Palestinians Finally Recognise Israel as Jewish State

The problem (one of them anyway) with Greg Sheridan, Australia's "most influential foreign affairs analyst" as he's trumpeted in The Australian, is that he relies on his readers (to the extent, of course, that he has any) not to look too closely at what he writes. And, of course, they don't look too closely, because reading what he writes is really all about confirming existing prejudices and reinforcing existing ignorance.

Which, I guess, explains why we had not one but two Sheridan pieces in yesterday's emission of The Australian: the first, a report, Beazley baulks at Palestine push, stamped, as always, EXCLUSIVE; the second, an op-ed, Nod to Palestine an ignorant and regressive idea. Both, of course, bewail Bob Carr's "nasty anti-Israel resolution [which] has embarrassed senior ALP leaders."

Parenthetically, you'd have to be a rusted-on Zionist fanatic to wade through either piece of poo, but what sort of extra lunacy, I wonder, would be required for one to read both, except of course for purposes of demolition? (Hell, maybe I'm the only person in the country to have soiled my boots.)

Anyway, let's start with this in the op-ed:

"Last week I had lunch with Dennis Ross, who was the Middle East co-ordinator for Bill Clinton and then a senior adviser on the Middle East for Barack Obama. It would be pretty hard to call him a neocon or a Likudnik or a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... Ross... tells me one of the main obstacles to peace is that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish national movement, which is why it won't recognise Israel as a Jewish state."

OK, so Ross doesn't have horns quite as long as those of His Satanic Majesty, Benjamin Netanyahu. Nonetheless, the real problem is that those obdurate Palestinians won't recognise Israel as a Jewish state.

Now, if we turn from the op-ed to the 'report,' we find this from HSM:

"In an exclusive interview with The Australian earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his support for the two-state solution long term. 'The question is not whether the Palestinians get a state but whether that state will recognise Israel..."

Which compels us to conclude that, as much as Sheridan would like to have us believe that there is some fundamental political difference between the fast-talking US Zionist and the foaming Israeli war criminal, the truth is that the two are one and the same when it comes to demanding that the Palestinians perform the mother-of-all-grovels.

Which, in turn, had me imagining just what form that MOAG might take:

Yes, you guys were right all along, and we Palestinians were wrong. We really were, as your great patron Lord Balfour put it in his Holy Declaration, merely the "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," of no particular consequence therefore.

And as for those "civil and religious rights," which he graciously offered us in his Declaration, and which we scorned back then as manifestly inadequate, we should have seen that they were good enough for us.

And of course, when your saintly Chaim Weizmann indicated, soon after, that he wanted a Palestine as Jewish "as England is English and France is French," we should have embraced the idea without so much as a raised eyebrow, nay, happily, joyously strewing flowers in your path as you disembarked in your thronging thousands at Jaffa on ships coming from Poland or Russia.

Yes, we should have seen the superior, God-like wisdom in the good Lord's decree that "Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," as he once so eloquently put it.

So, here it is, for what it's worth, our belated recognition that yes, Israel is a Jewish state.

So sorry to have troubled you all these years, we'll get out of your way now...