Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: An inconvenient truth

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5620681/an-inconvenient-truth.thtml
Yesterday evening, the historian Andrew Roberts delivered a remarkable 
address at the annual dinner of the Anglo-Israel Association.  I 
reproduce it here in full, with no further comment.
     My Lords, Ladies & Gentlemen,
     It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on 
this the 60th anniversary of AIA, and I’d like to take the opportunity 
of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship 
between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths.
     Because it seems to me that for all the undoubted statesmanship 
implicit in Arthur Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917, promising ‘a 
National Home for the Jewish People’, it doesn’t mean that Britain has 
ever been much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national 
aspirations. The Declaration itself was at least in part conceived to 
keep Eastern European and Russian Jews supporting the Great War after 
the Bolshevik Revolution, and Chaim Weizmann’s preferred wording of ‘a 
Jewish State’ was turned down by the British Foreign Office. As David 
Ben-Gurion wrote at the time: ‘Britain has made a magnificent gesture … 
But only the Hebrew people can transform this right into tangible fact: 
only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must 
build their National Home and bring about their national redemption.’
     Sure enough, at the Versailles Conference and its ancillary 
meetings up to 1922, although Britain was given the League of Nations 
Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was not established. 
During the Mandate period there was an observable tension between the 
CO, which was responsible for administering Palestine and wanted to do 
so within the terms of the (admittedly self-contradictory) Balfour 
Declaration, and the FO, which feared that allowing the de facto 
creation of a Jewish State would alienate Arabs. In 1937 the Peel 
Commission recommended ending the Mandate and partitioning Palestine 
into Arab and Jewish states, with population transfers of 225,000 Arabs 
from Galilee, an outcome Ben-Gurion said [quote] ‘could give us 
something which we have never had, even when we stood on our own during 
the days of the First and Second Temples’. Nonetheless, both the Arabs 
and the 20th Zionist Congress rejected Peel’s recommendations, to the 
palpable relief of the Foreign Office, which concentrated its own 
opposition to it on the basis of its supposed impracticality.
     Instead there was the notorious 1939 White Paper, which severely 
limited Jewish immigration into Palestine at precisely the period of 
their greatest need, during the Final Solution. A total upper limit of 
75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the fateful years 1940-44, a figure 
that was also intended to cover refugee emergencies. The White Paper was 
published on 9 November 1938 – the very same day as the Kristallnacht 
atrocities in Germany – and was approved by Parliament in May 1939, a 
full two months after  Hitler’s occupation of the rump of 
Czechoslovakia. The Manchester Guardian described it as ‘a death 
sentence on tens of thousands of Central European Jews’, which in sheer 
numerical terms was probably an underestimation. Although the Labour 
Party Conference voted to repeal the White Paper in 1945, the Labour 
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin – a bitter enemy of Israel - persisted in 
it, and it was not to be repealed until the day after the State of 
Israel was proclaimed.
     In late April 1948, Bevin ordered that Arab positions in Jaffa 
needed to be protected from the Jews [quote] ‘at all costs’, and when 
Israeli independence came the next month, the departing British 
sometimes handed over vital military and strategic strongpoints to the 
five invading Arab armies, the most efficient of which, Transjordan’s 
Arab Legion, was actually commanded by a Briton, Sir John Glubb. And 
then on New Year’s Eve 1948 the British Government actually issued an 
ultimatum to Israel threatening war if Israel did not halt its 
counter-attacks on Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Britain 
was the only country in the UN that came to Egypt’s aid in this regard.
     One can easily see, therefore, why when Brig-Gen Sir Wyndham Deedes 
set up the Anglo-Israeli Association only weeks after Israel was finally 
recognized by Britain in 1949 - months after America, Russia and several 
other states had already done so – it was much-needed. There was still 
massive resentment over the War of Independence; Israel was considered 
at best a headache by the FO; and worst of all, unlike her neighbours, 
she had no oil. Nor did the Suez Crisis much help matters seven years 
later: the way in which Israel fitted in neatly with British plans to 
crush Nasser ought to have endeared her to the Foreign Office, but of 
course it didn’t.
