Jewish Chronicle, 18 March 2010

The Obama administration’s fury at Israel over the ‘insult to the US’ of building more homes in east Jerusalem has provoked what is described as the worst crisis in US-Israel relations for more than three decades.

Leave aside, for the moment, the notable absence of ‘insult to the US’ caused by the Palestinian Authority a day or so later, when it named a square after a terrorist ‘martyr’ who not only slaughtered dozens of Israelis, but also in 1978 murdered the American niece of a US Democratic senator.

Leave aside also the fact that the US had previously expressly agreed with Israel that it would continue building in east Jerusalem while stopping building in the West Bank, an agreement for which it was warmly praised by Hillary Clinton.

Let us instead stand back and look at the underlying premise of what the US and the rest of the West are saying to Israel. For the most astonishing thing is how Israel meekly plays along with a vicious and quite hallucinatory farce.

Consider: Israel is the victim of six decades of uninterrupted aggression from its Arab neighbours. Yet, unlike in any other conflict on the planet, it is required to make territorial concessions to its attackers, even as they continue to attack it.

Anywhere else, this would be seen as forcing a victim to surrender. Anywhere else, the claims of aggressors are deemed to be forfeit through their behaviour. So why does Israel go along with these unique demands that it should reward its enemies?

It is Israel alone that has ever made territorial concessions to those enemies. Yet it is Israel alone that the US and the rest insist must make still more.

Yet they make no such requirement of the Palestinians who repeat they will never accept the existence of a Jewish state. So why does Israel go along with this appeasement process?

The US and the rest blame Israel for thwarting a two-state solution. But the reason the two-state solution has not been achieved is that, from the beginning, this was a two-state problem.

Two states were indeed provided in 1920 when Churchill split land already promised to the Jews by giving three quarters of Palestine to the Arabs to create Jordan.

The world community ordained that, within the remainder — what is present-day Israel and the West Bank and Gaza — the Jews should be ‘closely settled’ to re-establish their national homeland.

The Arabs refused to accept this two-state solution. When they turned to terrorism to destroy the nascent Jewish state, instead of holding the line for law and justice the British offered them half of what remained of Palestine.

They refused it then and have done so ever since, because their real aim remains unchanged: one state of Palestine, with Israel destroyed.

I have a revolutionary suggestion to break the Middle East logjam. It is that Israel stops going along with the diplomatic fictions and starts telling the world some home truths.

Such as that America and Britain are still doing today what the British have done from the start — rewarding the Arabs for their aggression against the Jews and thus providing rich incentives for the terror to continue.

Such as that, if any country has torn up international law in the Middle East it is Britain, which reneged on its legal obligation to settle Jews in Palestine while turning a blind eye to illegal Arab immigration.

Such as that, while America and Britain continue to reward and incentivise Arab aggression against Israel, they are the reason the conflict continues without end.

There can never be peace without justice, and there can never be justice without truth. As the Obama administration throws Israel under the bus, should not Israel finally rip away the camouflage to reveal the true ugliness of its false ‘friends’?