Londonistan

The indispensable Boker tov, Boulder! posted a chart last week showing the results of opinion polling by the Pew Research Center on Middle East sympathies in Europe. 

In past surveys, the “American public’s strong pro-Israel stance set it apart from other countries” (the U.S. percentages in the current poll are 48% sympathizing more with Israel versus 13% sympathizing more with the Palestinians).  Now more Germans sympathize with Israel than with the Palestinians.  In France, identical percentages now sympathize with each side.

But in Britain — America’s closest ally in the war on terror — Palestinians continue to generate more sympathy than Israelis.   Melanie Phillips, in her remarkable new book Londonistan, describes the prevailing mindset in the U.K. regarding the Middle East conflict:

The general view is that, to assuage European guilt over the Holocaust, European Jews were given land belonging to the Palestinians, who were driven out by this process to the West Bank and Gaza.  After 1967, Israel was determined to colonize these areas too — despite the fact that they were also Palestinian lands — thus frustrating the Palestinians’ desire for a homeland of their own.

She then proceeds to rebut that view:

There are many more fundamental errors in this false analysis than can be dealt with here.  They include the fact that Israel and parts of the West Bank were the ancient Jewish national home before this land was conquered by the Arabs; that half of Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews driven out of Arab countries; that the Palestinian Arabs were offered a state of their own in 1948 but refused and tried to wipe out lawfully constituted Israel instead; that they were not driven out of Israel but in the main fled; that the resulting war of annihilation against Israel has never stopped; that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was legal because it was an action taken in self-defense against combatants who have never stopped waging war against it; and that these territories, far from belonging to the Palestinians, had previously been illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt and should more properly have been described as no-man’s-land since the end of the British Mandate in 1948. . .

[T]he fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land.  It is about hatred of the Jews.  It is certainly not about the absence of a separate state of Palestine, which was on offer in 1936, 1948 and 2000, and could have been established at any time between 1948 and 1967 by Jordan and Egypt.

Phillips — despite being a columnist for the Daily Mail, a recipient of the Orwell Prize for journalism in 1996, a graduate of Oxford, and the author of several prior books — has had a hard time getting her book published in Britain.  She described the difficulties in an article published this past Friday (“The Battle to Publish Londonistan”):

Three years ago, I wrote a proposal for a book about the alarming resurgence of anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, the way this had been taken up by the left and the fact that this was undermining Britain’s ability to defend itself against global Islamist terrorism. My literary agent thought it was good stuff and sent it round. Every publishing house said no.

I was taken aside by a senior editor at a big-name imprint who was well-disposed towards me. ‘Drop it’, he said. ‘No British publisher will touch this’. Why? Because it defended Israel, already well on the way to becoming a pariah state, and worse still levelled the charge of anti-Jewish prejudice against the British intelligentsia. . . .

My agent sent this proposal to specifically Jewish publishers in the hope of touching a nerve. It touched one all right — the problem was it was the wrong nerve. ‘I don’t agree with this AT ALL [caps] so I won’t publish it’, said one. Another jovially observed: ‘I’d rather take ricin than publish this’.

The book was finally published last month, and it is a startling volume — as a factual report of what has been happening in England, as an analysis of a mindset regarding the war on terror that extends far beyond the U.K., and as a warning about developments that could have profound consequences for the West.  It is essential reading. 

(It is also worth reading her blog post today, particularly the last quote at the bottom).