1 min read
ByMelanie Phillips, Melanie Phillips
UK and UN policy shifts: what’s really going on?
February 24, 2011 13:56David Cameron's claim that failure to arrive at a "two-state solution" to the Arab-Israel impasse has caused terrorism and instability and helped excuse authoritarianism is surely a first for a British Prime Minister in its perversity and ignorance.
First, the current unrest convulsing the Arab and Muslim world demonstrates that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually irrelevant to the protesters' concerns, which are about the enslavement imposed upon them by their own regimes.
And then he gets the relationship between the "peace process" and terrorism the wrong way round. The failure of the two-state solution is not the cause of terrorism and tyranny; it is terrorism and tyranny that have caused the failure of the two-state solution.
A state of Palestine has been repeatedly offered - in 1936, 1947, 2000 and lastly under Ehud Olmert's Israeli premiership. Every time, the Arabs refused and merely ratcheted up their terrorism, mass murder and war.
One might say it is that very proposal which is the most important reason for the unending nature of this conflict. This is because, instead of condemning and isolating those conducting the terror war against Israel, it rewards and thus incentivises them. Which Cameron continued to do last week by supporting the Hizbollah-inspired UN resolution which falsely condemned as illegal Israeli building in the disputed territories.
Thus, while lecturing the Arab world on the importance of democracy and the rule of law, the Prime Minister actually hung the one democracy in the region out to dry while lining up behind the terrorist regime pledged to destroy it.
The list of grievances that supposedly fuels Islamist terrorism around the world is long. The Middle East conflict is certainly on that list - but what inspires those murderous instincts is not the absence of a state of Palestine but the continued existence of Israel.
Cameron has shown he fails to understand not just the dynamics of the region but the threat to the free world.