A Cold Wind in the Warmth By Melanie Phillips The UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, made a strikingly warm speech about Israel in the Knesset on Wednesday, including this statement: ‘Israel is and will always be the homeland for the Jewish people; that is what the State of Israel was and is all about.’ Indeed; a most welcome and, in the current environment, brave statement of the obvious. What a shame, then, that this was somewhat marred by what he subsequently said when defending this remark against the inevitable push-back from those who do not want the Jewish homeland to exist. For Mr Cameron said: That is what Israel is and that is what it will be. Jews were persecuted around the world, including those murdered in the Holocaust, and so the decision was taken that Israel should be the homeland of the Jewish people and this is what it is’. But this is a distortion of history. Yes, the UN resolution bringing the State of Israel into being was passed in 1947. But the world took the decision straight after the First World War that the homeland of the Jewish people should be re-established in Palestine. In 1922, the 51-strong League of Nations declared: Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.’ It did so because the international community recognised – as did the Arab leadership at that time, incidentally – that what had been renamed Palestine by the Romans was the historic land of Israel where the Jews alone had had their national kingdom, in which they had maintained a continuous presence throughout the subsequent centuries of conquest and where they alone therefore had the right to re-establish that homeland. It is this ancient Jewish connection which the Palestinians try so hard to deny because it makes a total nonsense of their own ‘narrative’. It is a fallacy of our time that the State of Israel was created merely to assuage European guilt over the Holocaust, thus giving a country to the Jews which had belonged to the Arabs – a fallacy which helps fuel the venomous hatred of Israel now so prevalent in Britain. In 1922 Britain, as the Mandatory authority for Palestine, undertook to resettle that land with the Jews ¬– a treaty obligation it then spent the following three decades doing its best to negate. So for a British Prime Minister to state that the decision to re-establish the Jewish homeland was taken as a result of the Holocaust is unfortunate, to say the least. Someone should teach Mr Cameron some real history. No doubt the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would never allow it.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 20:12:43 +0000
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