Reality check for the British ambassador

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/Jpost
01 August '10

In his recent "Editor's Notes", David Horovitz presented excerpts from an interview with the outgoing British ambassador to Israel. Horovitz noted that he found the conversation "profoundly dispiriting," and it's easy to see why.

Most Israelis who are familiar with the British media coverage on Israel would likely share Horovitz's view that Israel's reality "is misrepresented, misreported and misunderstood in Britain" - indeed, the research group Just Journalism regularly provides plenty of evidence for the anti-Israel bias in the British media. While Horovitz assures his readers that Ambassador Tom Phillips is in no way hostile to Israel, it is all too obvious that after four years in the country, the British ambassador remains reluctant to acknowledge some fundamental realities.

One very revealing example from the interview is the ambassador's view that Israel's Gaza policy is to blame if young boys in Gaza are "on the streets with no role models apart from the Hamas guy in the black shiny uniform on the street corner." The ambassador also blames Israeli policies for "creating, in psychological terms, another generation of people that are not going to feel that friendly about Israel."

The basic idea expressed here is of course that hostility to Israel is due to Israel's conduct - in other words, Israel is to blame if it has enemies. So let's check out some Palestinian opinion surveys to see how the Palestinians reacted to a few events.

A poll published in September 2004 includes one result that ostensibly supports the ambassador's views: asked if attacks from Gaza should continue after a complete Israeli withdrawal from the territory, 54% of the Palestinian respondents said they would oppose the continuation of violence from the Gaza Strip. That's not exactly an overwhelming majority, and some other results of this poll illustrate that the Palestinians hardly felt they should restrain themselves: 74% believed that the then-planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was a "victory for armed struggle," and the bombing of two buses in Beersheba at the end of August 2004 was supported by 77% of Palestinians. Interestingly enough, the same poll also showed that almost two thirds of Palestinians were already "worried about the possibility of an internal Palestinian power struggle in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal."

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