During “All-Stars Week”, CIJR’s Isranet Briefings will highlight the work of outstanding individuals, whose invaluable efforts contribute to strengthening public perception of the Jewish state’s regional and global position. Each Briefing will include a sample of articles written over the last year by a given author, dealing with issues such as Israeli politics and security, as well as matters concerning Diaspora Jewry, and ways of combatting the delegitimation of Israel.
Today’s Briefing:
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist and author, is best known for her controversial column in the Daily Mail which deals with political and social issues.
Born in 1951, Mrs. Phillips read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford before training as a journalist on the Evening Echo, Hemel Hempstead. After a short period on New Society magazine, she joined the Guardian in 1977 and soon became its social services correspondent and social policy lead writer. After a stint as the paper’s news editor, she started writing her column in 1987, taking it to the Observer and then the Sunday Times before moving to the Daily Mail in December 2001.
Her book Londonistan was published in the US and UK in 2006 and immediately became a best-seller. Her latest book, The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power is published by Encounter, (2010). In 1996, Mrs. Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for journalism.
THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT AND ISRAEL DERANGEMENT SYNDROME
Melanie Phillips
Jewish Chronicle, September 9, 2011
Government ministers might be concerned to know quite how often I am now accosted by strangers in public places. These strangers are usually, although not always, Jews. They accost me on the Tube, at the theatre, in the supermarket, in restaurants and in the street. They all say the same thing: keep on saying it about Israel, keep on telling it as it is, don’t ever give up.
What is happening to us? they murmur. It’s unbelievable, astonishing, terrifying. The bias, the hatred, the lies. Where is it all going to end? And an increasing number say there’s no longer see any future for us Jews in Britain.
Almost every few days brings fresh examples of the Israel Derangement Syndrome that so disturbs and frightens them. [Recently], anti-Israel hooligans disrupted a Promenade concert where the Israel Philharmonic was playing, causing the BBC to abort its live broadcast. [Soon thereafter], a St Andrews University student was convicted of racially abusing a Jewish postgraduate student over his support of Israel. And week in, week out, Israelis are blamed for defending themselves against mass murder.
By now, it must be obvious to all but the most supine or hostile to Israel within the UK Jewish community that what is happening is an evil uniquely targeted at the Jewish people. For the demonisation of Israel is of a nature and type extended to no other country.
While atrocities by tyrannies and rogue states provoke almost total indifference, Israel is treated as in a class apart: apparently the very worst country in the entire world, a kind of global blight which has to be expunged altogether from civilised society if not from the face of the earth.
Sound familiar? Oh, sorry, I forgot. Part of the madness is that we are totally forbidden to identify what this actually is—a prejudice directed solely at the Jewish people, who in this latest manifestation are uniquely demonised as usurpers in their own historic homeland.
Few [British] government minsters grasp the nature and scale of what is happening. Most don’t think there is a problem, and many of those who do think it is Israel’s own fault. Ministers would be amazed and appalled to know how many British Jews now feel so betrayed and abandoned. That’s because ministers tend to meet only those Jews who tell them that anyone who thinks like that can be safely disregarded as an hysteric, extremist or right-winger. They would be even more appalled to be told that they themselves play a significant part in fuelling the madness.
They maintain—and probably genuinely believe—that the British government is a true if candid friend of Israel. To which one can only say: with friends like these who needs enemies? Actually, it’s more like having a close relationship with someone suffering from multiple personality disorder. For there is no doubt that at the military and intelligence level, Britain’s relationship with Israel is close and mutually supportive. British spooks and soldiers tend to understand very well the immense benefit to the UK of Israel’s intelligence and military prowess.
The problem lies at the political level. While many Tory backbenchers support Israel, the government—with some very honourable exceptions—is hostile. So much so that a group of Tory MPs and others in the party who are well-disposed to Israel have reportedly formed an informal group to prevent [Prime Minister] David Cameron from throwing Israel under the bus altogether.
This group has become very alarmed by the government’s repeated sniping against Israel, such as Cameron’s calculated gesture of hostility in stepping down as patron of the JNF. And then there was last month’s video by International Development Minister Alan Duncan, in which he made false and inflammatory claims that, through its security barrier, Israel was annexing the Palestinians’ land and was also stealing their water.
First, the Foreign Office briefed that Duncan was only stating British government policy; later, it seemed to distance itself from his remarks. But the fact is that, despite his grossly ignorant and prejudiced rant, Duncan is still in post.
Why? Because the callow and opportunistic Cameroons are blank slates upon which can be written the fashionable bigotry and historical illiteracy of our times. The Cameron government did not create the madness now raging against Israel. It could, however, control it by standing up for truth and justice against lies and prejudice. Tragically, it is choosing to fan the flames of ignorance and hatred instead.
THE BBC AIRBRUSHES OUT PALESTINIAN ATTACKS—AGAIN
Melanie Phillips
Daily Mail, October 29, 2011
During the past 24 hours, Israel has been under sustained rocket attack from Gaza. Some 35 rockets and mortar shells were fired deep into the country, killing one man in Ashkelon and injuring four other people elsewhere. In Ashdod, vehicles were set on fire and a school—fortunately empty—was hit. The rocket barrage followed an IDF strike on Gaza which killed five members of Islamic Jihad—and which itself was targeted at the IJ terrorist cell responsible for launching a Grad rocket that exploded in Ashdod.
