 |
Stan Goodenough is an experienced journalist who has written about politics in South Africa and the Middle East for such organizations as The Daily Dispatch of East London, South Africa, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post, and the Virtual HolyLand website. He has been a South African gentile resident in Israel for 12 years. Stan is editor of and .
|
|
|
|
By Stan Goodenough
March 28, 2003
Courtesy of Jerusalem Newswire.
For a week now, Israelis have been carrying their gas masks and staring nervously eastwards, wondering whether or when Saddam's hidden mobile launchers will fire gas-tipped Scuds at Tel Aviv.
If they are concerned about existential dangers to their homeland, however, these Jews are looking the wrong way.
Yes, Saddam might just decide to go out with a bang and take some Zionists with him, and it is good and right that the IDF has its Arrows and Patriots ready if he does.
But while U.S.-led tanks and mechanized infantry are roaring through Iraqi sandstorms en route to Baghdad, another machine has been gunning its engine over in the British House of Commons, and has achieved a nearly unstoppable momentum.
The allies aim to wrest Iraq away from the Butcher of Baghdad and his terrorizing Ba'ath Party.
Simultaneously, Britain is leading the charge to ensure that, as soon as that objective has been met, the international community will move to remove the ancient land of Israel from Jewish control and hand it to the father of terrorism and his blood-soaked PLO.
The noble goal of liberating Iraq has long been linked in the British mind with the ignoble one of creating "Palestine" on Jewish lands.
But the impetus has been boosted by the British desire to heal the deep rifts that have divided the international community over the war against Baghdad.
Israel is to be offered on the altar of international reconciliation.
"I do not believe that there is any other issue with the same power to reunite the world community than progress on the issues of Israel and Palestine," Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Commons on March 18.
Just how uniting that power is, is already evident in the British Parliament, which was itself torn apart over Iraq.
"All of us are now signed up to this vision: a State of Israel recognized and accepted by the entire world, and a viable Palestinian state. That is what this country should strive for, and we will," said Blair.
Some in the British government fear that the United States of America is not completely on the same page.
On March 19, fellow MPs asked Blair to "reassure the House that he will maintain pressure, as he has already, on the American administration to ensure that they continue to back the momentum" towards a Palestinian state.
Blair responded by quoting President George W. Bush who, for the second time, publicly stated the previous week in that "America is committed, and I am personally committed, to implementing our road map toward peace."
Bush, said the premier, "is the first American President to commit himself to the two-state solution of a state of Israel and a viable Palestinian state."
As I write this, Blair is winging his way across the Atlantic to meet with Bush. The Brit carries with him the wishes of the House that he irrefutably secure the American leader's pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain behind a two-state solution.
With British boys and girls fighting alongside Americans in Iraq, Bush is unlikely to resist Blair's appeal even if the American is at heart no more supportive of a Palestinian state than is Bibi Netanyahu.
But for all the notice Israel is taking of the diplomatic storm darkening Western skies, it might as well be an innocuous spring breeze.
If, as some would have it, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon does not actually believe he will eventually have to give the nod to the de facto establishment of an Arab state on his nation's biblical heartland, he is pulling the wool over his own eyes, and deceiving his people.
Perhaps this once great Israeli warrior has not succumbed to the disease spread by Peace Now and his left-leaning son, Omri. Perhaps he truly believes he can outsmart Europe and the United Nations, England and the United States.
But Israel has paid in gallons of Jewish blood for the "risks for peace" and "painful compromises" taken by its leaders. Christians longing to see Israel secured in real peace within its rightful borders have expressed frustration at the trust these leaders place in their own cleverness to outwit the nations set on dismembering the Jewish state.
Just 12 years ago, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stated publicly that his Labor Party and the Likud Party Sharon leads today were in agreement on four fundamental issues: there would never be a return to the 1967 border, there would never be negotiations with the terrorist entity called the PLO; there would never by an Arab state created west of the Jordan River, and Jerusalem would never be divided.
History has recorded the complete erosion of that position in the Labor Party, and its almost complete wearing away in the Likud.
One wonders whether Britain's Mid East policy is predicated on oil interests, on a desire to still be seen as a super power, on resentment harking back to its failure to peacefully administer and slice up the territory of Palestine, on a long running love affair with the Arab world set opposite the deep-running historical anti-Semitism that often rears its head in that country, or on a sincere belief in the justice of the Palestinian cause.
If by some chance it is the latter, one can only marvel at how wholly the Brits have swallowed the Arabs' lying claims to a national home of their own on Israel's patrimony.
It is a great pity that the NIS 1 billion it will cost Israel to repackage the gas masks its citizens were ordered to assemble last Wednesday had not, instead, been spent on a media campaign to blitz international opinion with the truth: that Judea and Samaria are Jewish, and not Arab lands; that the Palestinian Arabs have no legitimate right to a national homeland on these lands; and that by aiding and abetting Arab efforts to establish this new terror-state, the "Christian" world is yet again showing its propensity to sell the Jews down the river for a mess of pottage.
For Tony Blair and the rest of his "honorable members," the birth of Palestine apparently offers a truly effective "final solution" to the specific post-1948 Zionist strain of the historic Jewish problem that has plagued the planet.
May God awaken the Israelis to the terrible danger facing their land and nation. And may He stir them to create an impenetrable barrier in the way of a Palestinian state; a barrier not even the united nations of the world will be able to push aside.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
|
|
|
|
Click on the blue headline to read a Talkback comment and respond to it. Click on the  icon to send a private email to the talkback writer. The icon appears only if the writer has decided to be contacted. If no popup window appears, please make sure your popup blocker allows israelinsider.com.
|
|
| |
|
|
