Conrad Black: The moral bankruptcy of Carney’s Israel sanctions

It is dismal and unsurprising that Canada has joined with 11 other western countries in purporting to abandon the importation of anything coming from areas of the West Bank of the Jordan River that have recently been encroached upon by Israeli settlers. It is embarrassing that any of these countries would at this critical point In the Middle East join in such a futile gesture. The announcement was accompanied by a pompous reassertion of the ambition of these 12 countries to assist in a two-state solution to the Palestinian question. (The other states are Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.)

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The Palestinians are not a distinct nationality but are essentially the Muslim and Christian Arabs of the former League of Nations Mandate taken from Ottoman territory at the end of the First World War that are not now located within Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, or the borders of Israel prior to the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The notion of a Palestinian state was popularized by Arab nationalists led by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1954 to 1970), in order to stir up antagonism to the State of Israel, and to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment that was being inflicted upon almost all of them by their rulers.

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The fate of the Palestinians has been a tragic one, as the Arab powers declined to assist in relocating them from fetid refugee camps that were simply terrorist breeding grounds. In their desperation, when given the chance, because of President George W. Bush’s blind faith that democratic elections would always elevate a democratic government, they empowered the Hamas terrorists in Gaza and the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and both are dedicated with suicidal determination to the extinction of Israel as a Jewish state. Israel was endorsed by the United Nations as a Jewish state in the recent aftermath of the destruction of most of the European Jews and half of the Jewish population of the world, approximately six million people, along with an approximately equal number of other victims of the Nazi death camps.

No member state of the United Nations has greater international legitimacy, other than the founding and convening powers: the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and to the extent that it represents the disintegrated Soviet Union, Russia. Canada and other countries joined when the United Nations was founded or subsequently, but Israel’s creation was supported by the United Nations by joint motion of the United States and the USSR (though because the Arab side rejected partition, the Jewish state did not emerge until after the 1948 war). Its borders remain notoriously disputed but it’s legitimacy as a homeland for the Jews is absolutely unquestionable. The Jews are, in addition, the senior local ethnic and religious group, having been in the land of Israel starting more than 4000 years prior to the birth of the Prophet Mohamed.

The Palestinians could have had a state at any time in the last 35 years but their leaders, whether in the Palestine Liberation Organization or in Hamas, want a state that includes Israel and the return or immigration to Israel of enough Arab Muslims to be a governing majority with the declared intention of expelling, subjugating, or massacring the Jewish population, (one more time).

The action of these twelve countries blundering into this terribly vexed controversy with absurd symbolic pieties of no consequence just emphasizes how fatuous the attempts of these economically (except for Norway, a petro-state) and politically derelict countries to assert themselves have become. The one thing that all the parties in the horribly violent and complex Middle East could agree upon is their disdain for these pretentious interlopers. These countries are unctuously imposing absurd and unenforceable sanctions that will fall most heavily on the many thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel and return to the West Bank each day, (something of a local economic elite). Most of these countries, except to an extent Poland, have a long and distinguished democratic history, (over 50 years for Spain and Portugal, centuries for the others), comparatively free of antisemitic outrages.

None of them has imposed such insulting strictures on China or scores of other countries in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, that are brutal dictatorships and routinely employ what could only be described as slave labour. Israel is a cacaphonous democracy that in deference to the historic sorrows and agonies of the Jewish people, the most horrible of them still within living memory, scrupulously upholds individual rights. (Israeli Arabs are the freest of any Middle Eastern or North African Arab, which is why they almost never emigrate.) Some of the conduct of some of the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, like some of the conduct of their Palestinian neighbours, has been reprehensible. Since Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is not accepted by the contending factions of Palestinian leadership, and most of the violence committed within the Palestinian areas of the West Bank is committed by Palestinians, it is abusively unjust to heap upon Israel, a society with a much more civilized ethos than those who dispute its rightful existence, the entire responsibility for violence in the West Bank. This manifestly unjust gesture of symbolic impotence betokens the moral collapse of much of the West. From when the great western democracies went to war against the Nazis and their allies 85 years ago to the last ten years, the nine accuser countries that have been pillars of democracy throughout that time, would have been judicious about the Middle East, and they would have emphasized the civil rights of their entire populations.

Instead, most of them have allowed their democracy to atrophy in cowardly submission to the practice of large minorities within each national Muslim minority to lead a relentless assault of fluctuating intensity on the long established but demographically smaller Jewish minority in their midst. (Norway is innocent of this, since because of its great per capita oil wealth, it severely restricts immigration and has no grievances against their 2,000 Jews, one twenty-fifth of one percent of the whole population.) The prime minister is undoubtedly correct when he states that there is a large overlap between Muslim and pan-Canadian values. He degrades and insults all Canadians when he truckles to that minority of Canadian Muslims afflicted by Israelophobia. The most galling aspect of this widespread moral cowardice, apart from the mealy-mouthed doubletalk of authorities pretending to be righteous when they’re in fact grovelling to the most unsavory popular instincts, is that a gesture of moral leadership on this issue would receive overwhelming public support. All Canadians should be ashamed of the antisemitic fellow-traveling of our federal government.

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