RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday’s Observer described Israel as the obstacle to peace because of the settlements, its

insular militarism

and

a rise in xenophobic and religious nationalism, with any discussion of Palestinians’ civil rights confined to a dissident margin.

A few days earlier, Roger Cohen in the New York Times described Israel as the obstacle to peace because of its refusal to extend the freeze on building in the disputed territories which would be

a body blow to the latest peace effort

whereas Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister Salaam Fayed were

very serious

about peace.

It is hard to credit that people can ignore reality quite so brazenly and display such an egregious absence of elementary logic.

How can the settlement freeze be the make or break issue when, during the ten months that the freeze was on, Abbas refused to negotiate at all with Israel?

How can the settlements be the make or break issue when the Palestinian response to the forced removal of the settlers from Gaza was not peace but war?

How can the disputed territories be the issue when Israel has twice now offered to give up more than 90 per cent of these territories to the Palestinians, only for them to refuse it twice point blank (and in 2000 start a campaign of terrorist murder against Israel instead?)

Why is Israel blamed for xenophobic and religious nationalism when Abbas has said repeatedly that the Palestinians will never accept Israel as a Jewish state? Why isn’t he blamed for xenophobia and religious fanaticism?

Why is Israel blamed for ignoring civil rights when the Palestinians — along with the Observer, Roger Cohen and all who want every last settler out of the territories — are campaigning for the ethnic cleansing of every single Jew from a future state of Palestine?

How can Salaam Fayad be ‘very serious’ about peace with Israel when he stormed out of a meeting with Israel’s deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon after Ayalon refused to approve a summary of the meeting which said ‘two states’ but did not include the words ‘two states for two peoples’ – a walk-out that tells us that even the supposedly super-moderate Fayad refuses to accept that the goal is the ‘two state solution’?

How can it be Israel’s fault that peace is not on the cards when the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon this month openly assured the Arab world that the current negotiations with Israel were

not a goal, but rather another stage in the Palestinian struggle… to isolate Israel, to tighten the noose on it, to threaten its legitimacy, and to present it as a rebellious, racist state?

Given the continuing open belligerency towards Israel, deliberate obstructionism, continued incitement to hatred and violence against Israel and paper-thin excuses of the Abbas regime, for the Observer, the New York Times, the Associated Press and all the rest to blame Israel for preventing peace is beyond startling. It is incomprehensible in any rational universe.

It is also fomenting a murderous global attitude towards Israel. Indeed, not content with blaming the victim, Cohen even suggests violence against Israel is justified, since

Obama must now break some bones to get his way.

It’s all of a piece with the obscene article in Time magazine a few weeks ago which suggested that Israel didn’t want peace at all but was more concerned with making money. What all this bigotry and inversion of reality is doing is painting Israel as simply diabolical – as a country that is deliberately preventing peace either through a desire to kill people or to make money. A vicious untruth of such monstrous dimensions, which cannot do other than incite around the world acute hatred of Israel – the actual victim of unending exterminatory aggression – turns such malevolent shapers of our culture as the Observer, Roger Cohen, AP, Time and all the rest into accessories to the campaign of lies, injustice and mass murder against the Jewish people in Israel that both defines and defiles our era.