Truth Is Told To Power In Sheikh Jarrah; But Is Power Listening?

Melanie Phillips
The Spectator
09 August 09

An important postscript to the misreported evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, which I commented on below. On the Guardian’s Comment is Free,Rafael Broch points out another detail that was, ahem, overlooked by all those screaming ‘ethnic cleansing’: the Arabs who were evicted had not paid the rent; those who had paid the rent were not evicted. Makes a bit of a difference, doesn’t it, in addition to all the background detail that was omitted about the Jewish ownership of these properties dating back to the last century. Broch writes:

It's all very well for the Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, to describe the evictions as ‘the ugly face of ethnic cleansing’ or for Cif contributor Matt Kennard to claim that they represent ‘a process of racial purification’. But without informing readers that the only people being evicted are the ones who refused to pay rent to the landlords they recognised decades ago, they paint a distorted picture.

As a story that has been widely reported and stirs deep emotions, it is vital that crucial facts are not erased from the narrative. There can be no doubt that there are clearly issues of inequality in Jerusalem which need to be addressed but that is no excuse for British journalists and commentators to misrepresent this particular story.

All credit to the Guardian for publishing this piece. Lenny ben David makes the equally important point that the resolute response of Israel’s government to the grotesque and ignorant US pressure over these evictions marks a rare occasion when Israel has not quiescently gone along with global connivance at Arab injustice in the Middle East.

For way too long Arab states, terrorist groups and the Palestinian Arabs believed that they could wage ‘wars of limited liability’first against the Jews of Palestine and then against the State of Israel. They embraced a fantasy that they could unleash attacks with impunity in an attempt to wipe out Israel, convinced that if they were defeated they could return to a status quo ante, or even achieve diplomatically what they couldn’t win on the battlefield. Territories captured by Israel would be returned and not annexed, terrorist leaders would be honored and not condemned, and Jews/Israel would be blamed and never indemnified. Tragically, that fantasy became reality.

... Yet, today, under the Arab concept of wars of limited liability, they and the United Nations demand a complete withdrawal from the West Bank and east Jerusalem – ‘100 percent’ -- and a dismantling of the security barrier erected to block Palestinian suicide bombers. In other words, there is no punishment, no price to pay, and no indemnification for acts of aggression.

Britain and now the US have also endorsed the principle that in the Middle East, injustice and aggression are to be rewarded and the victims punished. The result is that war, terror and rejectionism are incentivised and any nascent Arab moderation is still-born. As I have observed before, that is the overwhelming reason for nine decades and counting of war and terror in the Middle East and the current threat of a second genocide of the Jews.

Only if Britain, Europe and America start defending the Israeli victims of war and terror in the Middle East and holding the perpetrators of aggression to account, rather than getting this precisely the wrong way round, will peace and justice finally prevail. Without justice, there can be no peace. For years, an Israel under siege and desperate to grasp at any straws has also lost sight of that key fact. It should now finally tell this all-important truth to global power.

Related: The Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem: An End to the Arabs’ Wars of Limited Liability?

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