, I describe myself as a liberal, but not a member of any party. That means there are many things about the Green Party which I admire and others I do not. For as a long as I can remember, I have been a supporter of Israel, and not a day goes by without my contributing in some small way to the debate that surrounds Israel and the Palestinians. (You may even find my blog of help, ‘A Liberal Defence of Israel’ of help: http://mid-eastplus.blogspot.com/.)

Be that as it may, let me turn to some remarks of yours in the course of Martin’s interview. I thought it impressive that you chose to speak with a local rabbi, Elizabeth Tikvah Sara about the Green Party’s approach to the boycott and divestments dialogue. That you conclude that more sensitive language is needed is commendable. However, I don’t think it’s just the language that is at fault, but thre whole thinking behind the BDS movement. That initiative is based on the conceit that Israel is a rogue state, a state that engages in actions that breach human rights, that imposes a form of apartheid on Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, that oppresses Palestinians in various ways, that impedes the economic growth of Gaza and the West Bank, that continues to occupy Palestinian land without due cause, that kills Palestinians for no good reason, that targets Palestinian children, and much more.

If you support the BDS movement, I must assume that you believe at least some of those accusations. My worry is that, if you do so, it is out of the best intentions, but very far removed from a genuine context. I will not present you with an argument that Israel is a perfect country and its people long-suffering saints. That would not be true. But I would still argue that Israel is guilty of very little of what she has been condemned for. And I would argue that you need to read at least one intelligent book about these issues, since you do seem to have difficulty with the context.

For example, when Martin asked if there would soon be a Green Party boycott of Syria or Iran, you fobbed him off by saying ‘I think the difference with Israel is that so many other tools have been tried for so many decades with such extraordinary lack of success, that people have been driven to use these these other tools.’ What on earth can you mean by this statement? What has happened over the years is this. In 1948, Israel, a democratic state (not a dictatorship like any of its neighbours) was invaded by five countries, by six armies who stated aim was to kill all the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. This took place three years after the end of the Holocaust. No other country went to Israel’s aid, despite its being a UN state. The Arabs had been offered a state in 1947 too, but chose to resort to violence instead of taking up the offer. In 1967, Arab armies massed tanks and infantry on Israel’s borders, preparing to render the region judenrein. The Israelis fought back and won. In 1973, an invasion on Yom Kippur took the Israelis by surprise, but again they fought back and again they won. Do you think they ought to have put down their arms and let their enemies, as they claimed, ‘finish wehat Hitler started’. They are still saying that, by the way. Who do you blame for all this? Israel or the Arab states.

Since the 1960s, the Palestinians have been masters of terrorism, hijacking aeroplanes, sending suicide bombers into kindergartens, restaurants, buses or anywhere else. Who is to blame for this? Who launched two intifadas aimed at killing as many Jews as possible? The Israeli solution was not to go into the Wesrt Bank and slaughter civilians, but to build a fence that has now dropped the incidence of terrorist acts by over 90%. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

In 2000, at Camp David, Yasir Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank and the whole of the Gaza Strip. He walked out. Nobody walks out on an offer of almost 100% of what they have demanded. In business, it would be suicidal. In politics much the same. Were the Israelis to blame for this, should ‘tools’ have been used to bring them into line. The Israelis have made gesture after gesture for peace. They left Sinai, Southern Lebanon, and Gaza. None of these gestures bore fruit in peace. To this day, Palestinian leaders (such as Mahmoud Abbas) when speaking to their own people in Arabic talk of taking conrol of both their territory and Israel and of driving the Jews into exile. A future Palestinian state will, according to Abbas, will be judenrein. (Jordan is already free of Jews and will not allow Jews to enter.) The Palestinians simply will not wake up to the fact that they will have to do like anybody else in their situation and compromise. So, who do you need to put pressure on? The Israelis, who have been desperate for peace since 1947/48 or the Palestinians (and other Arabs) who are fixated by their horror of a Jewish presence on what was Islamic soil?

Further down, you say ‘I think the Naqba (sic), the occupation, that’s been going on for decades. You could say that Syrian oppression has been going on for decades but in terms of the wider awareness of what’s going on there and the particular violence we’ve seen over the last few months, it is a much more recent phenomenon.’ I don’t know where to start with this. As a minor point, the nakba (it’s a k, not a q) is not the occupation. The nakba is the ‘disaster’ of 1947/48, when the UN brought a Jewish state into being, when Arab armies were defeated, and when local Arabs were forced (as often as not by Arab armies) out of their villages. The nakba was their own doing, when they launched the invasion. In towns like Haifa, the Jewish leadership pressed their Arab citizens to stay, but Arab leaders from the Arab Higher Committee, told them to go so that Arab troops could take the town. Nothing, absolutely nothing, prevented the Arabs from setting up their own state. Now, the occupation of the West Bank has been going on for decades (though Gaza was abandoned in 2005), but the problem has been, not that the Israelis won’t give up (I’ve mentioned Begin offering 95% of the West Bank), but that the Palestinians will not give up on their idea of a Palestine from the sea to the Jordan. Even now, the Jewish settlements take up no more than 3% of the WB, and the Israelis have offered an equivalent amount of land to compensate. The Palestinian response is, as ever, no. That happened famously after the 1967 war, when the Arab League met in Khartoum and issued a declaration (the Khartoum Declaration) that insisted on ‘the main principles by which the Arab States abide, namely, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it’. Is Israel to blame for that (it has never been rescinded and can be found in similar words in the Hamas Charter of 1988, or in this statement from Hizbullah’s 1985 Risala maftuha: ‘We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev's and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity. Or, as the Fatah Constitution puts it: ‘Armed public revolution is the inevitable method to liberating Palestine.‘

These are all terrorist groups. They refuse even to negotiate, and they play games with Western politicians like yourself, convincing you that the Israelis, not themselves are to blame for the lack of progress in peace talks.

Let me go a bit further. I can’t believe what you have said about Syria. Anyone (including Western governments and intelligence agencies) knew perfectly well how horrible most Arab regimes were and are. The monstrosities of the Iranian regime have been well known since 1979: they hang their victims in public from cranes. Yet the West has never done anything serious to bring them to book. Iran’s (and Syria’s) human rights records have never been hidden. So were those of Saddam Hussein. Of Mubarak. Of Ghadhafi. Of Saudi Arabia (they don’t hang, they decapitate their victims in a public square). Of Algeria. Of Hamas (they kill opponents by throwing them off rooftops). But not till this year have we done anything (and it’s little enough) to stop the violence. Maybe you knew nothing about this till now, but in that case you and your party shouldn’t be supporting boycotts in a region you know so little about.

As for human rights, I think you’ll find that most of the people living in most Arab states would prefer to live in Israel than where they are. Some already take refuge there, notably gay men and women. Back home they can be beaten badly or hanged or thrown from a height. In Israel they can meet together openly, live together, and join in gay pride marches, should they wish. In Israel, women are not discriminated against. They have the same rights as men, they are conscripted into the army, and they suffer none of the discrimination their peers suffer in Muslim countries. Israel’s record on treatment of religious minorities is unsurpassed. I will give you a simple contrast. You may know that Iran’s largest religious minorities is the Baha’i faith, a religion that originated in Iran in the 19th century and currently has adherents in most parts of the world, but almost none in Islamic states. (I have written several books and many articles about them.) As you may have heard, the Baha’is are severely persecuted by the Islamic regime, which has executed over 200 of their leaders, which has destroyed them financially, destroyed their books, refused admission to universities for their young men and women, and has demolished their holiest places and ploughed up their cemeteries. But if you go to Israel (something I heartily wish you would do), you can visit two UNESCO World Heritage Sites belonging to the Baha’is. Here, they have their two holiest shrines (one in Haifa, one near Acco), their international archives, the seat of of their supreme administrative body, and much else, all surrounded by some of the loveliest gardens you can imagine. So, please tell me why a party like yours chooses to boycott Israel and doesn’t say ‘boo’ to Ayatollah Khamene’i and Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad about their criminal activities. Nobody is executed in Israel for adultery, or being gay, or being Muslim, or being a member of the opposition. So why the boycott? Don’t you feel ashamed to be boycotting a country that has achieved so much in such a short time to improve conditions for its citizens, yet can’t drum up the energy and interest to speak out against regimes that kill and torture and support terrorism or arm terror groups (as Iran and Syria do)? Israel is a genuine democracy that includes all its citizens, Arab and Jew. It has no system of apartheid in any part, despite wild claims to the contrary. Saudi Arabia operates an apartheid system, within which it bans non-Muslims from certain areas and forbids Jews to enter under any circumstances. Why not boycott a country that really does carry out human rights abuses? The Green Party has said that ‘There is no place for capital punishment in a criminal justice system which is compassionate, just and respectful of human rights. No country or state should retain the death penalty in its criminal justice system.’ Israel, as you should know, abolished the death sentence from the beginning and has only hanged a single person and that for good reason: Adolf Eichmann was a chief organizer of the Holocaust, and it’s hard to see who the Jewish state could have let him live. But today, Israeli gaols are filled with Palestinian murderers, chiefly terrorists. Recently, two young Arab men were placed in prison to stand trial for the sickening slaughter of five members of a Jewish family, the Fogels, in a settlement called Itamar. They stabbed to death the father, mother, two little boys, and beheaded a five-month-old baby girl. Those boys will never face a death sentence in Israel. In Gaza, people danced in the streets when they heard of the murders. That was last March. Iran hangs on almost a daily basis, Saudi Arabia has regular work for its executioner, China has the highest rate of executions in the world. But you boycott Israel.

