Critics missing point on Israel and antisemiticism

No, the anti-Israeli position is not disguised anti-semitism. It cannot be repeated often enough that this canard repeated endlessly by Irish commentators from Gerard Howlin (Opinion, September 3) to UCC historian Kevin McCarthy is complete nonsense. It represents intellectual laziness of a noxious kind propagated by men with exceptional literary ability and all the worse for that.

The glib lack of any historical perspective on Israel/Palestine from any of these writers is unbelievable. Zionism was a late 19th century European colonial creation fostered by imperial Britain with the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Long before WW2 Balfour said: “We deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination for the present inhabitants of Palestine, because the question of the Jews outside Palestine is one of world importance”.

And here is Winston Churchill: “No wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more wordly-wise race, to put it that way, has come and taken their place”. Here is undeniable racism, imperialism and colonialism in one neat package.

After the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Theodor Herzl, author of the famous book Der Judenstatt and founder of Zionism, sent two rabbis on a fact finding mission to Palestine. They wrote him back: “The bride is beautiful but she is married to another man”. Zeev Jabotinsky, spiritual father to the Zionism of current Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu wrote ” Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of foreign settlement. This is how the Arabs will behave...”.

I believe there is a studied silence amongst our eminent writers about these underlying historical realities and the pretence that these have no relevance to the occupation of the West Bank; the enclosure of 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza; the dispossession and subordination of those Palestinians who are Israeli citizens; the refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes against numerous UN resolutions; the total control over water resources in the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley and so on and on.

If Israel is to survive in the long run it must redeem itself as a state for both Jews and Palestinians — which right now have equal numbers of people in the land between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan.

Con Hayes

Tower

Blarney

Co Cork