This, however, is how BBC News has reported the past day’s events on its website, [under the banner of] “Militants killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza”:
“Five Palestinian militants have been killed in a number of Israeli air strikes on the south of the Gaza Strip. The violence is the most serious since a major prisoner exchange deal earlier this month between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that governs in Gaza.
The militants were killed at an Islamic Jihad training site in Rafah in the south of the strip. Doctors say at least 10 other people were injured in the strike. The Israeli air force has confirmed it carried out the attack. It said the militants were preparing to launch rockets into Israel.
An Israeli army spokesman confirmed to the AFPnews agency that aircraft had attacked other sites. A statement said the Israeli military had ‘attacked three terrorist sites in the Gaza Strip as well as an arms factory in the south of the territory.…’
The violence comes less than two weeks after a major prisoner exchange which saw about 500 Palestinian prisoners released from Israeli jails in a swap for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Some of those released were Islamic Jihad members.
A further 500 Palestinian prisoners are due to be freed as part of the deal later this year. BBC Gaza correspondent Jon Donnison says an escalation in violence could jeopardise those releases.”
No mention of the Palestinian rocket attack on Ashdod. No mention of the 35 rocket attacks on Israel during the past day, nor the Israeli killed in Ashkelon. Instead, the BBC has given the false impression on its website that the Israelis initiated the attacks—and the only casualties it reported were Palestinian.
This website report was timed as “last updated” at 14:12 on Saturday. But even on the midnight Radio Four news bulletin just now there was still no mention of the rocket attacks on Israel over the past day, nor the murdered Israeli.…
This reporting is simply disgraceful and inexcusable. Such selective manipulation of the facts and consequent misrepresentation of cause and effect, which reverses victim and aggressor in the Middle East, serves the cause of Arab propaganda and foments public hatred of Israel, all with untold consequences around the world.
As has been observed for years, the BBC’s reporting on Israel is out of control. The BBC is clearly incapable of putting its own house in order; its abuse of journalism on this most sensitive of issues is now so egregious that it is surely a matter that should be raised in Parliament.
OVERRATED: MAHMOUD ABBAS
Melanie Phillips
Standpoint, October 2011
Mahmoud Abbas is the man who Britain, America and Europe think deserves to be the president of an independent state of Palestine—the establishment of which, they tell themselves, would end the Middle East impasse.
To Western eyes Abbas, the Fatah-backed President of the Palestinian Authority, is a moderate. It is, however, simply astounding that he should be viewed in this way. It is even more astounding that Western liberals should endorse him and give him a free pass for his behaviour.
Both he and the Palestinian establishment he controls repeatedly say they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state. So his aim remains the destruction of Israel. He and his people repeatedly say that not one Jew would be allowed to live in Palestine. Such a state would therefore be a racist entity ethnically cleansed of Jews.
Abbas has gone even further in making plain that his bigotry is directed not just at Israel. Considering the possibility that NATO forces might be brought in to police a settlement, Abbas declared: “I will not accept the presence of Jews in these forces.”
Such bigotry is hardly surprising given that he earned the Soviet equivalent of a PhD in Moscow for a dissertation published in Arabic entitled “The Other Side: the Secret Relations between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement” in which he claimed that the Holocaust didn’t happen.
He declared that the gas chambers were never used to murder Jews, and that at most 890,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis. This happened, he claimed, in part because the Zionists led a campaign of incitement against the Jews living under Nazi rule in order to fuel their extermination and so bring about the victory of Zionism.
Not only does Abbas thus odiously deny the Holocaust, but he and his cronies also repeatedly deny the history of the Jewish people in their false claim that the Palestinians, rather than the Jews, were the authentic inhabitants of the land.
Despite mouthing platitudes in English about the aim of two states living side by side, when speaking in Arabic Abbas and Co deny Israel’s right to exist at all.
Although the Jews are the only people for whom Israel was ever their nation-state, the PA-controlled paper Al-Hayat al-Jadida stated earlier this year: “The Zionists must acknowledge publicly, in front of the world, that the Jews have no connection to the Palestinian Arab land.” And last May (in a speech read by an adviser), Abbas scorned as a mere Israeli claim the 3,000-year old historical presence of the Jews in the Land of Israel—and asserted an entirely fictitious 9,000-year-old Palestinian presence dating back to 7000 BCE. Despite the fact that no such people as the Palestinians then existed, Abbas declared that this made them “the owners of history”.
Abbas may look like a mild-mannered businessman but in fact he is steeped in terrorism. He has boasted of dispatching “fighters” to murder Israeli civilians during the terrorist intifada of 2000-05. And today he persists in glorifying the murder of Israeli innocents and showering honours upon their killers.…
Under Abbas, the PA regularly glorifies terrorists and turns them into role models. After the death of Amin al Hindi, a senior planner of the massacre of Israeli athletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics, Abbas personally attended the official red-carpet military funeral provided for him by the PA. He described another of the Munich terrorists, Muhammad Daoud Oudeh, as “a wonderful brother, companion, tough and stubborn, relentless fighter”. And he does nothing to end the incitement to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis promulgated in the educational materials, sermons and media under his control.