To quote further from the interview: ‘Ultimately, Ms Lucas explained, the Green Party's support of the boycott should be seen in the tradition of activism rooted in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. "For many people I think that's what they're looking at and thinking if we did it on South Africa…", her voice trails off. "And there are many parallels that are drawn.”’ What parallels exactly? Let me remind you that, in apartheid South Africa, the regime aimed to keep blacks and whites wholly separate. There were segregated buses and trains, segregated restaurants, segregated beaches, segregated schools, segregated hospitals (and ambulances),and segregated cinemas. Blacks lived in townships, whites on farms and in the cities. Blacks were disenfranchised. And on and on, as I’m sure you well know. But here is the point: not one of those segregations applies to Israel. There are no places reserved to Jews or to Arabs, no all-Arab public transport, no Arab-only or Jewish-only cinemas or swimming pools or schools or – importantly – universities (where Arab students form 20% of the student intakes, in accordance with the Arab percentage in the general population. When I was in the Hebrew University last March, everywhere I went I saw Arab students, including a possible majority of women. So, go ahead and draw parallels, and go ahead and boycott Israel to punish Israelis for their attempt to create a rounded and balanced society, and stay shtum about countries in the region that have their own apartheid ambitions. For decades now, Christians have been forced out of Arab countries, notably the West Bank. The only Middle Eastern country that has seen a rise in the Christian population is Israel. But why not boycott Israel for that? I have yet to hear a single politician raise his or her voice to protest that exodus of Christians from their homes.

I’m not writing this letter in a spirit of antagonism, and I hope you don’t feel that I have. I wouldn’t be writing this if I felt antagonistic. We have a lot in common I too have a degree in English (before the Arabic, Persian etc.) and I greatly admire your principled support for homeopathy (my wife is a well-known homeopath and author of books on homeopathy and women’s health; I was for a long time chairman of the UK Natural Medicines Society). In so many ways, I admire what you do and a great deal of what you stand for. That’s why I’m taking the trouble to write, and at this ridiculous length! I hate to see someone who normally impresses me peddling such a tawdry notion as the boycott of Israel. I have a strong feeling that you simply don’t know much about the history of all this, or about issues such as Arab anti-Semitism. I believe that if you knew a lot more about that anti-Semitism and its corrupting influence on Arab and Iranian and Pakistani society you would begin to realize why the boycott and disinvestment campaign is driven, as much as anything, by an unyielding hatred for the Jewish people. Delegitimization of Israel has become the focus for Fatah, Hamas, and other groups, now they are prevented from taking suicide bombers into Israel proper. It’s not a case of taking my word for any of this, and hoping I’m not a nutcase after all. You can delve into website after website to read for yourself how far the Nazi defamation of Jews has merged with older Islamic hatred. Not many years ago, anti-Israel marchers, composed of both radical Muslims and far-left activists appeared on the streets of London, Amsterdam and elsewhere chanting ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’. The boycott is a major strand in the delegitimization campaign, and it has its roots in anti-Semitism. Such actions are carried out by much the same people as though who define the UK or the USA as ‘terrorist states’, who see dark conspiracies everywhere, who state in a matter-of-fact way that Jews were behind 9/11 and that thousands were warned to stay away that day. It is not Israel that these agitators and conspiracy theorists hate, it is the presence of Jews on Islamic territory, and they will do all they can to suborn honest politicians like yourself into believing their upside-down world view, by manipulating your best intentions to their ends.

Forgive such dramatizing. I only want to get across to you just how vile this hatred for Israel has become, to give you a quick glimpse into what it does to the truth. I have written enough for one sitting. If you have read thus far, thank you for taking the time to do so. Beyond this, there are two things you should do. The first is to read more about this topic. To start with, why not read Robin Shepherd’s excellent and recent study A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem with Israel ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/State-Beyond-Pale-Europes-Problem/dp/0753827131/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310943586&sr=1-1). After that, perhaps any of the Israel texts by Alan Dershowitz, such as The Case for Israel ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Israel-Alan-Dershowitz/dp/0471679526/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310943761&sr=1-1). This book is much hated by the anti-Israel brigade, but I have always found him sane and reasonable.

More importantly, perhaps, you have to spend some time in Israel. There are two ways to go: the Israeli embassy will happily get you there (and may even cover the cost of your trip), but you may not like to go about with an official guide. So just book yourself on a flight to Tel Aviv and have a holiday.

There, that’s it. I’m more than happy to answer any questions you may have (provided I can answer them!). Forgive my impertinence in making this demand on you, but I deem it too important to let lie. A forest of lies surrounds Israel like great Birnam wood. I want to help you see through the thickets in order to make the most moral and ethical decision you can.



Dr. Denis MacEoin

Newcastle upon Tyne

A Letter to the Secretary of State for Defence

Last Sunday (15 May), I was at a wonderful conference called 'We Believe in Israel'. It was held in London, and almost 2000 people were there. The choice of sessions was overwhelming: it seemed hard to miss a good one.

The plenary session in the morning was opened by a speech by Dr. Liam Fox, Secretary of State for Defence, a man rightly praised for his pro-Israel attitudes. However, on this occasion, he said a number of things that sparked a very negative response on the part of half or more of his audience, who booed him. I'm sure he was taken aback, thinking that most of what he had to say was designed to please a Zionist crowd.

Afterwards, I felt he needed a briefing on what had gone wrong, but I wasn't sure where he'd get one. Whoever had advised him when preparing his speech had got several points badly wrong, and I wasn't sure that he would turn to the Israeli embassy or anyone else who might explain things. So I wrote a long letter in an attempt to bring some clarity into his life. The letter is on its way to the Ministry of Defence, and I hope he reads it.

It won't do any harm to spread knowledge of this letter more widely, so here it is. Any comments will be helpful. And, no, my timing was wrong, so there's no reference to Obama's horrendous call for Israel to return to the Auschwitz borders.

Rt. Hon. Dr. Liam Fox
Secretary of State for Defence

Dear Dr. Fox,

I have just returned from the ‘We Believe in Israel’ Conference, held in London on Sunday. Your opening speech to a large and sometimes hostile audience was impressive and, for the most part, nuanced, and I want to congratulate you on it and, rather belatedly, on your address to this year’s Herzliya Conference, which was outstanding. Your love for Israel and the support you offered her were obvious from the outset. If only more politicians could see this matter as you do…..

But you must have been dismayed and somewhat puzzled by the reception some of your remarks received. It may have seemed unfair to have such a pro-Israel speech countered in parts by hostile voices, and that is to be regretted. But there is, I think, a silver lining, in that this provides an opportunity to explain why those matters were deemed contentious by fifty per cent or more of your audience. Given the overall composition of that audience, it’s clear that they enjoyed and agreed with the largest part of what you said. I don’t doubt that, if asked, everyone would have agreed that your heart was in the right place, but that you had been misled, as often as not by nuggets of received wisdom which most or all of us think mistaken. So, what about the other passages?

The first one to draw my attention was your eulogy of British treatment of Jews and then Israelis during the Mandate and around the time of Israeli independence. I don’t have access to your text, but I remember that you spoke highly of British support for Jews and unprejudiced assistance in the creation of Israel. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite, and I say this with sorrow as a British patriot willing to defend this country on a broad front. After the White Paper of 1939, Britain closed Palestine to almost all Jews. This had an immediate impact, since it prevented thousands of European Jews trying to flee the impending catastrophe in their homelands, shutting off what might have been their safest place of refuge. After the war, Britain imprisoned many thousands of concentration camp survivors in camps on Cyprus and turned back attempts by other Jews to land on the shores of the Mandate. In 1948, as the Israeli war of independence was about to break out, Britain threatened to intervene on the side of Egypt. At the same time, Britain left forts, weapons and ammunition for the Arabs and nothing for the Jews, with the strong implication that they hoped for an Arab victory, which would drive the Jews out of the country. During that war, Transjordan’s army was led by thirty-eight British officers. And there has long been a perception that, like the Quai d’Orsay, Britain’s Foreign Office has always been strongly pro-Arab.

I’m sure you can appreciate why your expression of a rose-tinted picture of British-Jewish and British-Israeli relations did not go down too well with those parts of your audience who were aware of these more negative facts. However, let me add that, in the many years I have been privy to Israel advocacy circles, I have never come across anti-British sentiments. You are doubtless aware of that yourself. All I would ask, then, is a greater measure of consciousness on your part. Some measured affirmation of the difficulties Britain has caused the Jews down the years would go a long way to winning approval from similar audiences in future.

Now I must address those three issues about which Sunday’s audience grew vocal in disagreement. These were three areas on which your listeners felt you had misrepresented the facts, not about past history, but about matters that touch more nearly on the present day and the hopes for a valid peace process. I hope I did not misunderstand you in any of these.

1967 borders
At one point you stated that any final settlement would require Israel to return to her 1967 borders. That is not true. The relevant UN resolution 242, whose chief author was the British peer Lord Caradon, affirmed the principle that there should be ‘withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’. That resolution was accepted by Israel but flatly rejected by the PLO, a rejection that lies at the root of later conflicts. As you may know, Caradon and his fellow drafters deliberately omitted the definite article before the word ‘territories’, leaving the interpretation of which lands should be vacated by Israel to future negotiations. He did so because he knew the 1967 borders were ‘inadequate’ and exposed Israel to attack on its eastern flank. No Israeli government will ever accept a return to those borders, nor will they be compelled to do so in any future negotiations.

Famously, the late Abba Eban referred to the pre-war 1967 lines as ‘Auschwitz borders’, because they exposed Israel to attack: ‘We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz. We shudder when we think of what would have awaited us in the circumstances of June, 1967, if we had been defeated; with Syrians on the mountain and we in the valley, with the Jordanian army in sight of the sea, with the Egyptians who hold our throat in their hands in Gaza. This is a situation which will never be repeated in history.’

Settlements
Certainly, there are few topics in the Israel-Palestine debate more contentious than this one. There is almost universal condemnation of Jewish settlements, from the White House to the UN to the EU. Your statement on Sunday that called the settlements as ‘illegal’ and an ‘obstacle to peace’ was not therefore unusual in that context, but you will recall how much disagreement it provoked in the hall. You can hardly be blamed for expressing an opinion that is so widely shared, but I do think you should pause to ask if what you said is true.

A close examination of the claim of illegality will show where the fallacy lies. The settlements are not illegal. Controversial, certainly, and, in the case of the tiny, trailer-camp units, as much condemned in Israel as outside. The legal defence is simple. When Israel entered the West Bank (Samaria and Judaea) in 1967, it did so to protect its own citizens from attack by Jordan. In such a situation, occupation is provoked and justified by enemy aggression. British occupation of part of Germany in 1945 was, by the same argument, wholly legal, and has never been challenged. The West Bank had previously been illegally annexed by Jordan in 1950, following its conquest in the 1948-49 conflict. Thus, in 1967, the Israelis did not occupy Jordanian sovereign territory. Nor did they occupy sovereign Palestinian territory since the Palestinians had not acted on earlier resolutions to establish an Arab state alongside Israel. This means that the West Bank is merely ‘disputed territory’, not illegally occupied sovereign land.

