How Bad Was Ms. Hotovely?

Melanie Phillips did not take kindly to Deputy Minister Tzipi Hotovely listening to her being interviewed on the BBC (starts at 1:31:00):

The interview with Tzipi Hotovely was a car crash. In the face of Robinson’s unleashed aggression Hotovely simply didn’t have a clue. The encounter illustrated yet again that the Israelis have zero understanding of the big lie behind everything British Israel-bashers hurl at Israel – that its behaviour is fundamentally unconscionable because the Jews displaced the indigenous inhabitants and rightful inheritors of the land.

As a result, Hotovely missed the point every time and thus failed to counter Robinson’s allegations with core facts that the listening and uninformed British public badly needed to hear. When Robinson falsely claimed again that the Balfour declaration’s undertaking to protect Arab rights was “unfinished business”, Hotovely replied that Israel’s Arabs did have rights. She was talking, however, about civil and religious rights, totally failing to grasp that Robinson was talking about political rights – which were never in the declaration.

Then Robinson started accusing Israel of denying those Balfour rights to the Arabs living under Israeli “occupation”. Hotovely should have replied that these Arabs were not Israel citizens and therefore not entitled to the rights afforded to Israel’s citizens, including Israeli Arabs. Instead she resorted to the knee-jerk and irrelevant political point about the Jews’ own claim to Judea and Samaria. Even when Robinson further compounded his own error by stating falsely that the Balfour declaration had said “nothing should be done which prejudices the rights of the Palestinian people”, she failed to say it had said nothing of the sort because there was no identifiable “Palestinian” Arab people at that time. Instead she spluttered, correctly but irerelevantly (sic), about the Palestinians’ refusal to coexist with Israel.

She was, in short, beyond hopeless, reflecting the profound and enduring failure of Israeli diplomacy even to understand the world in which it has to manoeuvre.

I listened to the segment.

Hotovely does mention international recognition. And she properly links that as an act which was connected to thousands of years of Jewish history, which appears in the Balfour Declaration and incorporated in the League of Nations decision to award to Great Britain the Mandate over Palestine.

She makes a general, non-religious, statement that it is natural to have a homeland.

She emphasizes that the Arabs-called-Palestinians themselves refused the opportunities for their own self-determination achievement although the intricacy in this is indeed dangerous for it is murky. 

And she stresses that there is no Arab recognition of any Jewish national identity.

All these do not justify much of what Melanie writes.

True, there is a method to dealing with what the host was doing including shutting her off, moving on to another subject while dropping an aside on the previous subject which she was not properly allowed to respond to although I think at twice she stopped him in his tracks and replied.

Yes, she did fail to adequately clarify what I have been writing for years that the quite intentional and consistent over the years non-mention of "Arabs" as a specific "community" in all the documents and rather preferring multiple communities existing at the time without specific "political" rights all indicate that primary and sole political, national sovereignty was to be awarded to the Jewish people.

Yes, she did address the issue of second-class citizens but did not make the distinction properly that the Arab population of Judea and Samaria has its own government agency, the Palestinian Authority.  That there are no elections or civil liberties or other rights is their fault, not Israel's.

One last point on the issue of law:  the international legal authorization and approval of a Jewish national home in Palestine was predicated on, we must recognize, the religious and cultural history of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel as acknowledged by the leaders of the powers at the time.  In other words, it is a circle and inter-connnected.   Melanie and Tzipi go together.

Room for improvement, surely.  Hopeless, though?  Not so much.

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A 'Sparkling' If Underreported Speech

Melanie Phillips' speech (which I blogged briefly here) was termed by the Jerusalem Post as "sparkling".

But I feel the speech was underreported.

We are informed that

In her B’nai B’rith World Center’s “Jerusalem Address”...Phillips proposed that Israel change its diplomatic tack by adopting an offensive rather than a defensive position.

and one can find many examples there.

However, missing entirely was her brilliant analysis of why Israel cannot be accepted by the intelligentsia, the academics, the smart people.

In short, her entire portrayal of the decline of Western civilization in a most snivelling way in the face of Islam combined with such a broad approach to multi-culturalism is ignored.

Of course, her writings allude to this central point and, in my words, what she asserts is that the opposition to Israel and its policies are very rarely predicated on actual fact and reality or on a rational analysis of the situation.

Rather, it is a perverted outlook, and immoral, for while England has accepted the 'Other' from all countries and races and ethnicities, the Jew, nevertheless, remains still an unaccepted 'Other'. And that, one can say, is basically antisemitism.

