Why Britain hates Israel
In the JPost, Robin Shepherd recounts the crescendo of anti-Israel sentiment that has been rising in Britain in the past few weeks. She asks, "why now?" and comes up with five possible answers. These include the Obumbler's election, Netanyahu's election and his appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister, Foreign Secretary David Miliband's apparently preparing the ground for Britain to recognize Hamas, Israel's 'hard line' stance on Iran and Netanyahu's insistence that the 'Palestinians' recognize Israel as a Jewish state.I was thinking this evening about why Britain is and has for so long been so openly hostile to Israel. After all, it was Britain's Alfred Balfour who issued the declaration that called for a Jewish state more than 90 years ago. Is it that they love the Arabs more than they love us (witness the slicing off of 79% of the Mandate to create the rump kingdom of Jordan)? That wouldn't explain the extent to which they openly sided with the Arabs during the 1948 War. Pure anti-Semitism? It didn't used to be anywhere near as bad in England as it was on the Continent. The Islamification of England? Nowhere near as bad as France or Holland or Scandinavia.
I was about to send an email to Melanie Phillips - Britain's premier blogger - to see what she thought, when I discovered that she blogged the same JPost article that I cited above. Her answer? Go read it to find out.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:47 PM
4 Comments:
Scratch the surface anywhere and you won't find a truly rational explanation for anti-Semitism (no matter what you choose to call it, e.g.; anti-Israel sentiment). But let me take a crack at this. Beyond the fact that Israel persistently continues to want to be seen as a Jewish state, Britain's problem with Israel is, I believe, no more complicated than jealousy. Britain is small. Israel is smaller. Britain was once great. Israel's future is greatness. Britain's future is mediocrity, at best, dhimmitude more probably.
Melanie Philips points out those who hate Israel can no longer pretend its peace they want. The mask has been ripped off and we can see them for who they've been all along. And anti-Semitic bigotry has had a long and respectable pedigree in the UK going back to the Middle Ages.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Benny Morris, who has studied the '48 war in great depth, says the British were pretty evenhanded. They tended to allow Jewish communities to police themselves and take over British stations and military installations and the same for Arabs in Arab populated areas.
Britain supported the Balfour declaration because it thought--absurdly--that Jews controlled the world and were guiding the Ottoman Empire from behind the scenes. Buy them off with a promise of Palestine, then and the Ottoman war effort founders....
Combined with the unusually powerful and unusually philo-Semitic PM David Lloyd George and you got a declaration from the British of support for a Jewish Palestine.
The wonderful and highly reputable book "A Peace to End All Peace" has some fascinating stuff on all this.
One very simple explanation: BBC
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