by Bob Seely, Conservative Home
Like most people in this country, I’ve spent a lifetime listening to earnest news about peace in the Middle East. To be interested in foreign affairs once meant having to have an opinion on it. Frankly, I’m not sure I’d bother anymore, which I know goes against the grain of the British Left’s obsession with Gaza, Israel and the ‘two-state solution’.
Why is that? It’s because the two-state solution, based on Gaza and the West Bank comprising as a single Palestinian state – especially within the 1967 borders – is dead and has been, in any meaningful form, for 25 years.
Whilst Israeli settlers haven’t helped the process, the underlying reason lies in the wretched recidivist history of Palestine’s leadership, who, in the old description of them, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Palestine’s leadership, comprised largely of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), was heavily influenced by two malign 20th century forces; pan-Arab socialist nationalism, and from 1967 onwards, Soviet, and now Russian, antisemitism.
PLO tactics, including airplane hijacking, were allegedly invented by the Soviet secret police, the KGB. The Soviets and their allies distributed antisemitic propaganda throughout the Middle East, such as the notorious Tsarist-era conspiracy tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Operation SIG, as it was called, was designed to generate hatred for Israel – and Jews – throughout the Arab and Muslim world. In the UN, the Soviets pushed through the notorious UN Resolution 3379 declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism” – a trope that has been recently resurrected by the Western Left.
Israel is not a perfect state. But it is a law-governed democracy which has been willing to exchange land for peace.