Those who claim they only oppose Israel, Zionism, etc., but not Jews are lying. Their opposition stems from antisemitism.

I think that is a major theme that cannot be ignored when reporting on Melanie's thinking.

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With thanks to SoSi.

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Melanie Phillips in Jerusalem

Melanie Phillips spoke this evening before a crowded Hecheil Shlomo auditorium of more than 500, delievering the Bnai Brith Jerusalem Address:

As usual, Melanie was incisive, powerful and persuasive although the reality of Jew-hatred in Britain is a step away from communal violence.  She was even humorous noting that the Guardian made her the Jew she is today.

David Horowitz recounted in his introduction two almost insignificant instances, one that a college student denying that his name was Israeli but rather...South African.


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How 'Human Rights' Came To Quash 'National Rights'

Melanie Phillips writes this about the whole issue of human rights but should have gone one step further:

...it was western civilisation which produced the concept of human rights in the first place -- the sacredness of human life, the equality of all people, the seminal importance of freedom, law and justice – and declared these to be universal principles. That’s why ‘human rights’ lawyers protest that their doctrine cannot possibly constitute an attack on western civilisation, because it is rooted in that civilisation’s own foundational principles.

The crucial point, however, is that these were not universal principles but – very different, this – culturally particular principles to be applied universally. They derived from a particular set of religious ethics which gave rise to western civilisation -- principles promoted through Christianity but deriving from the Hebrew Bible. Without that Biblical moral underpinning, there can be no basis for freedom or equality or respect for life.

But modern ‘human rights’ culture effectively set out to sever those principles from their Biblical core. Arising from the contemporary cult of individuality which repudiates all external authority as unjustified constraints on self-actualisation, ‘human rights’ culture claimed that these ‘rights’ were indeed universal – principles that transcended all cultures and therefore laid claim to superseding them. It took the principle of ‘universality’ and radically dislocated it from the unique Biblical tradition from which such ethics had sprung. ‘Human rights’ thus became free-floating axioms, deriving from no higher authority than the vagaries of judicial assumptions, prejudices and whims.

In wrapping itself in the mantle of universality, ‘human rights’ culture became an explicit attack on the very notion of the particular. Religious tradition therefore was directly in its sights – particularly Christianity and the Hebrew Bible upon which it drew, even though these were the foundation of those rights.

And the above reasoning applies just as well to the national rights of the Jewish people, like all other peoples, to their national homeland where they can develop their national character, culture, lifestyle.

Phillips gets close here:

Small wonder that Israel is such a target for so many ‘human rights’ practitioners. Israel is not only a nation (crime number one) but a nation whose existence is rooted in a religion (crime number two), a religion moreover which underpins the oppressive, imperialist, reactionary west (crime number three). Even though the Israeli judiciary is a temple to human rights, Israel is guilty of the original sin of particularity three times over.

That is why those Jewish 'human rights' lawyers who are supporters of Israel – and often passionately so – like to pretend that Israel’s undoubtedly stellar human rights record embodies principles which are ‘universal’ and have nothing to do with the religion of Judaism, upon whose more observant practitioners they tend to look with unalloyed horror and disdain.

Melanie Phillips The UN

I met Melanie at the Jerusalem Conference and we exchanged brief pleasantries.

Here's her latest blog post.

Her 'bottom line', literally:

...people can now begin to get an inkling of the truth about UNRWA – that this supposedly impartial body supervising the tinderbox of Gaza is actually a major player in fuelling the murderous frenzy against Israel at the heart of the Middle East impasse.

The UN can never be the solution; it is the problem.

Temple Mount Travesty

Read Melanie Phillips in The Spectator on the Temple Mount travesty.

Here.

Excerpt:

As a result, the irony is that under overall Israeli rule over Jerusalem, Jews have significantly less freedom of access to the Temple Mount than do the Arabs. Far worse that that, successive Israeli governments have simply turned a blind eye to the appalling and wilful desecration and vandalism of the Jewish foundations of the Temple Mount by the Arab Waqf -- a deliberate attempt to erase the historical proof of the Temple and with it the truth about the origins of Israel as a Jewish state and the heart of the Jewish religion long before the Arabs ever got there...

...If anyone wants to know what would happen to religious freedom and respect for holy sites under any scheme of ‘international’ protection for Jerusalem that some believe would solve the problem posed by that city – and if anyone believes that Israel currently robustly defends its own heritage -- this review furnishes a most dismaying correction to both illusions.

And read this too.

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.