Dangerousromanticideas
NO MORE APOLOGIES— we who support the Palestinians are in the right — history will prove us right,” tweeted David Ward on Saturday evening for no apparent reason. Ward is the Liberal Democrat MP who lamented in January that “the Jews” were committing atrocities on Palestinians.
Ward is an obscure politician whose certitude exceeds his imagination. His incomprehension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is significant, though, because it’s a widespread condition.
Most Israelis support Palestinian statehood. So do numerous friends and supporters of Israel, including The Times, for which I write. Yet these facts don’t register with Ward at all. He is far from unique in this and it’s worth considering why. Here’s my hypothesis.
Some time around the revolutionary ferment of the late 1960s, an idea took hold in Western debate that has proved durable. The state of Israel had managed to establish and successfully defend itself in a hostile environment. After the Six-Day War it fatefully occupied the West Bank and Gaza.
Even though successive Israeli governments treated these territories as juridically separate from Israel and regarded them as bargaining chips in future negotiations, the notion of Israel as a settler-state gained wings.
It was, and remains, a fantastic misconception. Israel’s founding was part of the modern struggle for national self-determination. Its close alliance with the United States may be unquestioned now but it is quite a recent development. In the 1950s, Israel’s principal Western backer was France. Yet, in the wave of decolonisation in the 1960s, Israel came to be seen as an outpost of Western imperialism.
Though British Liberalism is hardly the most important part of this depressing history, the notion of Zionism as a colonialist and racist enterprise did gain traction among the forerunners of the Lib Dems. In an article in the Journal of Liberal History, Summer 2010, Peter Hellyer, a former aide to Liberal leader David Steel, recounted how he had attended a conference in Cairo in 1969 on behalf of the Young Liberals. The conference comprised representatives of African liberation movements and also Fatah and the PLO.
Apparently, the experience of tour- ing a refugee camp and a “guerrilla camp” (Hellyer’s term) awoke him and his comrades to the Palestinian cause.
A generation later, the images of Israel as an oppressor and the Palestinian cause as analogous to the struggle against apartheid are common in British debate. They are mainly, but not only, to be found on the Left and among professed liberals of a certain type.
These notions have only the most tenuous of links to the real politics of the Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a liberation struggle but a clash of two legitimate national claims to the same territory, which must ultimately be resolved in a two-state accommodation between a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine.
Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian columnist and my fellow JC contributor, wrote recently on this page of his fear that the movement to boycott Israel was becoming politically mainstream.
I share the apprehension but doubt that it is within Israel’s power to do much about it, for the boycott movement is not at root about Israel at all. It’s instead a romantic idea for which the Middle East conflict is a sort of cipher. Framed as a demand for disinterested justice, it’s a species of dogged irrationalism that finds prosaic embodiment in the figure of David Ward. It’s depressing but that’s what friends of Israel are up against.