The truth about Israel

From Mr Conrad Black Sir: The correspondence in last week's Spectator revealed the three most frequently encountered problems in any discussion of the Arabs and the Israelis. Some people regard any criticism of Israel as antiSemitism. Correspondingly, concern about anti-Semitism is often seen as overreaction to legitimate criticism of official Israeli conduct. And Israel is often claimed to exercise an undue influence on US policy-making.

No one at all familiar with what I have said and written on this subject over the last 20 years could possibly imagine that I am in either of the first two categories. Of course the Palestinians have a just grievance that must be redressed and of course Israel has behaved outrageously at times. Both these points were made in my comment in this magazine two weeks ago.

The claim of a Mephistophelean Israeli influence on the United States is a canard. Most of the principal so-called Jewish media interests in that country are not in fact controlled by people who think of themselves as Jews and are not at all uncritical of Israel. This and the myth of the invincible Israeli lobby in Washington are merely lies agreed upon by Arab militants and their sympathisers to explain the continued existence of Israel. I am grateful to Leonard Toboroff for his letter debunking the myth of official Israeli involvement in the lamentable Marc Rich affair.

Most criticism of Israel is not antiSemitic but some is, and the piece that prompted my comment of two weeks ago was unmistakably anti-Semitic. For personal and corporate reasons I am relieved that the author of it has denied that he is an anti-Semite. Fair comment and non-venomous ethnic reflections that might offend the politically correct are perfectly acceptable from contributors. However, our publications will not be used for the propagation of incitements to racial or religious bigotry against Jews or anyone else.

The most important point in this exchange is that no correspondent disputed that the Palestinians are squarely to blame for the present impasse. Israel, whatever its past obstinacy, now accepts the concept of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority, which even its apologists acknowledge is a brutal and corrupt despotism, does not accept the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel.

The Foreign Office, BBC, Guardian, Independent and Evening Standard should pay some attention to that fact. Instead, they have endlessly passed the crying towel for the rock-throwing mobs that were whistled out into the streets by the Palestinian leaders. This was the Palestinian response to Israel's acceptance of virtually all the Palestinian demands except for the flooding of Israel with millions of Arabs and the handing over of the West Wall to Islamic control.

Israel today wants only to be like other countries, to live at peace within secure borders. The Palestinians seem to imagine they are in an epic poem in which one more foreign colonial occupier must be expelled. But the right to exist of the Jewish state, historically and in contemporary international law, is unassailable. It is possible to wish both the Israelis and the Palestinians well, as most reasonable people do, while lamenting that addressing the ancient tragedy of the Jews has aggravated the modern tragedy of the Palestinians. This can be put right, but not by systematic misinformation, whether malicious or inadvertent.

Lord Gilmour's letter requires direct response. His assertion that I am a long-time dispenser of 'virulent Israeli propaganda' is a lie, as he and anyone remotely aware of my views on this subject know. In support of his charge, Lord Gilmour cited a letter of the late Chaim Bermant to The Spectator seven years ago in which he deplored the Jerusalem Post but implicitly commended me for intervening in it to require support for ratification by the Knesset of the Oslo Agreement. Mr Bermant, who did not live to see his rather naive views of the future of the Middle East reduced to tatters by the Palestinians, had previously claimed that I had bought the Post as a front for the Likud party. Even he eventually retracted that fatuous allegation and congratulated me for what he considered major improvements to the quality of the newspaper.

I am neither virulent nor a propagandist. Rather, Lord Gilmour is an almost pathological Americophobic myth-maker. And in his febrile hostility to Israel, he does himself the injustice of seeming little better than a common or garden Jew-baiter masquerading as a champion of the Palestinian 'underdog'.

Conrad Black

Chairman, Telegraph Group Ltd Canary Wharf, London E14

From Messrs William Dalrymple, Piers Paul Read and A.N. Wilson Sir: We welcome Conrad Black's article (`My friend Taki has gone too far', 3 March) exonerating Israel of all responsibility for the deaths of the 360 unarmed Palestinian civilians gunned down by Israeli soldiers and settlers over the last five months. This is because it makes explicit what has long been apparent to those of us who have written about the Middle East in The Spectator: that under Black's proprietorship, serious, critical reporting of Israel is no longer tolerated in the Telegraph Group, however much Arab land Israel seizes, however many settlements it constructs in violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions, however many Palestinians it expels or tortures, and however many unarmed children it shoots.

In Black's rose-tinted vision, as revealed in his article, Israel has never executed anyone except Eichmann. This fantasy is particularly bizarre when even the Israeli army itself has begun openly admitting that it carries out regular assassinations of its Arab opponents. Black has airbrushed from the historical record the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians murdered, assassinated, shelled and bombed by Israel over the last half-century, as documented by Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Tom Segev and Avi Schlaim.

