Give 'Em Hell, Mel!

Melanie Phillips excoriates those in the West who blame the slaughter of a Jewish family on the provocation of the settler moverment (the provocation being that settlers dare to settle--and to exist) even as she despairs that Israel seems unable to stand up for itself:

Religious fascism as thus displayed by Arabs from Ramallah to Gaza City is bad enough. But it is the evil that now consumes Britain and the west which so completely chills the heart and prompts a terrible despair. For such moral blindness and worse means that, facing the heirs of the Nazis, the Jews once again find themselves abandoned, their victimisation once again dismissed and themselves once again blamed for their own persecution. Listen to the BBC, read the British newspapers or the New York Times, read the vicious readers’ comments on so many websites (including this one) and you will see that the blind eye to deranged racism and totalitarian mass murder that paved the way for so much slaughter under Nazism and Stalinism is rampant once again, showing us once more that civilisation is merely a thin veneer for barbarism.

In the face of this crisis of western civilisation and its chilling implications for the Jewish people, Israel itself is worse than useless. This is because -- contrary to the brutish power ascribed to it by its enemies -- Israel is pathologically timid. And so, even when faced with the terrifying consequences for its own security from the moral inversion of the west, it has chosen to stay silent.

It does not say what it should be shouting from the rooftops, that it is being forced by Britain, America and Europe to cut its own throat and that it refuses to do so; that it stands for truth, justice and international law while Britain, America and the EU stand for their negation; that it is not Israel but these western powers that are the cause of the Middle East impasse, because from the get-go the more the Arabs massacred the Jews the more Britain and the west rewarded them and punished their Jewish victims, a pattern which continues to this day.

Israel doesn’t say any of this because it fears that unless it goes along with the farce of the ‘peace process’ it will become delegitimised by a world that will take its revenge and abandon it to its fate at the hands of the billions in the Arab and Muslim world who want it destroyed. Which all goes to show that you can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but it is far harder to take the ghetto out of the Jew...

Oh, Melanie, you're such a gloomy Gussie. Every J Streeter knows that once the West Bank becomes Judenrein Palestinians have their own state everything will be fine.