The Obscenity of It

Melanie Phillips muses on the question of Jewish residency in Judea and Samaria:

Yet as Just Journalism observes, in the Guardian Harriet Sherwood used the atrocity to blame the settlers for being the principal obstacle to peace, while providing no discussion of the relevance of Hamas, or any background information on its history of violence aimed at civilians as exemplified by yesterday’s killings;

while the New York Times similarly blamed the settlers for 'the disruptive role'
they were playing in the ‘peace process’. But the only reason they are ‘disruptive’ is because people like the New York Times and the Guardian single them out as such, vilifying them as the core of the problem between Israel and the Arabs...

...[this is] obscene because of the lies and indeed the racism upon which this animosity against the settlers is based. The settlements are said to be illegal: this is false. Jews are entitled to settle Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) under international treaty obligations which have never been rescinded – obligations entered into by the world in 1920 in respect of the unique claim of the Jewish people to that land. They are also entitled to be there under the terms of UN resolution 242 as long as the Arabs refuse to end their war against Israel, in line with all situations where land is taken to defend a country against a belligerent.

The settlers are said to have stolen land from the Palestinians. This is false. The land never belonged to a sovereign country of Palestine because there was none. It was ‘no man’s land’, illegally occupied for a while by Jordan. Nor was it ‘stolen’ from individual Palestinians since most of it was empty space, or bought from Arabs, or it was land originally owned and lived in by Jews.

Moreover, the demand that the settlers must leave is a racist demand, because it effectively states that no Jew can be allowed to live in a future state of Palestine. In this upside-down world of gross cognitive dissonance, it is an outstanding and eternal reproach to the ‘progressive’ western world – including, let it be said loud and clear, the Ha’aretz mob in Israel’s own media and the universities, along with idiotic or twisted Jews in the diaspora -- that it thus endorses racist ethnic cleansing and demonises anyone who dares to disagree.

The fact that the Jews are morally and historically entitled to settle in Judea and Samaria does not mean, however, that it is necessarily in their interests to do so. On the contrary. They would – and should – give up much of it tomorrow if there was a real prospect that the Arabs would genuinely abandon their war against Israel. The main reason that this is not likely to happen, however, is that, with the western world determined to blame Israeli ‘intransigence’ over the settlements as the core issue in this conflict, the Arabs can hide their genocidal aims behind western dupes and worse who are doing the Arabs’ dirty work for them...

With every article in the western – and Israeli – media painting the settlers as monsters while the truly monstrous terrorists are presented as injured freedom-fighters, more Israeli death warrants become sealed.

The western intelligentsia are not passive onlookers to this never-ending tragedy. They are active players in ensuring that it continues. It is high time that they were held to account for this murderous obsession.

- - -