Even before Black's outburst, both Telegraphs were unique among British broadsheets in failing to provide any serious coverage of Israel's deadly methods of silencing Palestinian dissent and maintaining the Palestinian population in continued serfdom. Israel has consistently defied some 50 UN Resolutions outstanding against its illegal occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank; has deployed helicopter gunships, missiles and tanks on Palestinian villages and churches; and Amnesty International has declared that some Israeli commanders have behaved so brutally that they could be prosecuted by an international war crimes tribunal: Black's letter makes it clear why his various editors appear reluctant to give

prominence to such awkward facts. Now, after Black has made the strength of his prejudices all too clear, can we really hope that any Telegraph journalist will ever again put his neck and career on the line and write frankly of the sufferings of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation? Or that his editors will have the moral courage to commission and publish such articles?

A press baron is an immensely powerful figure. With that power, however, come responsibilities, and those responsibilities are abused when he makes it clear that certain areas are off-limits to legitimate inquiry, and that careers will suffer if those limits are crossed. This was starkly demonstrated when a large chunk of the staff of the Jerusalem Post were sacked by Black when they showed (among other faults) what he judged to be an unhealthy enthusiasm for Yitzhak Rabin and his peace process. The magazine that the sacked journalists went on to form, the excellent Jerusalem Report, like Ha 'aretz, the leading Israeli daily, and the British Jewish Chronicle, all show far fewer qualms about honestly reporting Israel's systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights than do Black's papers, It is unlikely, too, that many journalists on Ha'aretz would agree with the peculiar argument Black appeared to be making in these pages: that the appropriate response to the Holocaust is to suppress all critical coverage of the oppression and dispossession of another Semitic people.

At least your proprietor has now nailed his colours to the mast. Readers have been warned. There may be many good things in Black's newspapers, but for balanced reporting from the Middle East, they must now, sadly, turn elsewhere.

William Dalrymple, Piers Paul Read, A.N. Wilson Conrad Black replies:

By so grossly distorting what I and all our writers have written about the Middle East, William Dalrymple, Piers Paul Read and AN. Wilson illustrate the depths of the problem of anti-Semitism in the British media. Their enthusiasm for the Jerusalem Report is particularly gratifying since it is in fact owned by us and is a happy stablemate of the Spectator, the Telegraphs. the Jerusalem Post (which generally supported Yitzhak Rabin and the Oslo Agreement) and the other publications they advised readers to avoid.

To assimilate casualties in the war that has existed between Israel and most of its Arab neighbours for more than 50 years to the execution of detained and accused prisoners is like accusing the Western allies of executing countless millions of Germans, Japanese and Italians in the second world war. As I wrote, the death penalty has never existed in Israeli courts other than for Eichmann.

Terrible things happen in wars. Both sides in the Middle East have done terrible things and both sides have grievances, but there is not a moral equivalence between them. Israel is a legitimate, democratic state that operates a society of laws that has a right to selfdefence. It does not commission suicide bombers or engage in indiscriminate violence.

Israel was unconscionably late recognising the right of the Palestinians to statehood hut has now done so. It would be a compounded tragedy if the Palestinians did not now grasp the opportunity that is finally theirs. But their state cannot, morally or practically, be built on the ashes of Israel. The Palestinians should negotiate towards the last Camp David proposals that they contemptuously rejected. And they should stop being the witless cannon-fodder of those Arab powers that use Israel as a distraction for the misgovernment they inflict on their own populations.

The present violence is the exclusive responsibility of the Palestinians. It is a completely unjustified response to the Israeli acceptance of all the Palestinian demands that were consistent with the continued existence of the State of Israel.

This, of course, is the point. As their selection of approved authors demonstrates, these correspondents desire the destruction of Israel by a combination of international defamation, local attrition and an inundation of Israel with 'returning' Arabs who will again disperse the Jews. They would be driven out into the world where they have been so hideously persecuted in the past. 'Never again,' said President Reagan at Bergen-Belsen in 1985. It was to ensure this would never happen again that Israel was established, and for the same reasons it must survive.

In their enthusiasm to criminalise policy differences, my overwrought accusers should indict the Palestinian Authority. It is one of the most odious regimes in the world, as that noteworthy political scientist, Taki, has graciously recognised.

Unsuspecting readers should be aware of who they are reading. William Dalrymple was discontinued as a contributor to the Telegraphs some years ago after he invented stories of Israeli desecration of Christian sites in Palestine. The other two are varyingly reputable writers who should know better than to subscribe to such nonsense as they did on this occasion.

Conrad Black