'The righteous bloodlust of the sensible centrists has been awoken once again'

It is not true that what became Palestine, then Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, has always been at war. For centuries it was a pretty quiet backwater. 

Nor is it true that Jews and Muslims have always fought. Far from it, they mostly cooperated reasonably well, often happily, until 1917.

An American Episcopalian priest with whom I stayed in Nazareth told me that the Israeli police kept out of crimes committed by Muslims against Muslims. 

'It's never a good idea if outsiders get involved in Muslim affairs. For example, if a Muslim murders another Muslim the police leave it to Muslims to sort out.' 

I protested, but he was right.

This, he said, applies to Middle Eastern affairs generally. We should not, for example, have invaded Iraq.

I strongly agreed with him on that. 

It seems to me today that all the problems in the Middle East are caused by British and, later on, American interference, from 1917 to their recent interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria. 

Anglo-American interference rather than foreign interference. The Sultan in Constantinople ruled the Middle East without any of the problems that exist now. 

The French seem to have done very much less harm, besides helping us topple Gaddafi. But Lebanon, their creation, has hardly been a success. 

Fortunately Mrs Clinton, who promised that regime change in Syria would be her top priority as President, did not get the chance to put her plan into practice. 

Boris Johnson, British Foreign Secretary, was strongly in favour of it. He was Churchillian in favouring wars.

Donald Trump too meddled, though he thought he was making peace. 

The Abraham Accords by which Bahrein and UAE recognised Israel are, I am now sure, the catalyst that prompted Hamas to attack Israel.

And so it goes on. 

I wonder for how long the American public will want to pay for interventions in the Middle East that do no good.

From a good article by Aris Roussinos in UnHerd:

'In the wake of Hamas’s bloody and murderous raid into Israel, as Israeli jets pulverise the Gaza Strip in advance of its looming punitive expedition, the Western discourse surrounding the century-old conflict feels both novel and wearily familiar. Familiar in that it feels we have suddenly been transported through a wormhole back to the heady days of The Euston Manifesto, as the righteous bloodlust of the sensible centrists has been awoken once again; and yet novel in that it is now all filtered through the distorting mirror of our social media-fuelled culture war.


'The effects are remarkable: though there is no obvious linkage between any of these matters, if I knew your opinions on wokeness or gender issues, or on Net Zero or Covid restrictions, then I could ascertain, with 99% accuracy, your opinions on a distant ethnic conflict in the Middle East. Such is the power of tribalism, though there is no essential reason why the dividing lines should have been drawn in this particular way. The poles could just as easily be reversed, and indeed once they were.


'In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis quotes a letter he wrote home from Oxford in the late Sixties marvelling that “I met an incredible reactionary yesterday who supports the Arabs vs. Israel”, a striking vignette of the lost period when sympathy for the Palestinians was an almost parodically Right-wing opinion, and support for the Israeli socialist experiment was the righteous Left-wing cause.'

I am surprised at how the newspapers in Britain and the British government have abandoned their former neutrality in the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Mrs Thatcher would have counselled Israel to spare civilians rather than encourage an Israeli attack on Gaza. 

It seems to me that the best thing would be for Israel to seal up the border with Gaza, allowing in just medical supplies, and keep it sealed unless they expect another incursion into Israeli territory. Other countries can supply food by sea or via Egypt. 

Is that not enough?

Here is an excellent interview with a Hamas spokesman. The Arab interviewer asks some very hard questions.