Zionist obstinacy making Israel a pariah nation

You would not expect to encounter a bombastic justification of Israeli settlements in the Guardian, a British newspaper famed for its liberal stance. Yet on June 8, the paper ran an op-ed article of precisely that character. In it, Israeli settler Dani Dayan bluntly asserted that West Bank settlements are now an irreversible reality, that the ‘two state solution’ has become an irrelevant fantasy and that it is time to adopt an entirely new approach to resolving the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Described as the Chief Foreign Envoy for the Yesha Council, Dayan is himself a resident of a West Bank settlement. Though a secular Jew, he writes with religious fervor about the ‘inalienable right’ of Jews to occupy — or rather, as he believes, re-occupy — land from which they were exiled for 2,000 years. Repeatedly his article stressed the ‘solid moral ground’ on which the settlements rest, brushing aside the long-established judicial verdict that they are in breach of international law.
It is true that liberalism thrives on diversity of opinion and is honor-bound to engage with positions that are anything but liberal. All the same, it is curious for the Guardian to give exposure to a perspective like Dayan’s, especially considering its well-known opposition to Israel’s occupation. Many must wonder what contribution so dogmatic and inflexible a figure has to make to the constructive debate about the Palestine-Israel conflict the paper seeks to promote. Some may question the wisdom of opening its opinion pages to a hardline Zionist who appears to regard Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, 46 years old this month, as a divinely sanctioned fait accompli.
No small coup for the Israeli right, the publication of Dayan’s pugnacious credo in a leading liberal organ might suggest that endless Zionist accusations of anti-Israel bias in the British media are paying more than usually satisfactory dividends. Still, Dayan is of dubious value to his country as a journalistic emissary. It may well be that the greater the salience of sentiments like his, the more pervasive the perception is likely become that justice for the Palestinians will never be achieved through negotiation with their Zionist oppressors. The publication of Dayan’s Guardian article coincided with a Globescan poll for the BBC providing fresh evidence that Israel is among the nations with the most negative global image. The signs are, moreover, that ever more people are being driven to the conclusion that the only language that the Jewish state understands is the unilateralist language it employs itself.
If there is a current ramping up of Zionist propaganda, it is out of rising concern that in the battle for world opinion Israel is suffering comprehensive defeat. On the weekend before Dayan’s article appeared London’s Trafalgar Square was thronged with Jews celebrating Israel’s 65th birthday with a parade to demonstrate the support of British Jews for the country in the face of what they worry is a concerted campaign to de-legitimize it. It is a measure of how far Israel is at risk of sinking irretrievably to pariah status that the renowned British scientist Stephen Hawking this spring acceded to requests from academic critics of Israel not to attend a conference in Israel — even though he had previously been happy to visit the Jewish state.
Not without cause, Zionists fear that the call for sanctions against Israel is ceasing to be associated with extremists, with fringe obsessives, and threatening to go mainstream. The fact is that increasing numbers of men and women who, in one capacity or another pursue the life of the mind, are abandoning the conviction that to boycott Israel is to betray the cherished principles of intellectual freedom.
More or less the last public intervention by the celebrated Scottish writer Iain Banks, who died on June 9, was a contribution to a bracing new collection of essays spelling out the case for boycotting Israel, Generation Palestine: Voices from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement, edited by Rich Wiles with a foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Banks, who vetoed publication of his books in Israel, spoke for many when he confessed that while not entirely happy to boycott Israel he had finally accepted that when it came to Israeli resistance to Palestinian claims ‘constructive engagement and reasoned argument have demonstrably failed.’ The ‘relatively crude weapon of boycott,’ he wrote, ‘is ‘pretty much all that’s left.’
In a powerful passage of his essay, ‘Our People,’ which was published by the Guardian when news came in April that he was terminally ill, Banks wrote that, of all people, Jews had special reason to understand how it feels to be persecuted en masse, to be punished collectively and treated as less than human. This blindness to injustice on the part of historic victims of injustice ranks, he declared, as ‘one of the defining iniquities of our age and powerfully implies a shamingly low upper limit on the extent of our species moral intelligence.’ It must be said that the dereliction of moral intelligence in question was grotesquely demonstrated by the vindictive Zionist abuse heaped on Stephen Hawking in the wake of his canceled visit to Israel. Not only was the revered scientist smeared by Zionists as an anti-Semite, he was even mocked, and with breathtaking crudity, for his physical disabilities.
What seems more abundantly clear than ever is that Zionists are not simply reluctant to accept that anybody, however distinguished, can legitimately object to Israel’s conduct. Often they appear incapable of doing so. Such blinkered intransigence ensures the steady and inexorable advance of the boycott movement.