Author: Barbara Amiel
Publication: The Daily Telegraph,
UK
Date: March 4, 2002
In a Gallup poll released last week,
61 per cent of nearly 10,000 Muslims in nine Islamic countries said they
did not believe Arabs were responsible for the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Centre last September. The poll did not ask the 61 per cent
who they thought had hijacked the planes. One Gallup poll recently cited
by Andrew Sullivan in The Sunday Times gave a figure of 48 per cent of
Pakistanis believing that Jews flew the planes into the WTC after warning
fellow Jews working there to stay home.
One is inclined to look at these
results with gallows humour, as did columnist George Jonas in Canada's
National Post. He found it "hopeful" that 61 per cent of Muslim respondents
thought crashing civilian airliners into office buildings sufficiently
wrong to deny that Arabs had anything to do with it. This, he pointed out,
is certainly a moral improvement on the martyrs of Hamas and Hizbollah
or al-Qa'eda who view indiscriminate murder with pride. Unfortunately,
the poll also found a significant minority who thought the WTC atrocity
morally justifiable. That leaves us with a Muslim world more or less split
into two groups: the larger portion has moral reservations about the events
of September 11 but is in a state of denial about Arabs being responsible,
and a much smaller portion (but as high as 36 per cent in Kuwait) has no
moral reservations about mass murder.
These polls can be easily manipulated
by how the questions are drafted. Nor are they fully reliable in their
measurement. I use polls strictly to determine the existence of a strand
in a given culture or country. The very existence of such a strand may
exert a strong influence on behaviour in that region. In that context,
the proposal the New York Times attributes to Crown Prince Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia that Israel should return to its 1967 borders and then the
Saudis and Arab world would consider recognition seems a deal one can't
immediately recommend - though there is a hint of some flexibility in it
regarding Jerusalem. The many problems of the proposal begin with the question
of whether it exists or is merely kite-flying. But, to mention only one
objection, such a proposal would mean Israel giving up tangible assets
in exchange for the promise of eventually getting a piece of paper signed
by countries that you know regard Israel's very existence as "a catastrophe".
This seems, to put it mildly, unwise.
What is on the Arab mind is redrafting
UN Resolution 242, passed in 1967, to have it say what they had always
wished it had said. That resolution called for Israeli withdrawal to "secure
and recognised boundaries". For a long time, the Arab world insisted it
meant a return to Israel's exact 1967 borders. Those borders give Israel
security concerns, not least because it would assume the vulnerability
of an hourglass, only nine miles wide in its populous northern end. But,
Resolution 242 did not specify borders. In 1970, George Brown, foreign
secretary at the time of 242, said in an interview:
"I formulated the Security Council
resolution. Before we submitted it to the council, we showed it to Arab
leaders. The proposal said 'Israel will withdraw from territories that
were occupied' and not from 'the' territories, which means Israel will
not withdraw from all the territories."
Lord Caradon, sponsor of the UN
resolution, added: "I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory
border; it is where the troops had to stop in 1947, just where they happened
to be that night." According to the Middle East Media Research Institute,
the Saudi ambassador to Britain, Ghazi Algosaibi, summed up the issue in
Al-Sharq Al-Awsat last February 19 in this engaging way: "Once a [new Resolution
242] is passed, once Israel's commitment to this resolution is declared,
and once an independent Palestinian state is established, Saudi Arabia
will not be [more politically hostile towards Israel] than its Palestinian
brothers..." Even by the ambassador's elegant standards, this was an impressive
display of conditionality.
Postscript: responses to my column
mentioning dinner-party anti-Semitism have been piling up. As media reports
go into "the files", one is forced, apologetically, to correct factual
errors. I'm perfectly happy to be castigated for views I hold, but I'll
be damned if I'll be castigated for ones I don't.
I learn from the Daily Mails Geoffrey
Levy, among others, that I am a "Jewess" (correct) and a "passionate Zionist".
False. While I find Zionism a perfectly respectable position, it happens
that I am not, and have never been, a Zionist myself Prior to Israel's
1948 establishment, I would have been on the side of those who believed
the solution to the "Jewish question" was more tolerance within nations
rather than the creation of a Jewish state. Just for the record, I have
also argued since the late 1970s that a Palestinian state is both right
and a necessity for peace. I believe the Israeli settlements should be
disbanded and that the Israelis missed a great opportunity to establish
all of the above when Prime Minister Menachem Begin produced his bogus
autonomy plan in 1979. I can't blame my colleagues in the press for not
going through my columns in North America or The Times, Sunday Times and
Telegraph on this issue, but these views are available.
In the same newspaper, another writer
matter-of-factly described me as "a campaigning Zionist". I am a journalist
and I don't campaign for any side. It is precisely because I don't consider
it my job to guide Israeli policy or its public relations efforts that
I have not written on a number of issues (such as how badly Israel conducts
its public relations compared with the Palestinians and why). The day I
did that I'd resign my job and become a PR flack.
It is true that I have been writing
more about the Middle East lately. When the Gulf war broke out and I was
at The Sunday Times, those of us on the comment pages were told by the
editor to write on that issue for several weeks. It was a logical request
given the seriousness of the subject. My own instinct is to go from topic
to topic. But if you are in a mood to write about something, the mere fact
that people may pigeonhole you is not a disincentive.
There is a school of thought in
the press, exemplified by Deborah Orr at the Independent, who wrote that
"according to Ms Amiel, I too have been peddling anti-Semitism... Ever
since I went to Israel on holiday I've considered it to be a shitty little
country too." Actually, Miss Orr strikes me as muddled rather than anti-Semitic.
However, her point, repeated elsewhere, is that I believe anyone who criticises
Israel's policies or actions to be anti-Semitic.
For the record, I do not. Yes, it
is possible to be anti-Israel both in general and vis-à-vis specific
policies without being anti-Semitic That is so self-evident that the number
of Jews since the days of Theodore Herzl, who were anti-Zionist not only
equalled but periodically exceeded the number who were Zionists. That said,
the fact is that these days, when anti-Semitism is not socially acceptable
and anti-Zionism is, a number of anti-Semites hide their true colours under
this distinction. '
I'm dwelling on this idiocy at length
because, having worked as a journalist on both sides of the Atlantic, it
is my impression that the British public is more likely to take its opinions
from the media than either the Canadian or American public. In the past
number of years, the British public, while not necessarily anti-Semitic,
has acquired an anti-Israeli bias based on the tendentious and inaccurate
information of the British media. (One example: the BBC's decades of letting
Resolution 242 pass as demanding Israel's return, to the 1967 borders.)
To become anti-Israeli because of
persistent misinformation may not be the same as becoming anti-Semitic,
but it is still foolish and wrong.