     When in May 1967 Nasser announced the blockading of the Straits of 
Tiran, closing Israel’s commercial lifeline to the east, the guarantors 
of this international waterway – including Britain – failed to act 
quickly or decisively, and although Harold Wilson was proud of his 
pro-Israeli sentiments, his foreign secretary George Brown and the FO 
certainly did not reciprocate them. Britain compounded its generally 
lukewarm attitude during the Six Day War by sponsoring Resolution 242 at 
the end of it, which called on Israel to withdraw [quote] ‘from 
territories occupied’, in a resolution that was so badly worded by the 
FO that Arabs and Israelis have been able to argue over its proper 
meaning ever since.
     The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 saw even worse bias by the FO in 
favour of the Arabs and against the Jews. Announcing an arms embargo 
‘equally’ between the belligerents, the Heath Government effectively 
stopped Israel buying spare parts for the IDF’s Centurion tanks, whilst 
allowing them to be bought by Jordan, the only other country affected, 
because it was not (officially at least) a belligerent. Egyptian 
helicopter pilots continued to be trained in Britain, with the foreign 
secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home lamely telling the Israeli Ambassador 
that it was better for the pilots to be training in Britain than 
fighting at the front. Heath even refused to allow American cargo planes 
taking supplies to Israel to land and refuel at our bases on Cyprus.
     In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher seemed to offer a new warmth to 
Anglo-Israeli relations. She sat for Finchley, her Methodism chimed well 
with Jewish values, and she was the most philo-Semitic PM since 
Churchill, yet even she was stymied by the FO, especially over 
Intelligence cooperation with Mossad. It’s true that John Major sent a 
special SAS unit to seek and destroy Iraqi Scud missile batteries 
targeting Israel during the First Gulf War, but that was largely to 
remove the danger of Israel retaliating, and thereby perhaps destroying 
the Arab coalition against Saddam.
     After 9/11 Tony Blair seemed to appreciate how Israel was in the 
very front line in the War against Terror, and he thus bravely refused 
to condemn Israel’s acts of self-defence in Lebanon, but since then 
Britain’s contribution to the EU’s strand of negotiating over Iran’s 
nuclear ambitions has been, frankly, pathetic.
     One area of policy over which the FO has traditionally held great 
sway is in the question of Royal Visits. It is no therefore coincidence 
that although HMQ has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 
different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member 
of the British royal family has ever been to Israel on an official 
visit. Even though Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who 
was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for sheltering a Jewish 
family in her Athens home during the Holocaust, was buried on the Mount 
of Olives, the Duke of Edinburgh was not allowed by the FO to visit her 
grave until 1994, and then only on a private visit.
     "Official visits are organized and taken on the advice of the 
Foreign and Commonwealth office," a press officer for the royal family 
explained when Prince Edward visited Israel recently privately - and a 
spokesman for the Foreign Office replied that [quote] ‘Israel is not 
unique" in not having received an official royal visit, because [quote] 
‘Many countries have not had an official visit.’ That might be true for 
Burkino Faso and Chad, but the FO has somehow managed to find the time 
over the years to send the Queen on State visits to Libya, Iran, Sudan, 
Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, 
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan & Turkey. So it can’t have been that 
she wasn’t in the area.
     Perhaps Her Majesty hasn’t been on the throne long enough, at 57 
years, for the Foreign Office to get round to allowing her to visit one 
of the only democracies in the Middle East. At least she could be 
certain of a warm welcome in Israel, unlike in Morocco where she was 
kept waiting by the King for three hours in 90 degree heat, or at the 
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda the time before last, 
where they hadn’t even finished building her hotel.
     The true reason of course, is that the Foreign Office has a ban on 
official Royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its 
being unwritten and unacknowledged. As an act of delegitimization of 
Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar 
acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the FO 
Arabists. Which brings us on to Mr Oliver Miles.
