‘A placatory gesture will never divert the bad guys’

ANY suggestion, as was made in a recent Irish Examiner editorial, that international support for Israel’s existence and right to defend itself “feeds extremism” and, in particular, the extremism that led to the 9/11 attacks is based on a false premise.

As are suggestions that US support for Israel, now being expressed in President Obama’s stance at the UN that the only route to Palestinian statehood is through negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel, will merely bolster Middle East terror organisations.

Eight years before 9/11, the first Al Qaida attack on the World Trade Center took place. It was treated as a mere police matter, not as a declaration of war. A peace process had just got under way in Oslo between Israel and the Palestinians, and the US would soon be saving Muslims from slaughter in Bosnia and Kosovo. None of this stopped Al Qaida from trying again.

The lesson is that the bad guys work to their own agenda — one that is not diverted by placatory gestures.

Here’s another lesson from recent history. By 2005, there had been more than nine years of suicide bombings and other terror attacks that had killed over 1,100 Israelis since the Oslo Peace Accords, and Palestinian rejection at Camp David and Taba of offers from Israel of an independent Palestinian state on almost all of the West Bank plus Gaza. Despite all that, in 2005 majority Israeli opinion was ready to try again for peace. Israel pulled all 9,000 Jewish inhabitants out of the Gaza Strip. Before the withdrawal, it had fired thousands of rockets on Israel. This campaign has continued into 2011.

That is the reality that Irish readers must understand. It is tempting to believe that a vote at the UN for a unilateral Palestinian state will help to solve the problem. It is easy to gamble with the security of another people far away by imposing a one-sided ‘solution’ from outside. But Israel’s 7.5 million citizens cannot allow their country to be used as a sacrificial victim in the mistaken belief that it will keep worldwide terrorism away from others’ doors.

In his article supporting the Irish Examiner editorial, Daoud Kuttab, an Arab professor, mentions Jews dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv in 1947 without referring to the fact that it was the Arab leadership, not the Israelis, who rejected the UN resolution setting up two states back then.

The last time I remember Palestinians dancing in the street was out of joy over the 9/11 terrorist tragedy. If the Palestinians want to celebrate the creation of their state living in peace with Israel, they should be convinced by their friends to open a dialogue tomorrow.