Blair: which project?
A Banksy in Bethlehem – on the way north out of the little town before the encircled Rachel’s Tomb and the Gilo checkpoint crossing up into Jerusalem.
Dear Tony,
I was dismayed to read your thoughts on the Middle East Peace process here.
As one of the people you cast as wanting to ‘de-legitmatise’ Israel in an insidious and camouflaged manner, I must respond to your partial analysis of the ‘facts on the ground’ in Israel-Palestine with my partial observations.
I do not want to de-legitmise Israel. Israel has the right to exist peacefully for sure. And to its own points of view for sure. After the atrocities of the Holocaust that happened on our very own soil in such recent history that’s the very least we Europeans owe the Jews.
But Tony, the Palestinian cause or case isn’t just bound up with what’s happening in Gaza, horrific though that continues to be. So don’t make out it is.
You say that Israel ‘should always be a staunch and unremitting advocate and actor for peace’. I’d agree. But you also touch on
the idea that Palestinians suffer not injustice alone; but a form of humiliation. Dignity is a very important concept. Consistent with security, Israel should be constantly looking for ways to compensate for the indignity which inevitably results from the security measures taken and should seek to avoid any unnecessary indignities.
Having spent some days in Bethlehem in 2008, this was my abiding sense: besides all the injustice and the flouting of International Law, it was the systemtic degradation and humilation of the Palestinians that I found so hard to stomach.
You also say that one of the reasons you’re a passionate believer in Israel is that it’s a democracy. OK. But it’s a pretty unusual democracy, isn’t it Tony? One where you only have full rights if you are Jewish. So it’s a qualified democracy; a Jewish democracy.
Try telling the Arab Israelis up in the Galilee that one of the reasons the International Community should support Israel’s claims is that it’s a democracy and I’m not sure they’d be all that enthusiastic – as they endure a systematic and largely hidden form of de-legimisation in the very country which calls them its citizens.
In a democracy, all citizens should enjoy equal rights regardless of ethnicity, religion or gender. This is not the case in Israel.
And your argument about where in the region you’d prefer to ‘do time’ is a little spurious too – especially when you consider the case of Mordecai Vanunu, kept in solitary confinement for years just for blowing the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear programme. (And that’s another thing, Tony. It’s ironic that while all eyes are fixed on Iran – including yours – there’s only one country in the Middle East with a secret nuclear weapons programme, and that’s Israel.)
To hold up the Jewish people’s contribution to culture is great and good. Too true. But not to also acknowledge the Palestinian contribution to the cultural and artistic life of the world. Come on, Tony. That really is clumsy. As if Israel is cultured and Palestine is not. Shame on you.
What you fail to acknowledge in your long and very personal piece is that we naughty people you typecast as wanting to undermine Israel’s right to exist and to hold its own points of view is that the ground on which we stand says: ‘but what about International Law?’ ‘What about human rights?’ ‘What about proportionality?’ ‘What about the illegitmacy of collective punishment?’ What about the Geneva Convention?’ And so on.
When the systematic and well-orchestrated (but illegal, Tony) Israeli settlement programme looks set to re-start apace in the West Bank at the end of this month, how can there ever be peace in the region? If Israel is to be allowed to – so flagrantly and over so many years – flout International Law and UN resolutions, then there seems little hope for a just peace in the region.
My fear is that, as long as we are told to appease Israel – for fear of being labelled anti-semitic – she will continue her relentless landgrab and drive the humiliated and resigned Palestinians out into the desert.
At that point, Israel might well concede to agree to a two-state solution. But it will be too late then. Because the Palestinians will not have a viable parcel of land with which to form a state any more. (They don’t really have this now, truth be told.) They will have been marginalised out of existence. Please Tony, don’t let that happen. If, as you say you are in the article, you are a ‘religious person’ yourself, then please see the side of the oppressed and the powerless in this situation. Before it’s way too late.
For me it already feels too late. But I’m saying: before it’s way too late.
