DAUBING slogans on the walls of the Palace of Westminster is officially frowned upon, so MPs have to do the next best thing. This is to table an early day motion. Such motions are never going to be debated, neither on an early day nor any other, but they place one’s views on the record in much the same way as aggrieved citizens chalk their views on walls.

It is by no means a futile form of parliamentary activity. Mr Thomas Steel, for example, keeps the legitimate grievances of railway superannuitants constantly before the eyes of the Commons by skilfully rationing the escalating support he gets for his perpetual motion on the subject. Any MP with a hundred signatures backing his views, moreover, can give that added painful twist to a Minister’s arm that it is his duty to apply.

But some motions are just plain silly, and the silliest of the current crop are those urging the Government of Israel to withdraw from the territory occupied in 1967. It is true that the Arab Legion (as I affectionately describe our parliamentary Arabists) ask President Nasser and company to “recognise a state of non-belligerency with Israel” and to allow free passage through that damned canal. It is equally true that Israel would be putting the knife to her own throat if she took the slightest notice.

For no Arab guarantees, at this moment, are worth the breath that is wasted on them. There are two effective political forces in the Arab States (there is no such thing as an Arab world). One is the gunman. The other is the mob. Kings and presidents alike are at the mercy of both.

Unholy war

The gunmen have been explosively in action recently. Their battle honours now include 11 dead and 55 seriously injured civilians. Their aim remains what it has been for a decade, and it is not the “liberation” they so incoherently rant about. It is to get another war started. Or, to be more accurate, to bring a simmering war to the boil.

Arab States have been at war with Israel ever since Israel was created. Whatever the terminology they use, however much they have borrowed from their Soviet friends, they have taken over the unholy war declared by the Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. It is in that war that the so-called Palestinian freedom fighters fight (if you can call murder fighting). It is in that war that I unreservedly support Israel.

There is, of course, an Arab case. I took the chair at a recent meeting at which it was ably and eloquently presented by the Israeli writer, Mr Amos Keynan. But when the guns started firing in June, 1967, Mr Keynan fought too. The Arabs whom he fought were not those for whose rights he had campaigned in Israel. They were, or would inevitably have become, a murderous mob.

It is no use our home-grown Arabists claiming that the screams for annihilation that were Cairo Radio’s contribution to an inglorious war were simply propaganda. Julius Streicher’s pieces were similarly dismissed in the 1930s, but they became Nazi policy in Auschwitz and Belsen.

Arab armies in a state of shock—and victory is as much of a shock, militarily, as defeat—disintegrate into mobs. Lawrence documented the process and Glubb Pasha organised the Arab Legion in an effort to beat it. It remains a fact of life in the Middle East. Had the Arabs taken Tel Aviv and Haifa none of their officers could have prevented a repeat performance of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Waving paper

But the mobs, three times defeated in war, still have not learned. As President Nasser has recently been reminded.

A unilateral withdrawal by Israel at this moment would not, as my misguided colleagues think, be a gesture towards abstract justice. It would merely bring Syrian gunners back to the Golan Heights, Jordanian snipers within range of West Jerusalem, and Egyptian tanks to the outskirts of Beersheba. And does anyone think that, once in position, they would be restrained by Labour MPs waving paper in their faces?

I have no great affection for guns and tanks, even when they are skilfully manned by Israeli Social Democrats. I happen to believe, in spite of all surface indications to the contrary, that a glacial shift has taken place in the world power structure that makes practical pacifism a realisable goal. I am currently engaged in talking about this to computers in an elaborate peace game.

This, however, is the music of the future. In the tormented present, the social Democratic State of Israel has the right to defend itself until such time as its energies and skills can pour into a Middle Eastern Common Market in which Arab and Jew dissolve hatred in joint labours.

Original Source

December 2, 1968 | © The Guardian

Archival material reproduced here for educational and research purposes under fair use. Original copyright belongs to the respective publisher.