The dystopia of the Left when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict
Posted by Jack Prevezer on November 5th, 2007
In the month of July 2006, with Israeli artillery fire raining down on southern Lebanon and Hezbollah rockets ravaging towns in the north of Israel, I attended a special Parliamentary side debate on the BBC Balen Report. The report had looked into alleged anti-Israel bias in BBC coverage of the Second Intifada, but the results of the findings were deemed too challenging to release to the public. The ensuing legal battle to prevent the findings entering the public domain reached the High Court before ruling in BBC’s favour.
What was contained within the confidential pages of the Balen Report might well never be uncovered. The side debate I attended was an attempt to shed just a little light on the mysterious report. Yet it took Liberal Democrat Peer Jenny Tonge, who was notoriously sacked from the Liberal Democrat front bench in January 2004 for remarks that lent credence to the actions of suicide bombers, mere seconds once questions were opened to the floor to dismiss the substance of the report, and indeed any attempt to question media integrity when it comes to handling the Arab-Israeli conflict. The truth, Baroness Tonge stoically proclaimed as she rose up from her seat, is so simple, so irreducibly obvious, that any attempt by the media to deviate from this self-evident norm is heretical: “The reality is so simple my 7 year-old grandson understands it: Israel is in the wrong, has been since it occupied a foreign land in 1948; the abused Palestinian people were, are, and continue to be the victims.â€
Such stark moral absolutism belies the Left when it comes to understanding the emotive and complex conflict that has bedevilled the Middle East since the UN Partition Plan in 1947. Any solution to the conflict requires a compromise from both sides - a return to the 1967 borders, the end to Israel’s “Security Wallâ€, and a recognition of existence from the religious and hardline fundamentalists on both sides. What it does not require is an irreducible maxim that lends absolute support to the actions of only one side. If the Right have become associated with support for Israel, the Left have become attached to allying itself with the absolute negation of its existence. For every Jenny Tonge, you can add a George Galloway, a Noam Chomsky, a Norman Finkelstein…politicians and academics hailing from the Left hell-bent on perpetrating an impossible end to a conflict – the destruction of the State of Israel. It is a shame when a political orientation that has stood up against the fascism of Franco, Hitler and Pinochet and the South African regime of Apartheid has become so morally blurred that it can only produce a dichotomy of right and wrong that leaves no place for a genuine peaceful compromise in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The search for a Middle-Eastern utopia by the likes of Tonge, Galloway et al. will forever remain unattainable if they continue to affix their cause to a misguided faith in violence, uprising and an absolute rejection of a liberal democratic existing state.
Filed under: arabisraeliconflict, bbc, jackprevezer on November 5th, 2007
There are notable left-wing journalists who realise the necessity of compromise, like Jonathan Freedland or David Aaronovitch, and there are prominent figures on the right who starkly refuse to admit that Israel has to compromise, like Melanie Phillips. Isn’t your flat-out refusal to accept that the left have anything constructive to say just as black-and-white as you allege their views on Israel are?
Also, you mention Chomsky as, yet in the (unbelievable) Wikipedia article you link to about the Balen report, he is quoted in order to criticise the BBC’s lack of disclosure. Perhaps the views of Israel’s critics aren’t as facile as you’d like them to be?
Don’t take Jenny Tonge and George Galloway as ambassadors for the left. I concede that the left probably has more than its fair share of nutty oddballs, but they clearly don’t speak for everyone - Tonge was, as you say, sacked, and Galloway was expelled from Labour.
Incidentally, I think ‘moral absolutism’ is entirely the wrong term. This is surely relativism - the view that a sovereign people’s claim to land and self-governance trumps any concerns regarding human rights or democracy should they take power. The absolutist would surely be troubled by the thought of a Hamas government replacing a relatively liberal Israel.
Jonathan, you are of course right - neither Tonge nor Galloway are ambassadors (or even remotely representative) of the Left. Nevertheless, they do represent extremes of an ideology…and extremes have a worrying habit of permeating the mainstream. In the case of the aforementioned conflict, my point is that the extreme left’s tendency to elevate anti-imperialism to a value above and beyond all is misguided. There are more important left-wing values - which of course mainstream leftists hold - including a commitment to human rights, to self-government, to democracy and welfare - that the extreme left seem to have forgotten. Especially when analysing the Arab-Israeli conflict…
I think Israel should just give the Palestinians the land they stole from them because at the end of the day, it was stolen land.
Neither Galloway nor Chomsky call for the destruction of the state of Israel. That is palpable nonsense. Both recognise the obvious de facto existence of an established Israeli state with a large population who have a right to self determination. Their point is, and has always been, that one state’s self determination should not be bought at the cost of another’s. Untill the historical injustice at the root of the present conflict is recognised and broadcast as real and as undeniable as the historical injustices heaped upon european jews of previous generations, there can be no basis for negotiation, and the horror will continue. South Africa made such a leap. So must the middle east.