Britain’s agenda of anti-Israeli hate and the deadly new triangle in the MidEast

That’s the neighbourhood Israel has to reckon with: Iran to its east; Turkey to its north and Egypt to its south. There are lots of other unpleasant characters to contend with. But these are the region’s big three – each with populations approximately 10 times greater than Israel’s.    

Now, back to Britain and Ben White’s article in the New Statesman. Mostly, it’s a re-hash of the old arguments that because Israel is a Jewish state it can’t be a true democracy. The fact that it’s had an elected parliament for longer than almost half the countries in the European Union – the 10 members from central and eastern Europe plus Spain, Portugal and Greece – is obviously not mentioned. Nor is the fact that it has one of the finest supreme courts in the world. Nor is the fact that Arabs in Israel have a tradition of living in a liberal-democratic environment that has been absent for Arabs living anywhere else in the region. (And the way things are going that is not likely to change due to the so-called “Arab Spring. “)

Instead, there is a list of items starting with the Law of Return which purports to demonstrate White’s case by showing that Israel has given a certain, minimum degree of primacy on immigration and citizenship policy to Jews over anyone else.

But since that is also the minimum that was necessary to correct a vast historic wrong done to the Jewish people who were driven out of a homeland to which they have now in large numbers returned, White’s argument amounts to nothing more than the tired old mantra that the Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancient homeland and Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.

It’s worth pondering on this for a moment. All democracies have immigration policies which discriminate in one way or another. People from other countries have priority in the immigration queue due to ancestral ties and marriage, for example. People without such ties are often excluded from that queue altogether.

But in other cases the country in question has not had Israel’s need to reconstitute and reconnect the people with the land and the state. That need derives from the uniquely painful history of dispersion and persecution of the Jewish people – a point that White, of course, shows no sign in  his article of recognising.

Unless you are up against a thoroughgoing anti-Semite who believes that Jews and only Jews are to be denied the right to meaningful self-determination these are easy arguments to win, and the ground has been covered many times.

If you’re not Jewish and you get into Israel you will live and work in one of the freest, law-based democracies in the world. You will have opportunities to go to great universities and better yourself. You will have access to a health system that is the envy of much of the world, and certainly far superior to Britain’s National Health Service.

It has its downsides, and very particular downsides -- just as Britain’s downsides are particular to Britain, France’s to France, America’s to America. But as countries go, the Israelis have made a pretty good go of it by any standards, and they should be proud of themselves.

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