The Annexation Trigger

After being treated to decades of spiteful, passive-aggressive anti-Israel spin from Middle East editor Bowen and his subordinates, anyone with a smattering of political and historical knowledge of ‘Middle East affairs’ could rattle off a pretty good case against the BBC.

Last night Yolande Knell treated us to a mawkish, innuendo-laden report on the BBC World Service impliedly blaming Israel for interruptions to Palestinian children’s cancer treatments during the coronavirus crisis - although most obstacles seemed to stem from the P.A.’s latest strategy of refusing to ‘cooperate’ with Israel in answer to the proposed annexation of parts of the West Bank. I wasn’t certain what message she was trying to send to be honest, but I predict a whole lot more mileage will be extracted from that situation ‘going forward’.  

Although criticism of Israel-related reporting is but one factor in a bias-related bigger picture, many bias-watchers regard the BBC’s left-wing/anti-Conservative bias as their chief bugbear and therefore their main target, but in a way, the BBC’s anti-Zionist bias is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of bias. 

Regrettably, the BBC’s Palestinian-advocacy reporting style has a wide reach. Compare the BBC’s uncritical regurgitation of the Palestinian narrative with the overtly hostile, ‘arms-length’ or even non-existent representation of the Israeli perspective that is routinely dished up by the BBC’s Middle East correspondents. Bog-standard, superficial and shallow reporting, served with ‘half-a-story’ contemporary and historical analysis.

Given that both Britain and Israel are democracies, this attitudinal imbalance is hard to explain. If ‘Palestinianism’ is rooted in (Islamic) religion-based antisemitism, surely a largely secular - or at least a not very religiously observant country like post 60s Britain would see Israel as a natural ally, while instinctively filing overtly racist,’Yahud-hating Palestinians’ as ’other’.  

As non-racist Brits, shouldn’t we at least find the Palestinians’ intractable refusal to accept Israel’s existence a little problematic? Since the opposite seems to be the case, the obvious conclusion must be that this demonisation of the Jewish state stems from the ‘oldest hatred’.

However, the word ‘Annexation’ has triggered a new wave of anti-Israel angst. 

Mark Regev has been Israel’s UK Ambassador for over four years. Here’s a link to his ‘goodbye interview’ It seems like only yesterday that he was merely Israel’s ‘spokesperson’ and his very appearances on the BBC would send the haters into paroxysms of fury.

Palestinians: Is It Really about 'Annexation'? Khaled Abu Toameh offers another perspective on Trump’s plan for peace. He says that the Palestinians’ opposition to annexation encompasses twin objections; the religious one and the political one. According to Islamic clerics and scholars, Israel has no right to exist anywhere in the region, so with that in mind, any legality (or otherwise) appertaining to ‘annexation’ is but a trivial detail, therefore irrelevant to the ultimate objective - eliminating Israel altogether. 

Mahmoud Abbas, whom the BBC persists in regarding as a ‘potential partner for peace’ claims that annexation would destroy any chance of a ‘two-state’ solution, ending all hopes of peace with Israel. According to officials, the plan would irreversibly deprive the Palestinians of their right to establish an independent and sovereign state on the (unsustainable) pre-1967 armistice lines. 

The BBC, being determined to see such disingenuous role-play as ‘the voice of reason’ takes Abbas’s words at face value. But the P.A. is actually with the clerics. Neither strand really wants ‘a state’, or is capable of forming one. Their idea of peace is simply ‘no Israel’. 

True to form, the BBC’s Tom Bateman puts the customary BBC spin on the matter. I don’t know if that was Bateman’s own headline, but whoever penned it is clearly hostile to Israel and sympathises with the Palestinians. Israel annexation: New border plans leave Palestinians in despair

Getting to grips with the complexity of Netanyahu / Trump proposals or analysing the long-term potential is of little interest to Tom Bateman whose job is to promote the BBC’s agenda, which disregards the welfare of the Palestinians. Stuck with their appalling leadership, encouraged to kill Jews by Abbas’s outrageous ‘pay for slay’ policy, and ensuring that the existing stalemate is prolonged indefinitely.

At the present time, while old allegiances in the region are shifting, the BBC’s current anti-Israel animus has been triggered bigly by the word “annexation’. An emotive concept indeed, but what does it mean? That terrible word alone evokes expansionism; land-grab; occupation. But this isn’t the idea at all. 

