Wheatcroft's "Protocols"

Geoffrey Wheatcroft thinks there's an influential coterie of Tory MPs bent on a foreign policy driven not by Britain's interests, but those of the US and Israel.

Coterie? A bit over the top on that one, my dear Geoff.

Oh, it's a fanatical one, at that:-

For years past the Tories have been infiltrated by Anglo-neoconservatives, a species easily defined. Several of the younger MPs are fanatical adherents of the creed with its three prongs: ardent support for the Iraq war, for the US and for Israel.

The Guardian has published his screed which includes this historical view:-

AJ Balfour was the Tory premier and then foreign secretary who signed the eponymous declaration in 1917 favouring a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and came to favour a Jewish state (as with many gentile Zionists, his attitude to Jews was highly ambiguous; he described privately how uneasy he once felt at a dinner party where "Hebrews were in an actual majority"). And yet his successor as foreign secretary took the opposite view. That highest of high Tories Lord Curzon deplored the Balfour declaration. He thought that a Jewish homeland could only mean a grave injustice to the inhabitants of Palestine. It would inflame hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects of the British empire. And as to the Jewish people themselves and the idea of transporting them to the Levant, "I cannot think of a worse fate for an advanced and intellectual community," Curzon said.

In his day Curzon might have seemed the truer Tory than Balfour, and it's only recently that his spirit has been stifled in his old party.

Truer or not, reneging on international obligations to reconstitute the Jewish national homeland, to keep Jews from leaving Nazi Europe and limiting the number of immigrants that could enter the Palestine Mandate while restricting the amound of land they could purchase (the 1939 White Paper) while conducting a segregated St. James Conference allowing Arabs not to sit with their negotiating partners, Curzon did represent political immorality at its peak.

Wheatcroft previously published a piece of trash in which he claimed that sixty years ago the sort of atrocity that Israel's leaders habitually condemn helped bring the country into being, referring to the King David Hotel operation.

Oh, Wheatcroft's e-mail is wheaty@compuserve.com


(Kippah tip: Carol)