Jewish Chronicle, April 4 2003.

It was disturbing -- to put it mildly -- to learn from the boasts of a Fatah official that hundreds of Palestinians had gone to swell Saddam Hussein’s war arsenal as a supply of human bombs.

So one might expect Britain - America’s staunchest ally in the war against terror -- to be making tough noises towards the Palestinians. But instead, Mr Blair has been pressing President Bush to publish the ‘road map’ which would set up a Palestinian state by 2005. Instead of drawing the correct lesson of equivalence – to show towards Palestinian terror the same resolve being shown to Iraq – Mr Blair intends to reward mass murder by giving it a state of its own.

In similar vein, the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw beat his breast over the west’s ‘double standards’ in insisting Saddam honour UN resolutions while failing to make the same requirement of Israel. But the disputed resolutions concerning Israel are not binding Security Council resolutions of the kind Saddam has broken. And the UN has made it clear that Israel is entitled to defend itself.

In his attempt to appease the Arab world, Mr Blair appears to want to ‘even up’ the score in the Middle East by balancing pressure on Saddam with pressure on Israel. But Saddam is an architect of terror; Israel is a victim of terror, sponsored in part by Saddam himself. To equate Saddam’s defiance of the UN with Israel’s beleaguerment is grotesque.

At such a time, the very idea of this road map is sickening. It is not that the notion of a Palestinian state is wrong; but it has to be a state which is not being created specifically to bring about Israel’s destruction.

President Bush said last June that the US would not support such a state until the Palestinians had new leaders not compromised by terror. Mr Bush and Mr Blair have hailed the new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas as evidence of a reformed administration. But this ‘reform’ is a charade.

Since Yasser Arafat remains in control of security and the ‘peace process’, Dr Abbas has no real power. And in any event, his own profile is hardly encouraging. He told the Arab daily al-Sharq al-Awsat last month: ‘We don’t talk about a break in the armed struggle… The intifada must continue; it is the right of the Palestinian people to resist and use all possible means’. His only ‘concession’ was that the violence should be confined to the territories.

Nor is this in the least surprising given his doctoral thesis, in which he reportedly concluded that the Holocaust (which was much exaggerated) was a Zionist Nazi conspiracy to bring about the foundation of Israel. Yet this is the man praised by Jack Straw as ‘a fine politician and statesman…committed to a peaceful path’.

President Bush appears to be far less keen on the road map, Mr Blair’s pet project. Now, aware that Palestinian support for Saddam might scupper the plan altogether, the British are proposing some weaselly ‘confidence-boosting’ security gloss. But the Prime Minister’s analysis remains frighteningly flawed.

He thinks the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a major reason for Arab terror. Wrong: Arab terror is a major reason why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinians. He thinks the absence of a Palestinian state is a cause of Arab bitterness and fury. Wrong: the presence of a Jewish state is the cause.

I happen to think the settlements are indefensible and stupid. But the idea that Arab terror would end if they were all dismantled tomorrow is simply fatuous. The Camp David/Taba debacle showed all too clearly that the real Palestinian agenda is a one-state solution and the end of Israel.

Mr Blair goes to great lengths to profess his deep affection and support for Israel. No doubt that’s genuine enough. But as in so many other areas, he appears incapable of thinking it all through properly.

The message of the war on Iraq is that the old order -- in which the west either looked the other way from terror or even rewarded it by treating its aims with exaggerated respect -- is supposed to be over. Everywhere except, it seems, in Israel.

Mr Blair appears to be prepared to use Israel as a bone to throw to the Arabs to pacify them. If so, that would also display culpable naivety. For the Arab states do not want peace in Israel. On the contrary, the conflict there serves a vital purpose for them: to distract the seething masses they subjugate, and prevent them from turning on their corrupt Arab rulers.

Mr Blair is surrounded by Foreign Office Arabists on one side, and on the other by people whose visceral hatred of Ariel Sharon blinds them to any analysis that does not cast him as sole villain in the Middle East tragedy. Someone needs to open our Prime Minister’s eyes, and quickly.

Posted by admin at April 4, 2003