Watson and the cause
▶ David Aaronovitch writes (Calling Emma Watson antisemitic makes it harder to fight bigotry, 7 January): “This or that charge of antisemitism is likely to be false because the charge is so often used simply to silence critics of the Israeli government” and “criticism of Israel as a country, its government and its policies are not antisemitic.”
Yet according to the widely accepted IHRA definition, “Applying double standards (to Israel) not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” is antisemitic. Invariably such “criticism” falls into that category.
Regarding Watson’s support of the Palestinian cause not being antisemitic, Aaronovitch defines it as “the desire of Palestinians not to live under Israeli occupation and to have their own state”.
Really? Between 1948 and 1967 the land beyond the Armistice line that had been invaded, and ethnically cleansed by Jordan of its indigenous Jews, didn’t have a single “settler” to be an “obstacle to peace”, yet there was never a call, either from the Palestinian Arabs themselves, or from anyone else, to create a Palestinian state.
One could also mention all the other offers of a state before and since that were rejected without counter offers.
The real reason is that the selfstated Palestinian cause is not just the creation of a new sovereign state but the destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab state. The Palestinian Charter and its articles denouncing the creation of Israel as illegal and calling for her destruction, which the Oslo accords stipulated must be removed but which never have been, leave no room for doubt.
David Aaronovitch thinks calling for someone who advocates this cause to be labelled antisemitic is wrong, and then derides Israelis who actually live under real security threats, for an “apathy that has eroded the Israeli human rights movement”, rather than for the realisation that every time land was surrendered for peace rockets and war followed.
The conflict is not about land or borders but about the fact that the Palestinian Arabs openly reject the idea of any Jewish sovereignty in what they regard as exclusively Islamic lands.
Indeed Arab rejectionism was the reason that the socialist prime minister Golda Meir repeatedly cited for the lack of peace - but then Golda probably “isn’t a legend” in David Aaronovitch’s household either.
Gerry Solomons
Highgate N6