Apart from this, it should not be forgotten that the Jewish people have a long connection to Judaea and Samaria, a connection that long precedes Arab conquest in the 7th century. In the 20th century, several settlements were set up with full legal recognition, in places like Neve Ya’cov and the Etzion Bloc, or older habitations like Hebron. Neve Ya’cov was forcibly abandoned when it faced attack from Jordanian troops in 1948 and was occupied by Jordan. Only when Jews returned there after 1967 was any question raised about legality. The same is true of the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion).

I do recognize that, in your position as a member of the UK government, you cannot say that the settlements are not illegal’, but on Sunday I think a more nuanced expression might have helped allay people’s fears that, despite your public Zionism, you subscribed to the accusation of illegality. This is not easy territory, but it is territory about which Israel cannot afford to back down. It is all but certain that any future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will result in an acceptance of the major settlements as part of Israel, in exchange – it has been suggested – for unoccupied areas of comparable size.. More worrying than the Israeli retention of little more than 5% of Arab land is the current Palestinian position, which refuses to have even a single Jew living in its territory. This may prove a major obstacle in the case of Hebron, where the small Jewish population is already subject to severe restrictions. In Israel, of course, Arabs form some 20% of the population, with equal rights under the Constitution.

Jerusalem
A touchier topic, on the whole, than settlements, and with the potential to upset an audience like Sunday’s. But this is less clear-cut than the other issues, since the future status of Jerusalem is entirely negotiable. In some ways, the issue revolves less around legality and more around religion and emotion on both sides, though more, I think, the city’s centrality to Judaism, I suggest, is more relevant than its historical character for Muslims. I should, perhaps, explain that I’m a former lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies and that I have a keen sense of what is involved here. For Jews, it is not just the division of the city (something you consider necessary) that is hard to contemplate, but the way that division would take place. By taking East Jerusalem, the Palestinians would gain complete control over the Temple Mount, the holiest place in the world for Jews. Despite cries to the contrary, neither Jerusalem nor the Temple Mount have ever had much importance for Muslims or Arabs. In the early phase of his mission, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers prayed towards Jerusalem, following the practice of the Jews in Medina. But about ten months after his move to Medina, he abruptly swung right round during prayers to face Mecca, literally turning his back on Jerusalem. There is even a verse in the Qur’an which records this change of direction and states that it is preferable to the previous one. By contrast, Jewish worship has focused on the city from the time of King Solomon, and remained firmly fixed there throughout the long years of the diaspora. Given that Muslims have Mecca and Medina (both cities closed to Jews), Muslim control over east Jerusalem would be unjust and might lead to renewed conflict over the mere fact that it had fallen into non-Jewish hands.

In Jewish hands, Muslims would enjoy the same rights they already have of access to the twin mosques on the Mount, the al-Aqsa and the Qubbat al-Sakhra. Israeli treatment of non-Jewish holy places has always been exemplary. Haifa contains an extraordinary UNESCO World Heritage Site, which contains the gardens, shrines, and international headquarters of the Baha’i religion. In Iran, by contrast, all the Baha’i holy places have been bulldozed and built over, and their cemeteries trashed. That alone causes me to consider Israeli control preferable to any by the Islamic waqf authorities. The Waqf authorities are guided by shari’a law, whose principles form the foundation of the Palestinian Authority’s Basic Law. In general, shari’a rulings are deeply prejudicial to the rights of Jews and Christians, and give no status at all to the followers of any other religion. By contrast, the Israeli Law for the Protection of Holy Places (1967) provides a more equitable basis for the control of Muslim, Jewish and Christian sites throughout the Old City.

There is another reason for Jewish concern. In Hebron, you can visit the Ma’arat HaMachpela, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, secondary only to the Temple Mount in Jewish affection and veneration. I visited it in March, and was deeply impressed by this large building dating from the days of King Herod, i.e. the same period as Herod’s Second Temple, of which the Kotel or Western Wall remains. Because Hebron is chiefly Arab and Muslim, the Tomb, which is believed to be the burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca and Leah, comes under Islamic control. The result is pitiable. Jews are allowed to use only 20 per cent of the edifice and are not allowed to improve or develop it in a seemly manner. Nor is any form of historical or archaeological research permitted. This naturally gives rise to concern for the Jewish and Christian sites in east Jerusalem should they be made subject to shari’a law, which is harsh regarding churches, synagogues, cemeteries, and other sacred sites.

This is difficult to put into political words, but it is immensely important to Jews who, after some two thousand years have regained a measure of access to their holiest sites only to see them at risk of being repossessed by the same people who banned them from entering the Tomb of the Patriarchs for 700 years. There has to be a better solution to the issue of Jerusalem, therefore, than a crude division of the city, which, incidentally, is mentioned some 700 times in the Bible but not once in the Qur’an.

I did not at first intend to write at such length, but the subjects demanded their say. I hope you will not interpret this as a letter of criticism: it is not. I understand that official UK policy on these matters makes it hard for you to introduce another note, however correct that might be. But I believe your work in this field would benefit from closer discussions from a representative grouping of pro-Israel activists, both Jews and non-Jews like myself. There is no shortage of organizations, and just about as many opinions. Nonetheless, I think the points I have made do come close to what most of us believe.

Yours sincerely,


Dr. Denis MacEoin

A Letter to the Quakers

Teresa Parker
Middle East Programme
Society of Friends

Many years ago, I came very close to joining your ranks and becoming a Quaker. I have generally admired much of what you do and some of what you believe. But I am now thoroughly grateful that I did not become a Quaker then, for I fear I would have to abandon you now. I find myself frequently disappointed in the Quaker attitude to Israel, and more so given your recent decision to boycott settlements in Samaria and Judaea, which you regard as illegal under international law. That is, of course, highly inaccurate. There is no firm position in international law concerning these settlements, and authorities veer from one side to the other and will do so until the matter is resolved by a future peace treaty or other instrument. The only point I wish to make in this regard is that, so long as the legal position remains unclear, you have no right to declare the illegality of the settlements, particularly since you are not a properly constituted legal body with the authority to pronounce on such matters. There is something high-handed about your position, which clashes with traditional Quaker belief in the virtues of humility.

I have spent much of the past week composing a letter to a 12-year-old girl called Tamar Fogel, and distributing it to people around the world, who have written in support of the letter and the sentiments it expresses. The letter will be delivered to Tamar before Passover next week, by her grandparents. Even for a professional writer like myself, it proved a difficult letter to write. Tamar is the oldest of the three surviving children of the Fogel family. On returning from her Sabbath youth club three weeks ago, she found her parents and three of her siblings murdered in a bath of blood. Her mother had been stabbed to death, her father and two brothers had had their throats slit, and her 3-month-old sister had been beheaded in her cot. The perpetrator or perpetrators have so far remained in hiding. When news of this atrocity was made known, Palestinians in Gaza handed out sweets and danced in the streets of Gaza City.

The massacre of this harmless family, all residents of one of the settlements you so despise, is only the latest in a long line of atrocities that have been carried out against Israeli civilians. Palestinian terrorist attacks have no excuse, yet I have never seen a supporter of the Palestinians march or protest against the very great evil they represent. A website entitled ‘Quakers in Israel and Palestine’ says almost nothing about Israel, but records a long list of activities you have undertaken in the Palestinian territories. An American website called ‘Quakers With a Concern for Palestine-Israel’ has a series of links, not one of which presents the Israeli point of view, but most of which reiterate a pro-Palestinian position. Does that seem balanced to you? Fair? Helpful? Likely to work towards peace? Another site, entitled ‘Quakers in Britain’ has a page named ‘Israel-Palestine’. It shows a photograph of part of Israel’s security barrier, to be precise a section of the barrier which is a wall. Only 3% of that barrier is a wall, the rest is a fence. Why did Quakers choose to show the wall when the fence would have been more representative? Does that match Quaker ideals of fairness and justice? The barrier has reduced terrorist attacks within Israel by around 90 percent. Might it not have been appropriate to have made that clear? You will know that images of this wall sector are routinely used by groups and individuals who seek to defame Israel and who mischaracterize the barrier and the reasons it is there. Can you explain how Quaker ideals sit alongside those of groups motivated by anti-Semitism and hatred for the Israeli state?

Palestinians have done much to worsen their position. While sympathizing with their plight, fairness demands we take notice of their many acts of self-defeat and hatred. They have fought wars against Israel and killed thousands in terrorist actions. They continue to do so, and their boldness in semi-military action grows year by year. Israel has done much to help them and for over 60 years has appealed to them to accept the legal status of Israel and to build their own state alongside it. Yet their newspapers, their school textbooks, their radio, their television and their mosque sermons are filled every day with exhortations to kill Jews, with appeals to young children to grow up to become suicide bombers, with blood-curdling cries to launch a jihad once more against the Jews, ‘those sons of apes and pigs’. Speaking in English, Palestinian politicians preach peace, but in Arabic they deliver a message to their people of ‘No surrender’ and predict a day when there will be no more Jews and no more Israel. Does it not seem to you that Quakers might be better employed in trying to break down these dreadful barriers of hate and militancy? But do Quakers have the courage to do so? You have made many friends with Palestinians, but fewer, to my knowledge, with Israeli Jews or, for that matter, Israeli Arabs.

If the Quaker movement stands, in the eyes of non-Quakers, for anything, it is the pursuit of peace. Your efforts, when directed to that end, have been commendable. We all hope and work for peace. It is an essential quality of civilized human life that all of us, be we religious or secular, should make efforts in the path of peace and reconciliation, for without them civilized life is not possible. I do not, however, believe that boycotting one side in this conflict is conducive to peacemaking. Through her tears, the little girl Tamar, whom I mentioned above, told an interviewer that she was resolved to continue in the path set by her parents. Her surviving family, her grandparents, aunts and uncles are all religious people, much like yourselves. They work hard to build something that symbolizes the survival and endurance of the Jewish people against the odds. No people in history have gone through the persecution, brutalization, and contempt that he Jews have done. We all thought that, when the Holocaust had ended, its horrors would speak to mankind and mark the end of hatred of the Jews. And yet it is clear today that anti-Semitism is as strong as it ever was, perhaps stronger. Hatred of Israel has become a mask for hatred of the Jews. Why else would the one Jewish state be singled out for the daily opprobrium that is heaped on it? Why do ordinary young people march in the streets chanting ‘Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas’? Not in Berlin in 1939, but in London in 2009. Having survived the Holocaust and returned to their homeland after 2000 years, the Jews are not going to cave in to your boycott or any other trick that singles them out for punishment, much as Hitler singled them out.

