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The Tall Story We Europeans Now Tell Ourselves about Israel

[Telegraph-UK] Charles Moore - Sir Peter Tapsell, the longest-serving Tory MP, on Tuesday asked whether the Prime Minister had colluded with President Bush in allowing Israel to "wage unlimited war" in Lebanon, including attacks on civilian residential areas of Beirut that were "a war crime grimly reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter in Warsaw." His remark seems to me a symptom of a wider unreality about the Middle East, one that now dominates. European discourse on the subject seems to have been overwhelmed by a narrative, told most powerfully by the way television pictures are selected, that makes Israel out as a senseless, imperialist, mass-murdering, racist bully. You would hardly know from watching television that most Arab nations in the region, with the notable exception of Syria, detest the power of Hizballah. You would barely have noticed that Hizballah is a Shia faction, actively supported by Iran, and therefore feared by most Sunnis and by all who resist Iranian hegemony. Behind the dominant narrative of Israeli oppression is a patronizing, almost racist assumption about the Arabs, and about Muslims, which is, essentially, that "they're all the same." We have now passed half a century in which the ultimate responsibility for the Middle East has passed from the UK (and from France) to America. Unless we seriously propose to try to regain that responsibility, we do well to try to work closely with America rather than acting like a querulous octogenarian. Mr. Blair's efforts in Washington to search for a cease-fire that prefers durability over immediacy are perfectly sensible.
2006-07-31 01:00:00
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