This is not the behaviour of a moderate. This is a man who should be in a courtroom being prosecuted for mass murder. Yet this is the man to whom the West declares that Israel must make concessions so that he can plant a state of his own on its border, which the people around him make clear will be used as a springboard from which to destroy Israel.
The fact that Abbas has made no concessions is ignored. The fact that he demands an end to settlement building but nevertheless refused to negotiate while such building was frozen is ignored. The fact that he is a Jew-hater committed to ethnic cleansing and the destruction of a country is ignored.
The West gives Abbas a free pass because they think there is no alternative solution to the one he proposes. But, appallingly, the solution that he represents risks being a final one.
PROMISE AND REDEMPTION
Melanie Phillips
melaniephillips.com, February 27, 2011
Some people would doubtless be amazed to learn that, some 10 centuries before the birth of Christ and 17 centuries before the birth of Mohammed, the city of Jerusalem was created by King David as the capital of the united kingdom of Israel and Judea. The Jews were in fact the only people for whom the land of Israel was ever actually their national home.
And the Arabs knew it. “Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?” the then mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Khalidi, told the Chief Rabbi of France in 1899: “God knows historically it is indeed your country”—even though, he added, the problem was that now there were others living there too.
Those others were only there, however, because of the extraordinary impulse to conquer and possess this tiny piece of land—and above all, the prize of prizes at its heart, Jerusalem. For after the Jews were finally driven out by the Romans in 70 CE, a myriad of different peoples and dynasties piled in to conquer it: Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Ummayads, Abbasids, Fatimids, crusaders from all over Christendom, Seljuks, Kurds, Mamluks, Mongols, Albanians, Ottomans and (in 1918) Britons. (The one name that does not figure in this great procession is the Palestinians—for no such people ever existed.)
Accordingly, as Simon Sebag Montefiore illuminates in his impressive “biography” of this most transcendent, mysterious and unique city, all these civilisations are embedded in its ancient stones like geological strata. What he brings out is that, from the start, Jerusalem was a global obsession. Peoples, religions and civilisations fought over it, conquered it and were in turn conquered. It was seen, quite simply, as the centre of the world, the hinge between heaven and earth. And everyone wanted to possess it.
On the face of it, this was extraordinary. For Jerusalem was hardly propitiously situated—devoid of seas or rivers, a mere lump of barren rock in the middle of the desert. Throughout the centuries it was often desperately poor and squalid.… And yet it is still magnificent, luminous and utterly special.
And that is because it is a city of profound spirituality and religious longing. For both Judaism and Christianity, Jerusalem was the place where the end of days would occur; and because the Muslims knew that this was foretold by the Jewish and Christian prophets, they wanted to own it too. Like all millenarian dreams of redemption, this one exacted a horrific toll of fanaticism.
To this eye-opening narrative of obsession, power-lust, and unspeakable savagery, Sebag Montefiore brings a novelist’s touch: vivid vignettes, stories and descriptions that leap off the page. Indeed, we could surely do without some of this graphic detail: Roman crucifixions, Tartar disembowellings, Crusaders piling up mounds of hacked-off limbs as a kind of religious sacrament. A city of peace this never was.…
In describing these claims and counterclaims to Jerusalem, Sebag Montefiore takes pains to be totally even-handed—rather too much so. For he gives the impression that the fight for the city is between three religions with equal claims.
But they are not equal. The Jews created the city as their capital. Everyone else marched in and conquered it and did their damnedest to keep the Jews out. Christianity’s attempt to conquer Jerusalem derived from its desire to supersede Judaism; the Muslim attempt to conquer it—as today—derived from the Islamic drive not just to supersede its predecessor faiths but to appropriate and Islamise Judaism itself. But throughout, the Jews always retained their connection with the city, their holy of holies that has always been the focus of their prayers.
Today, there are repeated Arab attempts to erase the copious, growing archeological evidence of David’s city and the ancient kingdom of Israel and Judea, which establishes the Jews’ indisputable claim to Israel and to Jerusalem. What is clear, however, is that it is only since the Israelis liberated east Jerusalem from the Jordanian occupation in 1967 that, for the first and only time in the city’s history, Jews, Christians and Muslims may freely worship at their shrines.
Sebag Montefiore, however, claims that this is only theoretically true. Non-Jews, he says, have their freedom to worship restricted because of the security barrier and other bureaucratic harassments. But that’s only because of the need to defend these places from yet more violence. For exactly the same reason, Jews are forbidden by Israeli law to pray on the Temple Mount.
In a war between truth and lies, justice and injustice, even-handedness ceases to be admirable and risks becoming instead partisanship for wrong-doing. Towards the end of this otherwise fine book, Sebag Montefiore falls into this trap. It is a similar trap—the misguided belief that fairness means splitting the difference between good and evil—that has led the West increasingly to abandon Israel to the prospect of yet further conquest and destruction. And so, as always, the peace of Jerusalem tragically remains merely a prayer.
