One More Point

Melanie Phillips has another great post up here on the theme of "Blaming the victim" wherein she writes:

One of the most egregious signs of western irrationality and bigotry over the issue of Israel is the way in which its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is routinely scapegoated for causing the breakdown of the so-called peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. This charge is based on the widespread fallacy that the ‘peace process’ has stalled because Israel keeps building more Jewish ‘settlements’ on ‘Palestinian land’. This reasoning is not only totally wrong but utterly perverse...

But I think I needed to add, in all due humbleness, to her disproofs, and I suggest one more element that could have been included in Melanie's piece where she asserts, proper and correct, that "the widespread fallacy that the ‘peace process’ has stalled because Israel keeps building more Jewish ‘settlements’ on ‘Palestinian land’" although it is, admittedly, slightly off-focus and that is:

between 1948 and 1967, no occupation existed nor was any "settlement" constructed in the territory of the former Mandate for Palestine, at present not under the sovereignty of the state of Israel, and yet, there was Arab terror against Jewish civilians, first perpetrated by the fedayeen and then by the Fatah and there was no peace. There was, however, an awful lot of terror.

If the 1967 war erupted with no "settlement" in sight, how would the removal of such a "settlement" solve the problems that led to the war?

Oh, and her six disproofs were:

1) The actual reason for the collapse of the ‘peace process’ is that Mahmoud Abbas repeatedly maintains that he will never accept that Israel is entitled to be a Jewish state, hails Palestinian terrorists as heroes for murdering Israelis and does nothing to end the incitement to murder Jews disseminated in schools, mosques and media under his control...
2) It is only Israel that has made concessions in this ‘peace process’ (as noted here). The Palestinians not only failed to deliver what was expected of them under the Road Map but now, with their UN gambit, have unilaterally reneged on their previous treaty obligations...
3) The claim that the ‘settlements’ are the key to resolving the dispute is ridiculous...even when Netanyahu froze such new building for ten months as a sign of good will, Abbas still refused to negotiate...
4) The claim that the establishment of a Palestine state would end the dispute is also ridiculous. Such a state was on offer in 1948; Israel offered to give up more than 90 per cent of the West Bank for such a state in 2000...
5) Whatever land Israel may choose to give up in its own interests, under international law Jews are entitled to settle anywhere in the West Bank. There is no such thing as Palestinian land and never was...
6) The Jews alone have the legal – as well as the moral and historical -- right to settle within the West Bank and Gaza...

That all together now is very clear.

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