A LibDem MP gives voice to Britain’s national sickness. By Melanie Phillips. Daily Mail, January 27, 2013. Also find it here.
Britain’s infernal cocktail of hate. By Melanie Phillips. MelaniePhillips.com, January 29, 2013.
Phillips:
No, the
true venom of these remarks is the way they reverse the position of today’s Jewish victims – the Israeli
survivors of the Holocaust and their children and grandchildren -- and their current would-be exterminators – the
descendants of Hitler’s Nazi collaborators in Palestine during the Holocaust.
For the
fact is that Israel is not trying to exterminate the Palestinians – indeed how
could this possibly be the case, since the Palestinian population has more than
quadrupled since the rebirth of Israel in 1948. Nor are the Israelis oppressing
the Palestinians, who have benefited from some of the highest rises in GDP and
lowest child mortality ratios in the Middle East.
Nor are
the Israelis behaving inhumanely; it is the Palestinians who are committing
crimes against humanity by targeting Israeli innocents for mass murder without
remission, both from Gaza and from
the West Bank. It is the Palestinians, in the West Bank as well as Gaza, who are
brainwashed from the cradle to hate Jews and to believe that murdering Israelis
is their highest glory. Which they have been doing in Israel and before that in
Palestine for more than a century – despite the fact that, as the international
community laid down in binding treaty in 1920, the Jews alone had the
inalienable and historic right to settle throughout Palestine, including not
just present-day Israel but also the West
Bank and Gaza.
Moreover,
while the Jews accepted proposals for a Palestinian state first made in the
1930s and then in 1947, and while the Israelis offered them more than 95 per
cent of the possible land for a state in 2000 and 2008, the Palestinians
responded merely by murdering more Jews.
Despite
all this, Israel behaves towards its genocidal Palestinian attackers with a
humanity that is seen in no other conflict on the planet. Despite the rocket
attacks and constant smuggling of ever more fearsome weapons to be aimed at its
civilians, it allows humanitarian supplies into Gaza; despite the constant
plotting in the West Bank to kill more Israelis, it allows Palestinians to work
in Israel, and treats Palestinians from both the West Bank and Gaza alongside
Israelis in Israeli hospitals. Yes of course there is Palestinian hardship
caused by the checkpoints and security barrier. But the only reason these exist
is to prevent Palestinians killing yet more Israelis. If the Palestinians and
their Arab and Iranian backers stopped trying to wipe Israel off the map, there
would be peace tomorrow.
