Two new, very enlightening articles by Peter Oborne. Unlike many or most British journalists he is interested in uncovering the truth

Here is a very enlightening and important article by my friend Peter Oborne, a review of the distinguished Israeli Professor Ilan Pappe’s new study of the pro-Israeli lobby in the UK.

Alec Douglas-Home, foreign secretary in the Edward Heath government that succeeded Wilson’s administration after the 1970 general election, was more friendly to Palestinians. An Old Etonian aristocrat, Douglas-Home is today dismissed as a hopeless old fogey and aberration in postwar Britain.

Today, his views would bring a nod of approbation from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. According to Pappe, “he was the only British foreign secretary to openly discuss the right of return of the Palestinian refugees that were expelled by Israel in 1948”, and, still more remarkable, “the only British foreign secretary to challenge the dishonest brokery of the Americans”.

In the wake of the 1967 war, Douglas-Home insisted, with Heath’s support, that Britain could no longer ignore the “political aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs”. In government, he infuriated Israel by allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to set up a London office.

Pappe says that Douglas-Home was the only senior British politician, with the important exception of the hard-drinking George Brown, to interpret UN Resolution 242 as a demand for unconditional Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 5 June 1967. During the 1973 war, the Heath government refused to deliver arms to Israel - though, as Pappe notes, this was mostly due to a fear of the Arab oil embargo.

Pappe’s historical perspective enables him to see the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party in a new light. “Corbyn’s views on Palestine were virtually identical to those expressed by most British diplomats and senior politicians ever since 1967; like them he supported a two-state solution and recognised the Palestinian Authority,” Pappe writes. This made him more mainstream than the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which supported a one-state solution.

In light of this, Pappe reasonably asks: “Why did the lobby see him as such a threat”? He answers: “They suspected, correctly, that he sincerely believed in a just two-state solution and wouldn’t swallow Israel’s excuses for obstructing it.”

The killing of Jeremy Corbyyn

In a thought-provoking passage, he adds: “Christopher Mayhew, George Brown and Jeremy Corbyn had much in common. They were in positions of power that could affect British policy towards Israel. They were all totally loyal to the official British policy supporting a two-state solution to the ‘conflict’. None of them denied the right of Israel to exist, none of them had made any anti-Semitic remark in their lifetime and they were not anti-Semitic in any sense of the word.”

This is another very interesting new article by Peter about how the media made up false stories about Corbyn, the Labour Left and antisemitism. I fell for it for a long time but the so called anti-semitic utterances for which people were fired or forced to make retractions were anti-Israel but never seemed to be anti-semitic at all.