I don’t claim to be an expert on the legality or otherwise of Trump’s plan for peace, but one thing I have gathered from my research so far is that the idea of ‘annexing’ parts of the West Bank appears considerably less ominous than Israel’s detractors would have us believe.

Here is another piece explaining Trump’s “Deal of the Century”   Israel has the right to annex parts of Judea and Samaria   by Eli Vered Hazan:

“So before explaining what annexation is and why it is imperative, it is important to emphasize a few things: France and the United Kingdom are vocal opponents of the agreement. The United Kingdom, which controls 17 territories, spread over thousands of miles across the globe, is criticising a territorial process in which there is a deep connection between a country and its citizens. France maintains control over 13 colonies thousands of miles away and even uses some of them for nuclear experiments, yet opposes our connection to our historical homeland. Not only that, Turkey illegally invaded and took over Northern Cyprus but threatens Israel over the mere potential of Israeli sovereignty. All of them claim that for Israel “it is not the same”. In fact, they are right – it is not the same.

and from Melanie Phillips

“Under international law, annexation has a precise meaning: the forcible incorporation by one state of the territory of another state. This does not apply to the disputed territories, which never belonged in law to any other state. 

Israel has the only legally grounded claim to this land, including the never-abrogated duty given to the British in the 1920s to settle the Jews throughout what is now Israel, the disputed territories and the Gaza Strip. 

Far from being an illegal annexation, extending Israeli law to these areas actually implements international law after some nine decades during which it was flouted and then ignored by Britain and the world community. It is those who oppose the sovereignty proposal who show contempt for the law.”

If it’s too easy to tar her with the “She would say that” brush, legal expert Eugene Kontorovich, lays out the situation fully in this article: Don’t Buy the ‘Annexation’ Hype (WSJ is behind a paywall, but I will post it in full over the fold.)

I didn’t want to display my ignorance by spouting nonsense about something I know very little about, so I did try to digest as much of the document as I could, and I dutifully watched the interesting (to me) video below. In the end, it seems that the specifics of the annexation plan is still a work in progress.  Also, at the end of the day, the legality is never the main and ultimate clincher when it comes to Middle East policy. Emotion is the real game-changer; hearts and minds and so on.

Even if the annexation ploy turns out to be just one strategic move in a long-term game, and the objective is a genuine, just and lasting peace, the BBC is never going to give us a fully-rounded picture because it is ideologically and ‘institutionally’ opposed to it and not entirely convinced of Israel's right to exist.

Legal situation fully explained overleaf.

Political choices. Part 2.

While I’m aware that this topic represents something of a minority interest and many visitors to sites like this will scroll past as soon as they see what it’s about - I still feel that, well, someone’s gotta do it and it might as well be me.

And I haven't forgotten the reason I started writing about bias against Israel (and/or antisemitism) in the first place, and why I chose to do so on a general ‘BBC bias’ platform, rather than below the line on a dedicated “Zionist” blog, like, say, Elder of Ziyon or Harry’s Place. 

I know that this specific issue isn’t necessarily at the top of every bias-watcher’s agenda, but such people aren’t likely to visit ‘Jewy’ blogs at all, so in the hope that I might catch the eye of someone who might otherwise avoid listening to me, I keep soldiering on.  

I’m not apologising in any way. I’ve said this many times before. I’m not religious. I’m secular through and through. I don’t belong to any association, group or community. But I do feel compelled to make a fuss about a massive injustice that has been going on forever and seems to be getting worse the more ludicrous it gets.

Yesterday I just scraped the surface of it, but the piece grew a bit too long and unwieldy for a blog post. Brevity is a virtue - I wish I knew how to achieve that.

So let me recap. 

I began by asking myself whether singling out the BBC’s undue respect for someone with such unpleasant “political views” as John Ashton was justified when it was really nothing out of the ordinary.  The BBC routinely promotes virulently antisemitic individuals without so much as a whisper that their views might be in any way controversial.