For over 60 years, the Jewish people have done all in their power to make peace with their neighbours. They have given up Sinai and Gaza, and they will give up most of the West Bank when a reasonable deal has been made with their enemies. What have the Palestinians given in return? In 2000, Yasser Arafat walked away from an offer at the Camp David Summit that gave him 97 percent of what he had asked for. He then started a pre-planned second intifada, in the course of which over 1000 Israelis and over 4000 Palestinians were killed. While Israeli hospitals continue to treat Palestinians of all kinds, the Palestinians have offered a steady diet of violence, from suicide bombings to bullets to car bombs. They fire rockets on civilian communities, they target children, they teach their children to kill. No Israeli school teaches violence. So why do people of peace like yourselves prefer to boycott Israelis and to leave untouched the men of violence? Perhaps you will say you work among the Palestinians to inculcate a love for peace. If that is so, may I say in sorrow that your efforts have borne no fruit? As time passes, the Palestinians grow more violent, not less, more dismissive of gestures for peace, not less.

You have a role to play in the Middle East, but at present I believe you are playing the wrong one. The settlements are a prickly subject that will be settled in its own time. It is fairly certain that most of the settlements there now will remain. The Palestinians and the Jordanians say that no Jew will be allowed to remain on Arab soil. Yet 20% of the population of Israel is Arab. Racism against tolerance, surely. I think it would be better if you could agree not to interfere in the settlements, for which you seem ill-equipped. Work with both sides, by all means. Give comfort to the Jews and good counsel to the Arabs. Associate yourselves with activities like Israel’s Save a Heart Campaign, which gives heart transplants to Palestinian children. Much good can come of that, and your help would be much welcomed. Go to Hebron and see for yourselves how the small Jewish population is restricted to 3% of the town, on pain of death. Much reconciliation is needed there. Visit Givat Haviva's Jewish-Arab Center for Peace, the Parents Circle-Families Forum, the four Hand in Hand schools in Israel and the West Bank, and many, many more. Such projects offer a positive response to alienation and fear. Boycotts only exacerbate enmity.

I do not doubt your motives, your sincerity or your commitment. I only ask if you are properly informed about the realities of the Middle East and whether you do not take your information from tainted sources. You must act by your own lights, but I fear that is exactly what you are not doing. You have a mission to the Palestinians, and that is essential. But I believed you also have a mission to the people of the settlements, to children like young Tamar Fogel and her two brothers. The horror she witnessed will never leave her. But nor will the determination she has to build on the foundations left by a loving mother and father. If it is possible, I would ask you to visit some settlements and to sit in silence with the people who live in them. But do not boycott them or the produce they work so hard to grow.


Yours sincerely,


Denis MacEoin

Letter to Edinburgh University Student Association

The following letter was written to the EUSA following their vote to boycott Israel because of its 'apartheid'.



The Committee
Edinburgh University Student  Association



May I be permitted to say a few words to members of  the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and  Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence  Elwell Sutton, two of Britain’s great Middle East experts in their day. I  later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies  at Newcastle University. Naturally, I am the author of several books and  hundreds of articles in this field.

I say all that to show that I am  well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am  shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a  simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in  Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against  reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to  see for themselves.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression  that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in  matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims  of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being  anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary  criticism of Israel. I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no  boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly  referred to as a ‘Nazi’ state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor?  Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS?  The Nüremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything  remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more  than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that  there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No  honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it  deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is  as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think  of.

Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be  a situation that closely resembled things in South Africa under the apartheid  regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of  Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of  university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on  the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be  the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have  exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights  as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in  Israel, where they have their world centre; Ahmadi Muslims, severely  persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places  of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of  the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general  population). In Iran, the Baha’is (the largest religious minority) are  forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why  aren’t your members boycotting Iran?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere  they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport,  they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they  go to cinemas alongside Jews – something no blacks could do in South Africa.  Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians  from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.  

In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender  apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often  escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me  that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries  like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a  mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be  silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only  country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that  supposed to be a sick joke?

University is supposed to be about learning  to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach  conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view  against one or more others. If the best Edinburgh can now produce are students  who have no idea how to do any of these things, then the future is bleak. I do  not object to well documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly  intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific  in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest  upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’s clear  that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight  back by killing their own citizens. Israeli citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do  not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no  demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia,  Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the  world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken  in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to  gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the  Baha’is.... Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit  on anyone who voted for this boycott.

I ask you to show some common  sense. Get information from the Israeli embassy. Ask for some speakers. Listen  to more than one side. Do not make your minds up until you have given a fair  hearing to both parties. You have a duty to your students, and that is to  protect them from one-sided argument. They are not at university to be  propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into  anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world,  which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish  state in the 1930s (which, sadly, there was not), don’t you think Adolf Hitler  would have decided to boycott it? Of course he would, and he would not have  stopped there. Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of  anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear  signs that it has done so and is putting down more. You have a chance to avert  a very great evil, simply by using reason and a sense of fair play. Please  tell me that this makes sense to you. I have given you some of the evidence.  It’s up to you to find out more.

Yours sincerely,


Dr. Denis  MacEoin

An Open Letter to Tamar Fogel

Dear Tamar,

We have never met, nor are we likely to. I am not a Jew nor an Israeli, though for many years I have defended both Jews and Israelis from the physical and political attacks that are made on them. I live in England, though I'm Irish. The Irish used to be great enemies of the English, who did bad things to us, but who gave us their language, something in which we excel. But many years ago, long before you were born, the enmity between the Irish and the English faded. We are not the same people, but we no longer hate each other, and the English Queen will soon make her first visit to Ireland, in a gesture that the past is past, that we are now allies, not enemies.

The most important for you is to be sure that the only guilty parties were the terrorists who carried out the slaughter. And I need not tell you that these were not the first Palestinian terrorists to take out their hate, their resentment, and their jealousy on helpless Jews living on Jewish land.

I have watched you in two videos, the first time when Binyamin Netanyahu came to visit you and your grandparents, and I still remember the force with which you challenged him, such an important man and such a young girl. And after that your tears. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now that the dead are at peace, and your two living brothers may grow up with less dark memories, but that you above all are old enough and aware enough to carry the most terrible memories through the rest of your life. But I also saw a second video in which you spoke to a reporter from Israeli National Television, and here your tears gave way to a most articulate, awesomely mature, and moving assertion of your right to live in Samaria. I wish every Palestinian could watch that video with an Arabic voice-over. Perhaps there and then they might see that their fight against Israel is worthless, that you will never surrender, that you will not let yourselves be led to the slaughter as happened all those years ago. Rabbi Chaim Potok once wrote that there are no more gentle Jews. He did not mean that Jews are no longer kind or good, but that they now know how to fight back. Kol Hakavod for every word you spoke.

You will grow up among strong people, and you will finally marry and have children of your own. That may seem far off to you, but to someone much older like myself, it will happen in no time at all. When that happens, and when your two brothers find wives and have children, there will soon be more Fogels than before. They cannot substitute for the dead, but they can stand up and speak for them down the long years to come. Your life, however much you may wish it otherwise, will be overshadowed by the terrible event that has fallen on you. You will ask questions and you may find answers. After the Shoah, many rabbis tackled the question of hester panim, asking why HaShem had seemed to turn his face away from his people. I am not a Jew, and I cannot provide easy answers to those questions. You must seek your own answers from your rabbis and in your scriptures. One answer may be found in a short sound recording that was made in Belsen shortly after its liberation by British forces. It was made by the BBC and contains at the end description of a Shabbat service held by a British rabbi, at the end of which the survivors stand and sing HaTikva. They are weak, they are out of tune, some of them will still die: but they are singing in open defiance of the very great Nazi evil that had overwhelmed them and their families. Three years after that, the state of Israel was established.

I'm writing, first because I'm a writer and that's how I express my feelings best. But also because I want to convey just how many people's thoughts are with you. You have your grandparents and aunts or uncles, and after that you have your small and concerned community of I'timar, but beyond that you have a world of people, Jews and non-Jews, who stand with you in your grief. We feel helpless, not knowing what we can or should do to help, yet longing to do so. How many people can say they truly love the murderers who came to your house that night? Some may hand out candies and dance in the streets, but how meaningful is that? They love themselves and their own dreams of glory, but who can truly love men of blood, people who kill infants in their cradles?

For you the greatest problem of the next few years may be this: you are still a child and you deserve to be reading funny books and watching films and playing games and going to your youth club; but many will treat you as an adult before you are entirely ready for adult responsibilities. You do seem older than your years, but you should not be rushed into adulthood. I am sure your grandparents and others will understand this and will do their best to protect you from those who want to take your childhood away from you.

Enough of the advice! Everyone likes to give advice. You don't have to listen to any of it, and advice isn't really the reason I've written. You are in my thoughts and in the thoughts of millions of other people because the murder of your family has gone so deeply into so many people's hearts. The list of atrocities carried out on Jews, not just in Israel but beyond, is very long. As a result, it's easy to let them all blur together into one mass. But every so often one death or a group of deaths stands out and demands special attention. One day there will be a memorial to the sacrifice your family made. People from far away may come to visit it. Photographs of it will appear in the press. But the true memorial will be you, an ordinary girl, with a torn heart and a wounded soul, going to school, going to shul, making friends, baking bread, sewing, cooking, reading, blushing when a certain young man comes to speak to you, going to Kever Yosef to marry him, giving birth to your first child. I just mean to say that no-one expects from you heroic deeds, no-one wants you to have to shoulder resistance to all the evils you know better than most. It is your ordinary deeds, the day-to-day living of an ordinary life that are for the creators of horror the most painful thing of all, that Jews will continue to live on land sanctified by Jewish blood. At the end of that recording made in Belsen, someone calls out 'Am Yisrael Chai'. By living, the killers only bring eternal disgrace on themselves, their families, and everyone who shelters them. By living, you make clear to everyone that the People of Israel live, that their light will not be snuffed out, and that when your enemies have gone to dust and seen a darkness beyond measure engulf them, the light of the Jews will illuminate the nations. Grow and be happy and tell us what you see on your journey.

