The theatre of the surreal - by Melanie Phillips

[Nannette]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/340906/the-theatre-of-the-surreal.thtml

The former Foreign Office diplomat Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale read a few inconvenient historical truths about the Middle East into the parliamentary record on Tuesday. Responding to the Queen’s Speech, she referred to the 800 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel between June and September, and observed:

I first visited Gaza in August 1967. Israelis had been there only a matter of weeks. It was a hell hole, a vast prison. It had been under Egyptian control, and Egypt would not allow Palestinians into Egypt proper without a special permit, so the Palestinians had been in Gaza since 1948. The Palestinian refugee camps of Gaza, Jordan—now the West Bank—and Lebanon are stains on the world’s conscience; but they are a stain above all on the conscience of those Arab Governments whose purposes it has suited to use the Palestinians for their own political purposes. That started in 1947, when the Arab League rejected UN Resolution 181, which would have made two states, Jewish and Palestinian, out of mandate Palestine and assured the Palestinians that, although the Jewish Agency had accepted Resolution 181, the Arab League would prevent its implementation. With the British mandate ending on 15 May 1948, Israel declared independence on 14 May, which was incidentally immediately recognised by both the United States and the USSR. On 15 May, the forces of five Arab armies, from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Transjordan, which provided the British-trained Arab legion, entered what had been mandate Palestine and fought the 1948-49 war, with the results we all know. We can only hope now that interests related to Iran and Islamist fundamentalism will at least make some Arab Governments do the right thing by Palestinians.

This of course is the point that is totally missed by all who excoriate Israel for the plight of the Arabs in the disputed territories. Their plight has actually been caused by the Arab states, who launched the war to destroy Israel in 1948, told the Arabs living there to flee in the expectation that Israel would be destroyed in short order, and then refused to absorb them into those Arab states — from where many of these families had originated in the first place.

Baroness Ramsay was optimistic that a unique set of circumstances now offered a chance of peace between Israel and the Arabs — principally because a settlement was now in everyone’s interests, especially in view of the looming spectre of Iran. Personally, I can’t see it. Abbas is not master of his own house, and so even if he were genuinely committed to accepting the right to exist of the Jewish state (and all the signs are to the contrary) he could not deliver any settlement with Israel in Hamastan. If the Arab states really wanted to neutralise the Israel/Arab dispute in order to stop the thing that really frightens them, the Islamisation of the region, Egypt would re-occupy Gaza (and we would all avert our eyes) and Jordan -- which always was ‘Palestine’ since it was carved out of three quarters of the original Palestine when it was handed over to the Hashemite dynasty -- would re-occupy the West Bank.

Instead, the rocket onslaught on Israel continues as the world looks the other way and insists that Israel makes 'painful concessions' that compromise its security and threaten its existence, while indulging the Palestinians' refusal to adhere to any of their commitments to dismantle their infrastructure of terrorist war. It is the theatre of the surreal.
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He who is merciful with the cruel, will end-up being cruel to the merciful
- Kohelet Rabba 7:16