While many subscribers have been outraged at some of the one-sided and vitriolic press that Israel has received in the British media, the situation in the Irish Republic is also a great cause for concern. A one-sided op-ed by Irish MEP Proinsias De Rossa in The Irish Times deserves a response.
Calling it “cold-blooded murder; a war crime,” De Rossa describes an unverified incident (relayed by Palestinian interpreters), alleging Israeli soldiers deliberately fired on Gazan civilians and refused access for ambulances. Many Palestinian accusations have been levelled at Israel recently, not all of which have stood up to further examination, not to mention the truth behind the Israeli shelling of a UN school that never was. Is this another anti-Israel charge without basis?
De Rossa does not appear to consider legitimate Israeli security concerns throughout his piece, instead parroting Palestinian demands. He wonders “how Hamas could not realise the counter-productive effect of their rockets launched into Israel.” De Rossa’s one-sidedness is revealed: the thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians over the past 8 years are seen as significant only in the effect they have on the Palestinian population. The real impact on Israeli civilians and the human suffering caused by Palestinian rockets is completely ignored. While De Rossa is happy to accuse Israel of “war crimes”, he does not acknowledge that the real war crime is Hamas’s firing of rockets against Israeli civilian targets.
Continuing to ignore the seriousness of Palestinian terror and the events leading up to Operation Cast Lead, De Rossa instead accuses Israel of launching a “war of terror, as well as an economic war, against the people of Gaza.”
Attributing particular malevolence to Israel, De Rossa’s “economic war” was “planned destruction of the economic infrastructure by tanks and bulldozers,” conveniently ignoring the presence of Hamas and other terrorists embedded and firing from within the Gazan civilian infrastructure.
De Rossa claims that:
those we met want peace and the freedom to run their own affairs. Freedom to grow their fruit and flowers and harvest their olives, write their poems and sing their songs; freedom to follow their own gods in the small corner of land that the international community has so “kind-heartedly” left them with.
Has he conveniently forgotten the Israeli disengagement from Gaza that did leave Palestinians to run their own affairs and grow their own produce (courtesy of Israeli agricultural greenhouses that the Palestinians promptly destroyed)?
In short, De Rossa, while paying lip service to Palestinian responsibilities, makes it perfectly clear who he blames for the ills of the region.
Please send your considered comments to The Irish Times – [email protected] remembering to include the writer’s full name, postal address, and telephone numbers (day and evening).
INDIE’S ANDERSON REWRITES HISTORY
The Independent’s Bruce Anderson writes:
The first act of the current tragedy began in 1967, after the Six-Day War. Plucky little Israel was master of the battlefield. She had overrun a vast acreage of Arab territory. Almost immediately, even by those who had never been enthusiastic about the State of Israel, distinctions began to be drawn between the pre-’67 boundaries and the 1967 conquests. Israel had a tremendous hand of cards, strategic and moral. There was never a better moment for “in victory, magnanimity”.
Israel should have announced that unlike almost every previous military victor, she did not seek territorial gains; her sole war aims were peace and justice. To secure them, she was prepared to trade her conquests, with the obvious exception of the Holy Places in old Jerusalem.
If Anderson had been bothered to check any reputable history book he would know that on June 19, 1967 (a little over a week after the war ended), the Israeli government sent a message to the U.S. that it was prepared to return Gaza and the Golan in return for signed peace treaties while separate negotiations would resolve the future of the West Bank, Gaza and refugees.
History refers to the famous Arab reaction from Khartoum as The Three No’s.
Please ask for a correction from The Independent – [email protected]
RECOMMENDED READING: JACOBSON AND MacSHANE
Two opinion pieces have caught the eye. In a detailed and eloquent essay in The Independent, Howard Jacobson examines the ancient prejudice lurking beneath the surface of some criticism of Israel’s Gaza operation:
A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here – the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.
But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, “criticism” of Israel, pure and simple. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians this country has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. Deviate a fraction of a moral millimetre from the prevailing othodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question. I don’t say that self-pityingly. As always with dictatorships of the mind, the worst harmed are not the ones not listened to, but the ones not listening. So leave them to it, has essentially been my philosophy. A life spent singing anti-Zionist carols in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway is its own punishment.
Read the full essay here.
In a similar vein, Denis MacShane writes in The Times about the shocking increase in anti-Semitism:
Is it unreasonable to argue that the reason that there is worldwide anger against Israel but not against other regimes or religions that carry out massacres of Muslims is because the Israelis are Jews? Has legitimate criticism and anger against Israel allowed Jew hate to become almost acceptable politics again? Add to this a world economic crisis in which it is so easy to point at the names of the swindlers and banksters that happen to be Jewish, and a new perfect storm of anti-Semitism begins to take shape.
Read the full article here.
