2 min read
An 11 year-old Israeli child, Ayala Shapira, suffered third-degree burns to her face and body last month when a car driven by her father Avner was firebombed in Ma’ale Shomron, part of the disputed territories.
Other than a small article in the Daily Telegraph, the British media didn’t think this was significant enough to report. That’s because of the widespread view that if the “settlers” are attacked, they’re just getting what’s coming to them for living in “illegal” settlements.
The people responsible for the attempt to burn Ayala Shapira alive were therefore not her Arab assailants but her parents (her father was also injured) for choosing to live in the “West Bank”, thus putting their extremist ideology above the safety of their child. I guess that’s what many of you reading this are also thinking; right? Of course you are. It’s what many British Jews think.
It is a viewpoint which first and foremost is morally disgusting, and second, is based on legal and historical ignorance. It’s disgusting because all terrorism against the innocent should elicit outrage and compassion.
The idea that people make themselves fair game for attempted murder simply by virtue of where they choose to live, and that judgment on their attackers is therefore suspended or muted, is obscene. It is tantamount to supporting such attacks.
I understand why many think it is very wrong for Israelis to settle beyond the 1949 ceasefire “green line.” I understand that because I used to think it, too. I now believe I myself was very wrong. Leave aside the violence of a tiny minority of settlers towards their Arab neighbours, which is entirely reprehensible: the vast majority behave perfectly decently. The intense disapproval of the settlements is based on the belief that they are illegal and that Israel is building them on Palestinian land. I came to realise that both assumptions are false.
When I read the opinion of lawyers and eminent jurists and scholars such as Eugene Rostow, Eugene Kontorovich, Howard Grief, Alan Dershowitz, Alan Baker, I realised that the settlements are legal under international law. Israel is entitled to retain territory seized in a war of self-defence while its inhabitants remain belligerent. The claim that the settlements are illegal under the Geneva conventions is based on a misreading of those conventions. Moreover, the treaty obligation under the Palestine Mandate requiring Britain to settle Jews throughout what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza as part of their unique right to that land was never abrogated.
These territories never belonged to “the Palestinians” because such a collective entity never existed — until it was invented purely to destroy the Jewish people’s legitimate claim to the land. After 1948, these territories comprised a collective no-man’s land.
Some of it belonged to individual Arabs from whom Jews legitimately bought those plots. People who want the settlements gone claim they are the great obstacle to peace. Apart from the historical illiteracy of such a claim, it is obvious that if the Israelis pull out of the “West Bank” it will turn into Gaza, Islamic State or an outpost of Iran. But then, logic and evidence cut no ice for those who refuse to face the hard fact that the true cause of the Middle East conflict is the Arab and Muslim aim to exterminate Israel.
So the Arabs who tried to burn Ayala Shapira alive were emboldened by the knowledge that the west would blame not them but the Israelis. It is a frequent charge that the settlements have corrupted Jewish ethics. I’d say the demonisation of settlers has made a mockery of morality and turned many Jewish and western hearts into stone.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times