Loosening the belt

I’ve been thinking this through for some time. Think, think, think. It clears the brain and makes all things evident: I recommend it to all my friends and relatives. What I’ve been thinking is simple: why don’t we destroy Israel? I don’t mean some mild redrawing of Israel’s fascist boundaries, or putting all those shameless Israeli women in burkas. They should be so lucky. No, I mean the hot patootie, wipe it off the face of the earth, off the map, off the pages of time, as my little chum Mahmoud There Are No Gays in Iran Ahmadinejad keeps telling us to do. I’m inclined to let him do it himself, because he has almost got the wherewithal, but I have some misgivings about putting everything into his hands.
For one thing, half a dozen nuclear bombs on the Zionist Entity would take care of it. No more Israelis, no more Nazi Zionists, no more fascist Jews, no more Christians, no more Baha’is, no more apartheid, no more gays. What’s not to like? There’s only one teensy drawback: Fifty megatons will take out all the Palestinians as well and probably contaminate Gaza and the West Bank. Sorry, Judaea and Samaria. No, that’s not right. Filastin.
Think about it as I have done. It’s not the land we hate. In fact, we love the land, we’ve loved it since 1964, long before the Zionists even heard of it. Before there was ever such a thing as a Jew. So the land is kosher. Actually, no, it’s halal or something. There were Palestinians on this land from before the Flood. It’s in the Qur’an, you just have to read it. Naturally, all this changed when the Jews invaded, following the Holocaust they caused in Germany and the deaths of millions of German Muslims and the SS Peace Corps. They drove all the Palestinians out and created another Holocaust, just like that. So all we have to do this time round is drive the Jews out, back to Germany, to their comfortable gemütlich homes given to them freely by the German Reich. There are many old SS men who will jump at the chance to help them settle in again.
Once the Palestinians return to their homes and take possession once again of those places so dear to their hearts, the homes they left in tears all those thousands of years ago, in the ancient Palestinian city of Tel Aviv and towns and villages everywhere, they will take possession of the lot. Think of that! The shops, the swimming pools, the universities, that neat little network of electric cars, all the businesses and technology centres, the farms, the electric cars, the widescreen high-definition TV sets, the restaurants, the falafel stands, the hospitals, the garden centre on Mount Carmel (we’ll demolish the shrines, of course, just to keep Mr Najdi Ahmadi-Mahmoud happy), the schools, the libraries (I’m not quite sure what those are, but they sound worth a look), the IT centres, Yad Vashem (which we will turn into a museum of the Palestinian Holocaust, which we will name Tadhkar wa Ism), in fact the whole bloody lot.
I got to about this point in my thinking, and I shared my thoughts with all the brothers and sisters out there. It’s not exactly rocket salad, is it, getting rid of the bad guys and putting the good guys in. There’d be an overnight transformation, wouldn’t there? Palestine would be Seventh Heaven, graced by pictures of the shuhada’ and nasheeds chanting everywhere you go. Why worry? But one of the sisters came up with a small problem that needs a bit more thinking. How the f*** do we run the place? She pointed out that the Jews were some sort of geniuses.
‘Geniuses?’ I guffawed. ‘You mean Jewnesses?’
She shook her head. Then she explained to me what a genius is. I must say, I was taken aback. It wasn’t a concept I had come across before. I had heard of martyrs, naturally. But not this. But not to worry, I said. ‘The glories of Arabic and Islamic civilization fly like banners before us….’ She let me go on for a while in similar vein, then she explained about the Noble (or is it Nobel?) prizes. ‘Nearly one hundred and seventy for the Jews,’ she said. I laughed out loud. ‘Is that all? The Muslims pick up Nobel prizes every other day.’
She looked rather worried when she answered me.
‘Actually, Ahmad, they don’t. Even at the most generous, they have only won nine Nobels. Ever.’
‘Well, that’s obvious,’ I told her. ‘Stands to reason. There are far, far more Jews than Muslims. Always have been. And the Nazi Jews are really, really rich. You just have to look around.’
‘Ahmad, there are about thirteen million Jews in the entire world.’
‘So, a couple of million Muslims? We win hands down.’
She shook her head.
‘Actually, we don’t. There are one point six billion Muslims, Ahmad. One point six billion.’
‘But if we throw all those Israeli Jews out or put them where the sun doesn’t shine, there’ll be none left, right?’
‘Not in Israel, no.’
‘So the Arabs and the Muslims get to take over.’
‘Yes.’
‘And they run the hospitals and the laboratories and the science institutes and the IT centres for research and development, and they win a lot of Noble prizes. We could even introduce Noble prizes of our own. We could call it Al-Ja’iza al-Nabila.’
‘Maybe,’ she murmured. ‘Maybe not. And it’s Nobel, not noble.’
‘Why maybe not?’
‘Ahmad, the Muslim world is a mess scientifically.’
‘How can that be?’ I asked, a little sarcastically, because I could see which way this particular wind was blowing. ‘We produced al-Khwarizmi and al-Farabi and Avicenna and Galileo….’
She stopped me, and for a moment I thought she was going to lay a hand on my arm, but I gave her a warning look and the moment passed.
‘Galileo was a Christian,’ she said. ‘As for all the rest, they lived in the middle ages.’
‘Well,’ I defended myself, ‘there’s no reason we can’t become great again.’
‘Ahmad, the countries belonging to the Organization of the Islamic Conference have an average of 8.55 scientists per every 1000 people.’
‘See, what did I tell you?’
‘Ahmad, the world average is 40.7. And the OECD countries have an average of 139.3. The OIC contains some of the richest countries in the world, like Saudi Arabia. Where are the Palestinians going to find the expertise to run all the enterprises you mention?’
‘We’ll patent everything we invent and catch up that way.’
‘I don’t think there have been any Palestinian patents. Now, Pakistan is one of the most active Muslim countries in terms of science. It has produced 8 patents in forty-three years. Israel has more companies quoted on the high-tech NASDAQ stock exchange in New York than any other country outside the United States. In innovation it outshines all its neighbours. Between 1980 and 2000 our neighbours the Egyptians registered 77 patents in the US. Our rich friends the Saudis registered 171. Israelis registered 7,652.’
‘But we have universities,’ I clamoured. ‘And lots of young people, and even more when they no longer have to blow themselves up to show the Israelis who’s the boss.’
‘Ahmad, not a single university from an OIC country is in the top 500 universities list. Did you know that in 1000 years the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in a single year?’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘you’ve made your point. We work slowly but surely. But where can we find help to replace all the Jews once we’ve kicked them out? I mean, Palestine will have to be proud and free. It’s our destiny.’
‘Ahmad, the Jews are the ones with the destiny. All we know how to do is blow ourselves up in public places. That’s not a destiny, that’s mass suicide.’
‘What then? We’ll have to create a new country, a what-do-you-call-it? A Goldene Medina. Won’t our friends help? The Saudis, perhaps.’
‘The Jews were our friends all along. If you kick them out, you’ll just have to grovel and ask them back in again and let them get on with what they were doing in the first place.’
‘And I’ll get a Fa’iza Nabila for that?’
‘I expect you will, Ahmad. You certainly deserve one.’
She squeezed my hand. Quite forward, really, but I let her go on squeezing.
‘Can we give Fa’izat Nabilat to people who blow themselves up? If they kill people, that is?’
‘I expect they’d like that, Ahmad. But you’re forgetting already that we want the Jews to stay. Permanently.’
This time I squeezed back. Impure thoughts went through my head. For the first time in my life, my suicide belt felt heavy. Maybe she would take it off for me.

Last night I went to a concert by the Russian-Jewish-American singer and songwriter Regina Spektor. I was probably the oldest person there, but I was delightful to see so many grey heads among a bunch of teenage fans – a tribute to the range of Regina's writing. It wasn't as great a concert as it might have been: Regina seemed distracted and almost unfriendly throughout; but at the end she revealed that her cellist had died earlier in the tour and that she found it hard to perform with her usual grins and chats with the audience. He'd drowned by accident on the 6th of July (this was the 20th).

Well, that was my evening. I don't know why, but when I looked round the magnificent auditorium, it struck me that there weren't any visibly Muslim women there. Thinking of the same concert hall, one of the finest and most welcoming in Europe, I realized I hadn't seen anyone wearing hijab at the Patti Smith gig I'd been at not long before, or the tango orchestra just after that, or even at the not very good concert of Iranian music I'd attended in a different hall. I've never seen any at an opera performance, or plain old classical music concert.

Now, this may all be quite misleading. After all, I don't go to that many concerts or to many different venues, so it could all be happening elsewhere. But here's the problem: I shop in town once a week, on Friday. 'Town' is Newcastle upon Tyne, which is a small city in the North East of England. Newcastle doesn't have a large Muslim population compared with places like Birmingham or Bradford, yet on a Friday afternoon I will see dozens of Muslim women in hijab of some sort. Two weeks ago, I counted sixty-four. Some wear the niqab, others look pretty in coloured headscarves and tight jeans or even a short skirt and stockings. I wouldn't expect the niqabi types to turn up at a Regina Spektor concert, but why not a teenager who doesn't look as if religion is the first thing she thinks of when she wakes up in the morning.

Am I being reasonable in wondering where these young women are? Well, yes, I think so. Although they are fairly visible in the main shopping mall, in shops, and even in the Costa's Coffee café my wife and I frequent, they aren't noticeable at cultural events. Does this matter? I think it does. When I carried out my research on Muslim schools, I found on several school websites a prohibition on pupils taking part in music, dance, even gym and games. In one case, a boy was criticized for wanting to play cricket for Pakistan, since cricket is one of the most disgusting things anyone can waste his time in. In several other cases, I read that playing chess is forbidden, because he who plays chess, it is as if he has dipped his hand in blood.

