Cameron cannot support Obama’s plan to barter away Israel’s security

Barack Obama continues his whistle-stop tour of Europe today with a state visit to London (England) in the desperate hope of a private audience and photo opportunity with Nick Clegg. The Deputy Prime Minister has hitherto declined to meet with the President, suspicious that all this matey back-slapping is simply a stunt designed to invigorate Mr Obama’s bid for a second term in The White House. Mr Clegg is having none of it: he is determined not to share his aura or sprinkle any of his political gold dust on the re-election of a political minnow who reneges on his election promises.

When the President meets the Prime Minister, talks will be dominated by Libyan landfill, Syrian egg-shells, Pakistani pacification, Afghani armed intervention and a little Palestinian pin-head dancing. But no doubt there will be a full and frank discussion about Israel.

The Guardian informs us: ‘Barack Obama will seek a joint Middle East agreement with David Cameron, insisting that a Palestinian state should be based on pre-1967 borders – a proposal rejected by Israel's prime minister as "unrealistic" and "indefensible".’

A joint US-UK Middle East agreement that Israel should barter away her security and accept a ‘secure border’ approximating to the 1949 armistice lines?

Right.

Let us set aside for a moment the embarrassing fact that Binyamin Netanyahu has said there’s not a hope in sheol of Israel withdrawing to the territorial lines that existed before the 1967 Six Day War. And let us also set aside the even more embarrassing fact that Hamas have said there’s no hope in this life or the next for any Jews living in the ‘occupied territories’ (ie, the whole of Israel, insha'Allah).

When the State of Israel was declared in 1948, hordes of armed Arabs descended to murder her at birth. The UN plan for partition of the land was accepted by Jews but opposed by five Muslim states who decided to invade and rid the land of the descendents of Abraham and Isaac. And Egypt would doubtless have invaded again if Israel had not pre-empted their attack in 1967.

While Israel remains surrounded by enemies – having ceded Gaza to Arab control from whence rain thousands of Katyusha rockets – David Cameron is now being asked to support the Obama plan to revert to the very partition which posed an existential threat to the only democracy in the region. The ‘Arab spring’ has not yet quite sprung enough to persuade Israel that a glorious summer lies ahead: Syria openly supports Hezbollah; Egypt now has the Muslim Brotherhood; Gaza has spawned Hamas; Lebanon hosts a plethora of anti-Israel terrorist groups and Iran is pledged to wipe Israel ‘off the map’: the whole of Arabia is intent on her destruction. And President Obama is here to persuade David Cameron to support a policy which will inevitably result in yet another attempt to drive the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. This is not a peace process: it is a plan for genocide on a scale not seen since Auschwitz.

Before he became Prime Minister, David Cameron made a speech in which he proudly identified himself as ‘a Zionist’, which he defined as ‘someone who believes that the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel and a right to their country’.

His Grace said then that it was a forthright, bold, and (in this day and age) rather brave thing to say. As the Prime Minister meets the President today, he would do weel to remind himself of this section of his speech to the Conservative Friends of Israel:

There is something deep in our Party’s DNA that believes in Israel, the right of Israel to exist, the right of Israel to defend itself and that a deal should only happen if it means that Israel is really allowed to have peace within secure borders and real guarantees about its future… The West has to understand that there isn’t an equivalence between a democratically elected Government of Israel, a state of Israel that is a democracy, that’s a member of the United Nations, that has a totally legitimate right to exist and defend itself – there is no equivalence between that and a group like Hamas. When it comes to Hamas we have to be very clear about the Quartet principles, until they recognise the state of Israel, until they put an end to violence and accept previous agreements, they really have to move toward those principles in a big way before they should get any Western money and Western support.

And when asked about the British ‘loons’ and ‘trots’ who seek to boycott Israel and defame her at every turn, he said:

‘What’s disturbing about it, is it is something that is happening here in the United Kingdom and it’s something that has absolutely no justification because Israel is a democratic country and these Trots as you put it are treating Israel as some sort of pariah state and that is completely wrong. So I have no hesitation in saying yes it may be a bunch of loons but actually what they are doing is profoundly wrong, profoundly damaging and also I think sometimes attacks on Israel can spill over into anti-Semitism, to be frank about it.’

The starting point for peace in the Middle East is not tit-for-tat Israeli-Arab bartering over land, and neither is it dependent on Israeli withdrawal to the arbitrary armistice lines of any era. The path to lasting peace is contingent first and foremost upon an unequivocal commitment by the governments of all Arab states that ‘the Jews have a right to a homeland in Israel and a right to their country’; that Israel has ‘a totally legitimate right to exist and defend itself’. When Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Gaza and the rest of Arabia accept that, they must then proceed to eradicate all expressions of Israel hatred and cleanse their lands of the anti-Semitic extremists in their midst. His Grace is not without hope, but acknowledges that this may take some time.