Freedland's 'Foul'

Jonathan Freedland, erstwhile self-described "journo" (he has a column both in the Guardian and the JC), published an attack on Melanie Phillips in last week's Jewish Chronicle.

Here is the center-piece (he also attacked her characterization of a new "independent" Jewish pro-Palestinian group) of his slashing:

But it was a sentence in Melanie’s January JC column that really got me going. “Individual Palestinians may deserve compassion,” she wrote, “but their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project.” Read that line again. I have, along with the entire piece that preceded it. Think about what it means: that the Palestinian urge for national self-determination — their desire to have what we Jews yearned for so long, a homeland of our own where we might govern ourselves — is nothing more than a collective plot to deny Jewish suffering. So those Palestinians living under curfew and hemmed in by checkpoints aren’t angry about this hardship or desperate to throw off a 40-year occupation. No. Their shared desire, their national project, is to join David Irving in pretending that Hitler did not murder six million Jews. Of course, it follows that such people — a nation of neo-Nazis — deserve nothing, let alone a state of their own.

We are all expecting a counter-foil [UPDATE: here it is] but I figured that I, too, might as well add a few pence of my own.

I have discussed this before (here and here) and so I will be concise.

The amount of Holocaust denial currently being spun out and taught in the Palestine Authority would cheer David Irving no end. But the historic fact is that the Pal. leader, the Mufti, supported Hitler. His violence during 1936-39, persuaded the British Colonial Office that it would be better to limit the amount of Jews coming in to the country - which means limiting the Jews leaving or fleeing Hitler's Europe before and during the war - and therefore was complicit in the Holocaust.

They then propagated the PR line that "why are we Pals. to suffer for what the Germans did to the Jews in Europe? It's a European problem". Which means that the solving of their (self-created) problem, will lead to the disappearance of Israel in one way (military defeat) or the other (demographic defeat).

"Their cause", Freedland, is the denial of Jewish nationalism, the undermining of Jewish security, the continuation of what Hitler began which is the killing of a Jew simply because he is a Jew and the fuertherance around the world of antisemitism. There is no other way of understanding their constant refusal to agree to any diplomatic stance that would allow for the conflict to end. The conflict's end is that, too, of Israel. It is so obvious. But, I presume, it takes a Jew like Freedland not to grasp it.

Good luck Melanie.