{"id":498,"date":"2003-01-02T14:01:53","date_gmt":"2003-01-02T18:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=498"},"modified":"2003-01-02T14:01:53","modified_gmt":"2003-01-02T18:01:53","slug":"blaming-the-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"Blaming the Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan<\/a> has a bash at the Foreign Office, on the back of this Telegraph report<\/a>. It proves, he says, that the Foreign Office will always blame the Jews. But it seems to me to prove something more worrying: the difficulty of balance, both for the dispatch writer and for Sullivan himself, and the difficulty of keeping distinct anti-semitism and an opposition to Israeli occupation of the West Bank. This is not just a distinction to be observed by other people. It’s a danger, I think, for anyone who believes, as I do, that Israel has no business occupying the West Bank, and that the Palestinians are entitled to a real state of their own.<\/p>\n\n
\nThe offending dispatch, from the consul-general in Jerusalem, is quoted thus:

\n“Before we reproach the Arabs too much, perhaps we might try to put ourselves in their shoes.
\n“They are, after all, human beings with normal human failings. The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology.
\n“Whatever one’s moral criticism, it must be agreed that the Munich operation was well planned and that the Arabs there carried it out to the bitter end. It is said that lives were really lost because of Israel and West German bungling incompetence.”
\nMr Woodrow’s head of department, James Craig, wrote on his letter: “Not bad but he goes just a little too far.”
\n<\/blockquote>\nSullivan comments “Ah those plucky terrorists. Not their fault if a few pushy Jews got killed.”<\/span> Of course, he’s half-right: to blame the deaths of the hostages on the bungling of the rescue is to miss, rather elaborately, an important point. But is it anti-semitism? If I think Israel is expansionist, does this mean I have to believe that Jews are pushy? Of course not. Presumably it is the Foreign Office that Sullivan is accusing of anti-semitism.
\nBut there are two true and important facts in the report. Terrorists are often brave. This is worth remembering, if only because it helps to predict their future activities. The second is that
“The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology.”<\/blockquote>\nThis is the more important, unarguable fact. You may well become anti-semitic by brooding on it too long. But there is an opposite error in denying it. I don’t know if the error is equal as well as opposite; and I don’t, frankly, much care.
\nAnd when one goes on to read the next FO memorandum quoted by the Telegraph<\/em> (though not by Sullivan), it’s clear that the author was doing rather well exactly what a diplomat is paid to: understanding and predicting the behaviour of foreigners:
It is self-evident that the hijacking is a manifestation of the Palestine problem. This is a problem which the Israelis are trying to solve in two main ways: one by pretending it does not exist (hence their claim that Amman is the capital of the Palestinians), the other by hitting the Palestinians so hard that they cease to exist, militarily if not physically.\n“What the hijacking does is to remind the international community that the Palestine problem exists: in one sense this is unwelcome to the Israelis as it shows their pretence for what it is, but in another it provides them with an excellent opportunity to enlist the aid of the international community in erasing the problem.
\n“Hence their apoplectic reaction to the hijacking, which is of course calculated to produce the desired attitude in airline workers at Heathrow. It also provides them with an excellent opportunity to slip into Syria, bomb a few more bases and kill a few more innocent people with impunity. Deplorable though the hijacking may be it caused the loss of no lives whereas . . . casualties in Syria may be as many as 45 or even more. <\/blockquote>Of course, in the thirty years of war since that was written, the Palestinians have now graduated to killing large numbers of Israelis, and this is terrible too. So is the endless cycle of retaliation. The war has acquired its own momentum. Neutrality gets harder. But that’s no reason not to strive for it, or to avoid the effort needed to avoid taking sides. The present Israeli governments is directly descended from a successful terrorist movement. It bases its claim to the West Bank on biblical authority and brute force. And I find it odd that Sullivan, who won’t — quite rightly — take his sexual ethics from the Old Testament, seems to have so little trouble with the people who take their political geography from that book.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Sullivan has a bash at the Foreign Office, on the back of this Telegraph report. It proves, he says, that the Foreign Office will always blame the Jews. But it seems to me to prove something more worrying: the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}