Why does this matter, and how is it related to Israel? First of all, I deplore the fact that very few Muslim girls will become ballet dancers, or boys and girls with talent for music ever come to develop that talent, or children who might become great cricketers or footballers or gymnasts or swimmers or divers, ever aspire to take part in the Olympics. This abstention from most forms of popular or elevated culture takes a ghastly toll on young Muslims, both men and women, but particularly women. This self-deprivation is inspired as much as anything by a doctrine known as al-wala' wa'l-bara', which translates roughly to 'Loyalty and Enmity': loyalty to Islam and enmity to everything that is not Islam. Strict Muslims should not make friends with non-Muslims. Muslim women may never marry non-Muslims. A Muslim should not give a Christian workmate a Christmas card or a Jewish boss a Rosh Hashana card. Nor should he attend a Christmas party. Because to do any of these things would be to imitate the unbelievers, the kuffar, and put the Muslim on a par with corrupt and evil non-Muslims.

In the early days of the Yishuv, the original Jewish community in Palestine, relations between Arabs and Jews were not altogether bad. From the 1920s or so, inspired in part by men like Hajj Amin al-Husseini, that began to change, and much of that change was due to the attitude, based on the al-wala' wa'l-bara' doctrine, that the two communities could not and should not live together. The 1948 onslaught against the newly-created Jewish state was frequently defined in these terms. In his recent book, 1948, historian Benny Morris shows that the invasion of Israel was understood as a jihad. It is still regarded that way today. Underlying the Arab rejection of a two-state solution and the demand for a single state, is a belief that Muslims can only live with Jews or Christians when the latter are decidedly in the minority and are under Muslim control.

Israel is one of the most culturally developed countries in the world. Most Jews found it easy, not simply to integrate into Western society, but many became important figures in just about every field of human enterprise, including the arts. Some Muslims have done the same in traditional modes like Persian classical music or calligraphy, others in Western art forms like literature. But overall, the Muslim contribution has not been on the scale one might expect from a world population of 1.6 billion. In Israel, there have been excellent projects to bring Muslims and Jews together through art and other means http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projects_working_for_peace_among_Arabs_and_Israelis, notably Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan, a musical group. But Muslim antipathy to the arts (apart from architecture and calligraphy) limits the work that can be done, since young Muslims often have to get through three barriers, first that antipathy, second issues around al-wala' wa'l-bara', and thirdly the huge resistance to Israel, Jews, and Zionism.

Not long ago, a Muslim woman, Rima Fakih, was elected Miss America. A lot of Muslims thought it was the best thing to happen in a long while, and they were right. The more Rima Fakihs on the Muslim side and the fewer Yusuf al-Qaradhawis the better for everyone. The misery men of the Islamic clergy bring nothing but misery, with their total inability to understand the world around them.

This was a major factor in what went wrong after Israel's founding. The main five Arab states that invaded Israel after the declaration of independence were either members of the UN or in line to receive its recognition. Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were all UN members states, while Transjordan had been created by the League of Nations and would join the UN in 1955 as Jordan. The shame of the invasions lies precisely in the refusal of those Arab states to recognize the authority of a body to whose principles and authority they subscribed. The United Nations was the best expression at that time of a new world order that was brought into being following the Second World War, and membership brought with it both benefits and responsibilities. This was the way countries worked together, the way they obtained their legitimacy in the world community. But many of the Arab states (and others later) wanted to have it two ways: they belonged to the UN and used it as a platform for their speeches and accusations, but they also belonged to the Arab League, a body brought into existence a few months before the UN. When Israel was established by the UN, the Arab League turned its back on it and announced a war intended to destroy both new UN member states. The result of that selfish decision has been catastrophic for both the Israelis and the Palestinians. When I think of the good that would have come of cooperation, I want to weep. A more vibrant Israel, a prosperous Palestine, and no violent deaths on either side, young men and young women becoming singers and dancers and artists and writers and actors, not suicide bombers, not hate-filled monsters who love death more than life, who throw away their own lives and the lives of all those other young people who have died so innocently and so undeservedly down the long years of conflict.

And why? Because of al-wala' wa'l-bara', because Hajj Amin al-Husseini had been chairman of the Palestinian Higher Committee and he loved Nazis and hated Jews, because the Arab League states only pretended to want a new order and really wanted things to stay the way they had been for generation upon generation, and because the UN states were mostly kuffar, and integration into the international community, true integration was unthinkable, because Muslim women won't get into bed with non-Muslim men (unless they want to have their throats cut), and Muslim men will get into bed with Jews and Christians (and never Hindus or Buddhists or Baha'is), but if there are babies they will be brought up as Muslims, because faith and hope only travel in one direction, and the wives must convert too, because love changes nothing and everything, because going to a concert doesn't kill you, and swimming in a swimsuit in a swimming pool doesn't kill you, and playing cricket for Pakistan won't kill you, and all of these innocent, life-affirming things have been banned or denatured until all the beauty is gone, and the longing for beauty too. I want to see a pretty young Muslim woman in a bikini on a beach and to feel desire for her, because that is one of the affirmations of life and beauty. I want this pretty young woman to meet a Jewish man and love him and marry him, and for nobody to turn up at their door with a gun or a knife to kill them. I want a world without niqabs and burqas that make beauty seem like something sick, something to be hidden, because the flesh is corrupt and the body is vile and if a man sees so much as a woman's thumb he will be driven to unfathomable depths of liquid desire, and he will rape her, and she will deserve to be stoned because she let him see her thumb. As a man, I believe a woman's face, the face of a pretty, a beautiful woman, is the loveliest thing there is. I want to see a Muslim woman high up on a diving board at the Olympics, soaring through the air with perfect elegance and grace. If her body is beautiful, that's part of the perfection. A burkini would make her and the sport absurd. I want to see a Muslim woman in the orchestra at my next concert. I have a video of the Algerian singer, Souad Massi singing in French in concert with Marc Lavoine in Paris. She could pass as French, but when she sings in Arabic she's Algerian. The only way she will die will be because her enemies have finally got to her. But if they kill her, they kill themselves in part.

The more that Muslims break from the narrow, bigoted, and maladjusted clerics who try to enforce the principles of al-wala' wa'l-bala', the closer we will be to the day when common sense takes over. Under the Meiji emperor, Japan adopted the principle of Japanese spirit with Western know-how, and the Japanese took full advantage of it. It's time for some Islamic reformer to step up to the plate and start the ball rolling towards integration.

Lies, lies, and lies about lies

I'm going to start this by talking about anti-Semitism. You're probably all aware that anti-Israel activists, when told they are anti-Semites, hotly deny the charge, saying they are just opposed to Israel and its policies. I don't believe them, any of them. Let's start with anti-Semitism itself. We know that for some 2000 years, Jews have been persecuted across Europe and the Middle East, and that this persecution culminated in the Holocaust. The Holocaust had all sorts of knock-on effects, especially in Europe. I was brought up in the shadow of it. All my generation were. One thing the Holocaust did was to make anti-Semitism unpopular. You couldn't admit openly you were an anti-Semite. Only ex-Nazis in the comfort of their private homes in South America or Cairo could get it off their chests, that they still hated Jews, that they still longed for another Holocaust. Everybody else avoided any association with the Nazis and far-right politics. Of course, as time passed, little groups of far-right lunatics stood around in wet fields making the Hitlergrüss and saying Seig Heil, because it made feel better to be absolute nonentities in funny suits. People on the left became pro-Jewish and, for a time, pro-Israeli.

But gradually, mainly in the past twenty years or so, there came a point when people couldn't keep their hatred of Jews pent up any longer. These weren't fascist thugs any longer so much as self-proclaimed liberals and leftists. They became infected with anti-Semitism because they wanted someone to pity and the Jews were no longer pitiable. In Wanderings, Chaim Potok's very readable history of the Jews, he says 'there are no more gentle Jews'. This time round, he argues, the Jews will not let themselves be herded onto railway trucks and shepherded into gas chambers. The young men and women of today's IDF exemplify Potok's declaration perfectly. Pity the Nazi who tries to herd them anywhere.

For some reason, a lot of people don't like this. But they still don't like to be called anti-Semites, because anti-Semitism is a form of racism, and they aren't racists. They think they aren't racists because anti-racism is the keystone of modern right-on politics. But they are racists, so they have a problem. They have a lot of circles to square, and to do that they have employed a range of lies that cast a spell on the media and most of the general public. It goes something like this. The Jews are no longer suffering, but someone must be suffering in order to deserve our pity, and the obvious candidates for victimhood are the Palestinians, because those nice Arabs I met at our conference tell me they are. This must mean that the Jews are... A hard think here, I suppose, then the obvious answer. The Jews, sorry, the Israelis are Nazis. Not 'like the Nazis'. They are Nazis. That sweet young Israeli girl doing her first year in the IDF and feeling pangs of homesickness every night is a Nazi. That boy with a kippa dovening in a field full of tanks is a Nazi. Gilad Schalit is a Nazi.

Next, if there's to be some sort of equivalence, there has to be a Holocaust. What? you say. What? But it's obvious, they reply. There has been a Holocaust of the Palestinians. If this makes you feel nauseated, I don't blame you. You ask, when, how many, where? They sneer and talk about Jenin (51 dead) and say it's worse than gas chambers. And to make this worse, a lot of them deny the real Holocaust, aided and abetted by a UN member state, Iran.

As a result of this warped style of thinking, we are living in a fantasy world. It doesn't matter how many rockets Hamas fire, they are some sort of friendly prank. The separation fence isn't a fence but an 'apartheid wall'. And it doesn't matter how racially mixed and free and democratic Israel is, it is, as we all know, an apartheid state. It's unimportant how many times the Palestinians say they refuse to recognize Israel and to make peace, because we know they are the true peace-makers, and it's the Israelis who are the obstacles to peace.