     One of the reasons I’m proud to be an historian is that there are 
scholars of the integrity and erudition of Prof Sir Martin Gilbert and 
Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman who also write history. If people as 
intelligent, wise and incorruptible as they choose to be historians, 
then it must be an honourable profession. Let me quote to you, 
therefore, word-for-word, what a former British Ambassador to Libya and 
Greece, Mr Oliver Miles, wrote in The Independent newspaper less than a 
fortnight ago, commenting on the composition of the present Chilcot 
Inquiry into the Iraq War:
      ‘Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a 
record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually 
mentioned in the mainstream British and American media. … All five 
members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, 
if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition 
will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be 
seen to be balanced.’
     Ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the way that FO Arabists are 
prepared to express themselves in public, can you imagine the way that 
they refer to such people as Professors Gilbert and Freedman in private? 
For the balance that Mr Miles is talking about here is clearly a racial 
balance, that only a certain quota of Jews should have been allowed on 
to the Inquiry.
     Of course there’s a reason why ‘Such facts are not usually 
mentioned in the mainstream media’, of course, and that is because it is 
a disgraceful and disgusting concept even to notice the racial 
background of such distinguished public servants, and one that wouldn’t 
have even occurred to most people had not Mr Miles made such a point of it.
     Because there are 22 ambassadors to Arab countries, and only one to 
Israel, it is perhaps natural that the FO should tend to be more 
pro-Arab than pro-Israeli. On occasion there are remarkably good British 
Ambassadors to Israel – your president, Sir Andrew Burns, was one such 
in the early 1990s – just as there are on occasion remarkably good 
Israeli Ambassadors to Britain, indeed we are fortunate to have one at 
the Embassy today in Ron Prosor. Overall, however, such men are swimming 
against the tide of an FO assumption that Britain’s relations with 
Israel ought constantly to be subordinated to her relations with other 
Middle Eastern states, especially the oil-rich ones, however badly those 
states behave in terms of human rights abuses, the persecution of 
Christians, the oppression of women, medieval practices of punishment, 
and so on.
     It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews 
are expected to behave better, goes the FO thinking, because they are 
like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in 
warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her 
neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally 
under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem 
crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague 
called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with 
Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won 
any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe 
killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 
600,000 Germans – twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate 
response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we 
therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses 
should be?
     Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the 
overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media 
and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would not do placed in the 
same position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 millions is 
nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at 
random, Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed 8 
patrolmen and kidnapped 2 others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha 
rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians. Now, if we 
multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just 
imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close 
as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 
British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and 
capturing a further eighteen? I put it to you that there is absolutely 
no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British 
subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. So why should 
Israel be expected to behave any differently?
     There has hardly been a single year since Brigadier-General Deedes 
established AIA in 1949 when a speaker has not been able to say that 
Israel faced a crisis, and on some occasions – in 1956, 1967, 1973 and 
especially in the face of the present Iranian nuclear programme today – 
these were existential. At a time when Barrack Obama appears to be least 
pro-Israeli president since Eisenhower, the dangers are even more 
obvious. For there is simply no way that Obama will prevent Ahmadinejad, 
perhaps Jewry’s most viciously outspoken and dangerous foe since the 
death of Adolf Hitler, to acquire a nuclear Bomb.
     None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if 
she decides pre-emptively to strike against such a threat – in the same 
way that Nelson pre-emptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and 
Churchill pre-emptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran – then she can 
expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She 
should ignore such criticism, because for all the fine work done by this 
Association over the past six decades - work that’s clearly needed as 
much now as ever before – Britain has only ever really been at best a 
fairweather friend to Israel.
     Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do 
occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to 
anything it is testament to this:
     That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, 
only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests 
of the Jews.

 between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths.
minchia che palle con sti miti...roba da paranoici convinti che il
mondo intero ce l'ha con loro. Lo specchietto dei protocolli...

amaryllide ha scritto:

Bombacci. Ma tu sai cos'è un mito?
Oppure non te intendi?
Tb (bieco illuminista)
-- 
"A vote is like a rifle, it's usefulness depends upon the character of
the user."
~ Theodore Roosevelt