Ronit Lentin’s recent column, ‘Palestine: 40 years of occupation’ (21 June), presented a picture of Israel so astonishingly jaundiced it would not look out of place in the Hamas weekly, al-Risala. Through the distortion of its past and the misrepresentation of its present, she carefully built a case for Israel’s destruction.
Make no mistake; despite being neatly obscured by the language of ‘peace, love and healing’, this is Dr Lentin’s fundamental demand. Under her “single democratic secular state solution” to the conflict, present-day Israel would cease to exist, subsumed into a sovereign unit called ‘Palestine’ which would incorporate all of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Given regional demographic trends (the Arab birth-rate far exceeds that of the Jews, for instance), the Jewish sector in this new entity would steadily decline as a percentage of the population which would inevitably result, though a process of democratic subversion, in the establishment of the world’s 22nd Arab state. And, on the evidence of recent events in Gaza, it would not remain “secular” for long.
Repudiating the right of the Jewish people to national self-determination in their historic homeland, proponents of a bi-national state argue that the lives of the Middle East’s six million Jews would be secure under non-Israeli sovereignty; that despite the rank anti-semitism of the Arab regimes and the blood-curdling threats of the region’s Islamists, the erstwhile Israelis would thrive. Given the extent to which she downplays both past and present threats to Israeli existence, Dr Lentin certainly seems convinced on the issue.
For her, the 1948 War of Independence in which Israel lost 6,000 souls in a co-ordinated attack by the forces of nine Arab nations was not a life-and-death struggle but the beginning of the Jewish ‘conquest’ of historic Palestine. She also dismisses Israel’s contention that the 1967 Six Day War was a war of survival, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. While the analyses and historical studies to which she refers have questioned whether the Arabs were readying for immediate war, none disputes the fact that their ultimate ambition was the extermination of Zionist existence in a battle of annihilation which would leave practically no Jewish survivors. And while few Israelis actually believe last summer’s Lebanon war was a “war of survival”, the vast majority consider it to have been a legitimate defensive operation against six years of cross-border attacks by an Iran-backed jihadist militia for whom the Jews are cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion’ and Israel an ‘illegal, and illegitimate entity, which has no future in our land.
Dr Lentin denigrates the importance of Israel’s security barrier as a life-saving measure, despite the fact that it has proved itself effective in this regard. For example, between August 2001 and August 2002, 58 Israelis were killed or wounded in the northern cities of Afula and Hadera; since the barrier’s construction, this has fallen to three. Certainly, it is causing hardship to some Palestinian communities but, while not ideal, it remains a legitimate and wholly proportionate security response to the murder of 1,000 Israelis in over 19,000 attacks. Furthermore, to call it, as Dr Lentin does, “the horrible apartheid wall” is doubly misleading as the structure is an example of neither ‘apartheid’ nor a wall. The concrete wall sections form only 5 per cent of the barrier, the remaining 95 per cent consisting of a series of conventional chain-link and wire fences, while the only “apartheid” it seeks to enforce is between Palestinian suicide bombers and Israel’s civilian population.
Indeed, the ‘apartheid’ issue goes to the heart of the matter of Dr Lentin’s one-state solution. Under the Jewish state’s multi-ethnic democracy, the Arab minority enjoys full civil and social rights, political representation and recourse to the courts and the same rights to education and healthcare as the majority (her claim that Israeli Arabs are prohibited from marrying Palestinians from the territories is false; the law in question merely rescinds the Palestinian spouse’s automatic right to permanent residency in Israel).
Does anyone really believe that a dwindling Jewish minority would enjoy physical security, let alone full civil rights, in a future Islamic state of ‘Palestine’?
Seán Gannon is chairman of the Irish Friends of Israel