The thing is, this is all so transparent a three-year-old could see through it. It's like those Visible Man dolls, all its veins and organs and bones on display. Why do so many people fall for all this? A lot of them are students. Where on earth are they studying, what subjects, with whom? Because something basic is wrong with their education. Two weeks ago I went to a lecture on Islamophobia by a rabid anti-Israeli speaker. This man was in his 40s and dressed as if he was sixteen. He spoke in a very loud voice, and he thundered home the message that racism was wrong and islamophobia was wrong. He is a senior lecturer at a university near me. He could not tell the difference between racism and feelings of disquiet about a religion. This is the standard that passes for rigorous across the board today. Nobody wants to think any more, least of all about Israel. They hate Israel with a viciousness that can only originate in dark psychological problems with Jews. I don't know why that is, and I don't know how to solve it, but it's the most dangerous single thing in the world today. I mean it. Hatred of Israel is going to provoke another war in the Middle East, and that war is capable of spreading to Europe, America and beyond. Iran is in the hands of lunatics, and other lunatics have made hatred of Israel the only political issue of any importance in the world. If we don't do something to stop this, a lot of people are going to die. And they won't all be Israelis.

The man in the photograph

It's time I wrote a new blog: the last one is dated August 2009, whenever that was. This evening, I chaired a panel at an event held by the Anne Frank Trust (the UK partner of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam). This evening's discussion was part of a month-long festival being held by the Trust in Woodhorn Museum, near Ashington in Northumberland. The main focus of the festival is an exhibition (one of several) devoted to Anne Frank, her family, their fate, and the events taking place in the world around them. Of her family, only one person survived, her father. She and her sister died in Bergen-Belsen, not that long before the end of the war.

During the discussion, people spoke of ways in which bigotry and hatred could be eliminated, and many worthy things were said about education and asylum seekers and terrorism. But before joining the panel, I had gone round the exhibition again, and two images out of hundreds had stayed in my mind this time. One, which many of you will have seen, shows a man standing half-way in a pit while a bunch of German soldiers idle and chat. One soldier stands next to the man, holding a pistol pointed at his head, and we know that once the picture has been taken, he will shoot his prisoner and let his body tumble into the pit on top of others, no doubt to be followed by many more. It is a disturbing photograph, not least because the prisoner – a Jewish man, we presume – stands awaiting death without cringing, with what little dignity is left to him. There is no-one to bid him farewell, no-one to whisper a prayer in his ear, only the soldiers, who have lost their humanity. Perhaps some of those soldiers are alive today, old men, near enough to death themselves. Are they riddled with guilt? Will there be someone to say comforting words to them and hold their hands on their deathbeds? Who knows? I just know that I wouldn't want to be one of them.

Another photograph in the exhibition is less well known. It shows a Jewish man with a beard. Behind him a German soldier is laughing. Unseen except for his hand, another soldier holds a long razor against the man's neck. Did he cut his throat with it? Or did he let him walk away, secure in the knowledge that, sooner or later, all Jews would die, that he would not even have to stain his uniform with Jewish blood because neater, more humane ways of killing had been introduced? Who knows?

Looking at those two photographs, I come away, like any normal person, with mixed feelings of pity and rage. And I come back to the discussions we had tonight and the assumption that all can be put right so long as we adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All well and good, but I know that being kind to these thugs, seeking to enlist their help in educating their fellow Nazis, or (had it been written then) reading to them slowly from the Universal Declaration would end in raucous laughter and, quite probably, a bullet in my brain. The raw truth is that the only thing that would stop those killers as they go about their duty would be exactly that: a bullet in each of their heads. Against all my normal qualms about killing, I set the fact that, behind the man with the pistol, there is a long line of men, women, and children, each of whom will be made to stand in that pit, and that he means to kill them. And after him, another man with another pistol will down another hundred or thousand until the pit is full and the bodies are buried from sight. Like most of you, I would happily fire the gun.

Chaim Potok once said 'There are no more gentle Jews'. Of, course, there are, millions of them. But what he meant is clear. The next time a thug with a pistol sets out to snuff out Jewish lives, he must reckon with Jews who will not just stand waiting for the bullet, but who know how to use guns themselves. And this, more than anything, is the logic behind Israel. Every time the IDF takes on Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, it makes a statement, that Israel was created as a safe haven for Jews.

Israel is not a nation founded on brute force, but it is a nation made up of individuals who, should they see others at the mercy of brutes and sadists will step up and bat. And every time someone sheds a tear for a Hamas gunman cut down or a suicide bomber put out of action or a missile-firing child-killer shot before he can send his missile aloft, I think to myself that they would not have shed a tear for that man teetering in the pit or that other trying to stop screaming as the razor caresses his neck.

The Land of Mordor

I was sitting in town today, waiting for my wife to return from shopping in Marks & Spencer. To keep things balanced, I now do a second round in Waitrose, so we get the best of both worlds. I was sitting on a bench opposite a window of John Lewis, where they were displaying large-screen televisions, and the televisions were playing clips from films. The first one was that bit during the siege of Helm's Deep, where the Riders of Rohan, led by Gandalf (returned from his fight with the Balrog), charge down upon the massed orcs of the Uruk Hai. Stirring stuff. I first read Lord of the Rings when I was thirteen, forty-seven years ago. It was my first real book, and it gripped me night after night for week after week. It's not great literature, but that's not what JRR Tolkien set out to write. He was a specialist in Old and Middle English. I also specialized in Middle English as part of my first degree. There are great books from that period, but they don't all set out to be literary masterpieces. Many of them, from Gawain and the Green Knight to the Arthurian legends, are about myth, and that's what The Lord of the Rings is about too.

Tolkien's masterpiece tells a myth of great power. In the simp;lest terms, it describes a battle between good and evil, between the Dark Lord Sauron and the forces of good (exemplified by the future king Aragorn, the Elves of Rivendell, and the Hobbits of the Shire). Good wins in the end, as it does in all great myths. The Land of Mordor is ruined and the Shire cleansed. There are echoes here of the Bible, of Arthur, of the Mabinogion.

From the beginning, we know how things stand. There is no mistaking the goodness and strength of Gandalf, the evil of the Ringwraiths. Sauron is evil through and through, as are his orcs, as are the nine Nazgul. The Hobbits epitomize goodness and simplicity, and Aragorn (despite a rocky start) reveals himself as a dedicated enemy of the Dark.

Real life is not as easy, of course. What appears good often turns out to be evil, what seems ill often turns out well. We spend our lives tussling with moral dilemmas, learning who to trust, who to be cautious with. more often than not, people get it wrong. The Germans fell in love with Nazism, learned to hate the Jews, came to put their trust in brute strength and murder. Throughout Europe, communists extolled the People's Paradise of the Soviet Union even as Stalin sent millions to their deaths. Misplaced faith hurts and kills, leads whole nations to commit crimes they will later regret.

I don't have to explain the relevance of this to Israel. Today, millions across the globe self-righteously wish the worst possible harm to befall this small nation. It is not mild criticism, it is a global effort to portray Israel as Mordor, a land whose soldiers, dressed as orcs, march from the Iron Gate to slaughter innocent Palestinians (and harvest their organs). Of course, the myth has been created in reverse. Just as it isn't hard to know who, in The Lord of the Rings, is a good guy or a bad guy, so it should be clear to anyone with a working moral compass who is on the good side or the bad side of the Middle East conflict.

I'm not talking about perfect evil set against perfect good. The real world isn't like that. I'm just looking at the broad picture and our ability as human beings to recognize good and evil within it. When one side uses suicide bombers and bombs set in cafés, buses, and restaurants, rants about how much they want to kill their foe, rejects all forms of peace-making, trains its children in hate, and turns its guns on its own people; and when the other side treats its enemies in its own hospitals, willingly departs from territory, builds a security fence that keeps the bombers out, and supplies its enemy with goods, fuel, and equipment, why is it so hard to tell which side of the border Sauron is on and which Aragorn? When one side has struggled through war and terror to destroy the other, and the other has offered its enemy a state of its own again and again, does it take the brain of a genius to see which way the horses of Rohan are riding?

Tragically, many of the world's finest brains keep failing this moral test. Intellectuals in America, Europe and elsewhere have come and continue to come to the startling conclusion that Israel is the one truly evil state in the world. This astonishing notion marches alongside many other failures of the moral compass. Intellectuals, the media and government are more and more often apologists for radical Islam. Feminists defend female genital mutilation and round on other feminists (like Phyllis Chesler) who condemn it. I recently took part in a TV debate in which one person after another spoke up loudly for a woman's right to wear a full face veil, despite the very obvious disadvantages this has for the woman and the society round her. Just looking at a woman in a burqa or a niqab, it's clear she is being treated as an inferior being, yet plenty in the audience applauded her 'choice'. Intellectuals (rightly) condemn the Transatlantic slave trade, but no voice is ever raised to condemn the larger and longer-lasting Arab and Ottoman slave trade. It has become commonplace to denounce Western empires and colonialism, but when did anyone last speak out about the many Islamic empires and their often devastating impact on countries like India.

Political correctness and multiculturalism have wrought and continue to wreak havoc in our universities and in government. Anti-racists parade their credentials everywhere, but not one of them will ever be seen to condemn Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism. Movements for the establishment or re-establishment of nationalities, from Sri Lanka to Ireland tell us that every people, however small, has right to its own homeland; but the Jews are denied that same right.

During World War II, there was never any doubt where one's loyalties lay. Apart from a few self-serving individuals, like Oswald Mosley and Lord Haw Haw, everyone knew who the enemy was. When bombs were falling every night on British cities, it was hard for anyone's moral compass to swing far off north. The more we knew about the Reich, the more obvious it was that we could not afford to lose the war, because Hitler was a Dark Lord who would enslave or kill us.

And that's the puzzling thing. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't going on in someone's backyard. It's out there for everyone to see. Hamas rockets fell on Sderot, and any visiting journalist (if any had cared to visit) could have been there when they landed. But when Israel moved in to stop the barrages after many years, the world seemed not to know of any provocation and portrayed Operation Cast Lead as an unprovoked attack. All the photographs and film of destruction in Gaza made the front pages and TV screens; but there were no shots of the Gaza that had not been harmed. We all know about this, about this dishonest reporting that is more interested in keeping wounds open than in telling the truth.

But aren't these the same reporters who have been in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in the aftermath of a terrorist attack? Don't they look at the walls in Gaza and the West Bank and see the posters making heroes of young people suborned into killing Jews? Don't they ask themselves, who hero-worships a murderer? What mother sends her children to die in this way, and hands out sweets afterwards? Desperation? Devotion to Palestine? Or simply evil? Not the mother, perhaps. But the men (and women) who send children out with bombs round their waists and who put remote controls in the package so they can detonate the vest should the child have second thoughts. Why should anyone experience a moment's hesitation in calling such people evil?