The people who immediately came to mind (Chris Gunness, Richard Horton, Abdel Bari Atwan, etc) were but the tip of a giant iceberg. And that’s before we got to the long and terrifying list of (mainly Labour) MPs. Lo and behold, David Collier came up with just such a list, and all the more sinister for the fact that these individuals were ‘democratically elected’ and their ferocious anti-Israel activities are regarded as ‘political choices’. 

One of these people - Sarah Champion (MP for Rotherham) is routinely lauded as a “champion” for the victims of the Pakistani grooming gangs and the MP who selflessly sacrificed a front-bench position for the cause.

However, calling her courageous for naming the perpetrators as “Pakistani men” in a Sun newspaper article is ‘benefit of the doubt too far’. Because, well, this crime was being perpetrated for quite a while before she ‘spoke out’ and she was by no means the first MP to do so. 

As we have pointed out before, Sarah Champion has long been pandering to the virulently antisemitic ‘political choices’ of her constituents, and as Collier points out:

"How many times did she critically mention Israel? – and how many times did she critically reference the world’s serial human rights abusers?
Israel: 60
Syria: 7
Iran: 5
N Korea: 2
Pakistan: 1
DRC: 0

That’s dealt with section one. 

Next, there’s the mountain of a communication problem to overcome regarding those wretched “annexations” which the BBC and its international ilk are determined to misrepresent in their default “It’s all settled” manner  -  i.e., as yet another of greedy Israel’s characteristic land-grabs. 

As I said yesterday, legally, the land is already Israel’s, and here is another easy-to-read and a particularly accessible piece which I enjoyed, despite my own recently acquired short attention span syndrome.

“The Palestinians have adopted a paradigm of the conflict in which Israel is entirely at fault. Justice, they say, requires that we vacate “their” land – in fact, if you asked them, they would say that this includes everything from the river to the sea; they believe they are being generous by just asking for Judea and Samaria (at least, for now). But this paradigm is wrong. In fact, we are the ones who have been excessively generous in repeatedly offering them large parts of the land, offers that were rejected because they did not provide a clear enough path to an Arab state in all of the land.

Within the article, there's a link to  Why Israeli Rule in the West Bank Is Legal under International Law in which Professor Eugene Kontorovich explains the legal (not the political choice) aspect of it.

Professor Eugene Kontorovich

Lastly, I’d like to expand on the final section of yesterday’s post. Matthew Sweet’s piece in UnHerd. Anti-Semitism runs deep in Britain.

Antisemitism is not exclusively ‘on the left’. I read some interesting comments generated by this article on Harry’s Place. Commenter Fritz Wunderlich linked to several detailed and extremely lengthy historical accounts of Britain’s role in the establishment of Israel in 1948 and I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for Blighty.

Two conclusions can be drawn from research into these documents, which are relevant to the role of British intelligence in the war in Palestine. 

The first is that, in the 1940s, Britain conducted a two-track policy in the Middle East: one, a well-documented, official policy defined by Whitehall under both the Conservative and Labour parties; the second was informal and secretive, which can be termed “regional,” implemented by “agents in the field,” which left few traces in British archives. 

It was perpetrated by a small, influential group of Arabist secret agents who manipulated the cabinet in London and implemented their own policies, which deviated from the official position. These agents enjoyed a unique status as intermediaries between Whitehall and local Arab leaders. Either intentionally, or because of deep-seated personal beliefs, they provided biased assessments. 

They did not merely gather and interpret information and recommend policy, but controlled the flow of information and implemented their own policies while keeping the London decision makers in the dark. They joined forces with Arab rulers, whom they portrayed as voicing the Arab view, in order to mislead their government. Their tactics, which were backed by senior military officers in Cairo, gathered momentum under the post-WWII Labour government and during the crisis in Palestine in 1947-48. 

The second conclusion is that the British secret agents succeeded in implementing their policies due largely to their use of indirect control over local “agents of influence.” They employed undercover political operations, clandestine diplomacy and covert propaganda to manipulate Arab leaders and public opinion – methods widely used in the Middle East during World War II.

British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin

Britain’s antisemitism runs deep indeed. It looks like our covertly (right-wing) Arabist agenda and our arrogant meddling planted the seeds of an increasingly intractable conflict. So the ongoing situation in the Middle East is our fault? Not entirely, though. The religiously-based hatred of Jews emanating from the religion of peace probably had something to do with it as well.