Sucking up to antisemites

Spell-check will keep altering Maitlis to Meritless - I wonder if it knows something I don’t - I but  am absolutely tired of watching people like Emily Maitlis sucking up to people like Ghada Karmi. 

As if Karmi’s opinion is in any way worth hearing. (If that comment sounds dangerously close to complaining because someone I detest has been given airtime, so be it.) 

It’s not so much that I want Karmi to be no-platformed, although I wouldn’t care if she were, it’s merely that oxygen was being given to her very partisan, embittered opinion and  she was being sucked up to by one of the BBC’s senior presenters. Not only that, but Maitlis suddenly became rude and argumentative when speaking to Israeli ambassador Mark Regev, continually interrupting him in that reproachful tone of voice.

Now we all know what the BBC (and most of the British establishment) think about Trump, and we also know what the prevailing attitude towards Israel is - let’s call it lukewarm to cool -  but we suspect that the latter is based on a mixture of ignorance, lazy thinking and fear of enraging the antisemites in British society (if not on antisemitism itself.)

In case you don’t know, Ghada Karmi is an Honorary Research Fellow based in Exeter University. I think she teaches antisemitism and related studies. Honorary?  Wassat? Oh, nothing. It just means…….. Anyway, she gets to be labelled “academic”. 

To date, the only sensible article I have read about Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is in Commentary Magazine by Sohrab Ahmari, a senior writer at the magazine who happens to be of Iranian/ American nationality. So in a good position to opine. (i.e., notaJew) 

Because I don’t know if the full article will be accessible to many ITBB readers I’m going to reproduce most of it below. (The missing paragraph virtually reiterates the law US Congress enacted in 1995, which was included in Trump’s excellent speech) 

“The journalistic class is apoplectic over President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. But conservatives, including those skeptical of this president, should add it to the list of Trump-administration foreign policies that deserve praise. The case for recognizing Jerusalem, and relocating the U.S. Embassy there, is formidable. Talk of the move throwing the region into chaos is overwrought and out of touch with Mideast reality. [..] 

(Professional people) contend that Trump’s capital idea (pun intended) will scuttle any chances for a negotiated settlement to the seven-decade-long conflict. In this, they echo the Palestinian president-for-life, Mahmoud Abbas, who on Wednesday characterized the move as America’s “declaration of withdrawal” from the peace process. 

Here’s the problem with this line of argument: What peace process?

For nearly a decade, Abbas has refused to sit down for direct talks, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open invitation. Abbas’s rejectionism was spurred in part by the Obama administration’s theory that peace would come from creating “daylight” between the U.S. and the Jewish state and tying talks to an Israeli settlement freeze. Now, with the Jerusalem move, Trump is signaling that Washington will no longer tolerate the Palestinians’ excessive demands–or the obstinacy that led them to turn down generous offers from Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008. 

But, ask the peace-processors, what about the violence that will ensue from this? Here one must respond: Have you looked at the Middle East lately? 

The whole region is on fire, as America’s traditional Arab allies respond to Iran’s hegemonic ambitions from Yemen to Lebanon. Very little of today’s instability has to do with Israel at all. Thus, Washington should take Arab leaders’ statements of outrage with a grain of salt. Arab elites have to create some sound and fury over Jerusalem to satisfy their publics. But most of them today look to Israel as a protector and potential ally against Tehran. 

It can’t be an accident, moreover, that Trump’s announcement followed news of Abbas’s visit last month to Saudi Arabia. There, the reformer-prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) reportedly told the Palestinian leader that Riyadh shares Netanyahu’s view of the conflict. The Palestinians must learn to accept a state with limited sovereignty and non-contiguous territory dotted with Israeli settlements. Under the MBS plan, the New York Times reported, “The Palestinians would not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.” 

The leading Arab power, in other words, has concluded that maintaining the anti-Iranian alliance is more important than a settlement here or an East Jerusalem neighborhood there. The Trump administration’s Jerusalem decision, then, is attuned to the tectonic shifts taking place in the Middle East. Why keep pursuing the fiction that the Palestinian question is the most pressing problem in the region, when the Arabs themselves have moved on? 

As for Palestinian groups’ threat of staging days of rage and rioting, that’s not so much an argument against Trump’s decision as it is a case study in why peace has remained elusive for so long.

Strangely, this morning (still early days) this issue seems to have been demoted, news-wise. I do hope the BBC finds something else to gnaw on.

Saudi Arabia’s condemnation may merely be lip service - to keep their Arab co-religionists quiet, and d’you know, I hear that the Palestinians, actually, ain’t that bovvered.