Frodo carried the ring of power to the Crack of Doom, and Gollum's greed finally carried it into the depths of the mountain, where it was destroyed and Sauron's power lost for ever. If only we had a ring like that and a Crack of Doom to throw it into. What we have instead is Israel itself. Whatever its flaws, it's a healthy country. It stands for values like democracy, freedom, human rights, and a balance between secularism and religion. Set beside its neighbours, it stands out. Good amidst evil may be overstating it. But it needs to be recognized for what it is: a land that promotes good and stands against evil.

The One-way Street

In his next speech, at Bar Ilan University, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to make little or no reference to establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, something the new American administration is pressurizing him to accept. His preference is to return to the earlier 'Road Map', in which demands are made on both sides before they even think of a two-state 'solution'. To many or most observers, it will seem yet another confirmation of Israeli intransigence if the Knesset and the Israeli public continue to deny Palestinians their right to a state of their own. In principle, of course, the Israelis have not and have never had qualms about an Arab state on its borders: they are, after all, already swimmers in a sea of Arab states. So why not just a shrug of the shoulders, a murmured 'davka', and a passport to freedom for those poor dispossessed Palestinians?

If it were only that easy. The problem, of course, is one that anyone with his eyes fully open can see: the Palestinians are intent on the destruction of Israel and the elimination of any Jewish presence in the Middle East (or anywhere else, if they could). Asking for a second state, however desirable, is, at this stage in the game (and perhaps for ever) about as sensible as asking a man whose house is surrounded by gangs of thieves to open all his doors and windows on the grounds that thieves have human rights like anybody else. Thieves do, indeed, have their rights, but not the right to steal other people's possessions. Murderers have alienable rights, but not the right to kill their fellow citizens. But surely, Obama and others may fairly ask, once the Palestinians have their own state, they will settle down and become good neighbours, allowing two countries to live side by side as part of a Mediterranean economic union that will bring prosperity and goodwill to all. And surely Syria and Hezbollah and the good people of Egypt and all those other moderate Muslim of North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and the re-elected Mr Ahmadeinejad and that cuddly Ayatollah Khamene'i, and those peace-loving Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia will all put down their arms and put an end to their hate speeches and anti-Semitic sermons, they will turn their missiles away from Tel Aviv and Haifa and all the cities of Israel, they will beat their proverbial swords into ploughshare and harness the shares to oxen and plough the fields to bring food and affluence and tolerance to all.

It is, of course, all hooey. Gobbleygook. Balderdash. Bosh. Tosh. Piffle. Bilge. Flapdoodle. Flimflam. Poppycock. Bunkum. Boloney. To expect anything like it, to imagine that the die-hard members of Hamas or the Iranian-controlled fighters of Hezbollah or the committed warriors of al-Qa'ida would mutter some platitudes about 'There is a Palestinian state at last, We can all go back to our lives as teachers and philosophers' would confront the stark reality of human nature with a naivete that would be funny if it were not so very dangerous. Perhaps nothing characterizes the attitude of most Western states towards the Islamic world, its governments, its institutions, its religious groupings, its religious leaders, and its entirely ineffective political parties more than an inability to think beyond the limitations of their Western equivalents. For most Westerners, and particularly Western politicians, Islamic ways of thought are counter-intuitive, and yet we cling to to fairytale that they are, at heart, just like us inside. They are, so statesmen and churchmen and journalists proclaim, as amenable to rational thought and the usefulness of secularism as their Western brothers and sisters. And that would seem plausible because there are many Muslims why have adopted Western ways of thinking, who place reason before the dictates of the Qur'an, who stand in orderly queues at the cinema, who work as doctors, lecturers, and restaurateurs, who vote for our favourite political parties, who treat women as equals. But such Muslims are, as often as not, partly or entirely secularized. I'm thinking of the majority of Muslims, for whom such accommodations with Western mores are either unthinkable or forbidden.

An Iranian friend of mine was paying a visit home some years ago. She had official documents to be stamped and had to visit a government ministry. She dressed herself in the obligatory hijab, took off all make-up, made sure her hair was tucked well inside her veil, and made to go through the checkpoint. The guard stopped her and said she had to remove her Western shoes. She pointed to the ground, showing that her shoes were covered entirely by her chador, which reached the ground. He answered that he could hear them. That is what Israel is up against. We have a Palestinian state. We have a peace treaty. The sun is smiling sweetly on us all. God is in Heaven. But there are Jews across the border, there are synagogues, the Temple Mount belongs to us, the Kotel belongs to us, Jerusalem belongs to us because it is an ancient Palestinian capital, a city that the Jews have no connection with at all, and weren't we ethnically cleansed, hasn't our vice-president Ilan Pappe explained all that?

One of the reasons it is a mistake to observe the Islamic world through European or American lenses is that it remains so much closer to the Middle Ages than any of our cultures. I don't mean chronologically, and I'm not even sure that the term 'Middle Ages' fits most Arab, Iranian, or other Islamic societies. But it expresses a mood, a mood that explains why even a technologically advanced and wealthy country like Saudi Arabia resembles nothing more than, let's say, Portugal or Spain under the Inquisition. The need for change, for political, social, and religious reform that grew in European in stages has never taken hold of people's hearts in Islam. Many of the great religious 'reformers' in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men like Muhammad 'Abduh in Egypt, sought nothing but to return Islam to its pristine form, removing all traces of later accretions. The Wahhabis, the Salafis, the Taleban, the Mawdudists and their like are all committed to preserving the ancient order at any cost. And that cost can be very high indeed. Take the Wahhabis, whose clergy are the co-rulers of Saudi Arabia. Their king is popularly described as the Guardian of the Twin Holy Shrines (Mecca and Medina), much as our dear Queen is the Defender of the Faith. In order to protect the two holiest Muslim cities, the Saudi authorities have demolished 80% to 90% of them. The oldest buildings, the sacred graveyards with the graves of the Prophet's family and companions, houses Muhammad lived in. Their have been talks about destroying the grave of the Prophet himself. In its perverted and blinkered way, this makes perfect sense to the Wahhabi mind. More than anything, strict ~Muslims fear idolatry, the worship of anything but God. In the early days of Wahhabi/Saudi rule, they made a fetish out of destroying Sufi and Shi'i shrines at which pilgrims worshipped. But it later occurred to them that people who came to Mecca or Medina while on the hajj pilgrimage were going to these graves (some of which had domes built over them) and praying. So the domes and the other buildings had to come down. When Cromwell's men defaced the statuary in British churches and cathedrals, they were doing much the same, but at least they left the buildings standing.

In a very real sense, the Islamic world remained in all respects closely comparable to Europe in the Middle Ages through to, say the 16th century. Apart from sections of the Ottoman empire (Hungary, Romania, the Balkans, Greece), this world was almost entirely isolated from Europe, and Muslims remained unaware of social, political, scientific, and religious changes taking place elsewhere. It was only from the late 18th century that this changed, with the French invasion of Egypt or the growing British dominion over India. During the 19th century, European powers (Britain, France, and the Netherlands) created colonies that imposed Western rule on Islamic lands. Out of this emerged movements for change, pleas for constitutional government through parliaments, for religious freedom, for Western-style education and much else. By the 20th century change had taken place. In Turkey and Iran, the clergy's power had been greatly diminished. Women started to throw off the veil. And then, around the 1970s, all this progress was slammed into reverse. Islam has rushed backwards, like no society in history.

Part of the problem is that Islamic law postulates that any form of innovation is heresy and will lead to hell. The most minor things have been seized on as indicators of innovation, condemned, and used as the basis for rulings for legal cases out of which a man or woman may be flogged or even executed. In Tudor times, a butcher might be hanged for selling meat in Lent. Among the Taleban it can be as little as wearing one's trousers below the ankle.

But there's something else more relevant to Obama's grasp of what a two-state 'solution' would really mean for Israel. It is this. A distinguishing feature of Islam from the beginning has been a commitment to Muslim supremacy. And that keen sense of superiority (to Jews, to Christians, to pagans, to atheists, to secularists) creates a one-way street. Thus, Muslims demand the implementation of shari'a law in Western countries, and some (like the UK) allow them to act on rulings from shari'a tribunals, in matters like marriage and divorce or childcare. But if a Westerner were to demand a reciprocal arrangement in, say, Saudi Arabia, they would soon find themselves on a one-way flight home or doing time in the local chokey. In the West, Muslim women demand the right to wear veils, even all-enveloping ones, everywhere they go, and, naturally, we grant them that freedom. But should a Western woman turn up on the streets of Tehran dressed as she might at home, it will only be a matter of minutes before one of the Blood of God patrols turns up in a white Toyota, grabs her, and pushed her into the minibus that will come behind them. No reciprocity.

From all sides come cries for Israel to do this or that. Demolish the 'apartheid wall', grant every Palestinian on earth the right of 'return', pack up and go home. But when Israel pulled out of Gaza, things only got worse. When Israelis hand back hundreds of terrorist prisoners, they will be lucky to get a couple of corpses in return. When Israel says it will recognize a peaceful Palestinian state, Mahmoud Abbas gets uppity and says he will never recognize a Jewish state. So everybody gets uppity, not with Abbas, but with Israel. Obama hasn't even mentioned that particularly dirty little trick.

So what's a girl to do? Her tormentors openly declare their intention of raping and murdering her, and all the police can do is say 'Open your legs, dear, and let them get on with it, you know it won't hurt, or grit your lovely white teeth if you need to, just don't let them see you smiling'.

The consensus is that Muslims can always have it their way. If they don't want to make peace, what right have we to force them to? If they say black is white, that the Holocaust never happened, that the Jews are the worst human beings on the face of the planet, that no Jews set foot in the Holy Land of antiquity, that Abraham and Moses were Muslims, that if only they could have a little land, they'd behave better, that murderers are martyrs, that Yasser Arafat was a man of peace, that Islam is a religion of peace, that submission to Islam is the highest form of peace -- if they say all these things and more, all we should do is bow, as Obama bowed to the obnoxious Saudi king, and say 'what else can I do for you, honoured sir?' and then shut up in case we inadvertently offend them again.