Palestine and Israel, strong comment in the Guardian

A powerful comment on Palestine/Israel; read as well the interview with Arnold Hottinger

Justice demands it
Ted Honderich
Wikipedia on Ted Hondrich
November 27, 2006 08:00 AM

The comment in the Guardian

We cannot settle such fundamental questions of right and wrong as that of Palestine and so on by the common recourses to international law, UN resolutions, doctrines of human rights or our hierarchic democracy. Rather, for consistency and other reasons, we need a fundamental principle of right and wrong. This is the principle of humanity. It is, in short, that we must take actually rational steps, as distinct from political pretences and the like, to get and keep people out of bad lives, the latter being defined in terms of lacks and denials of the great human goods.

This morality of humanity includes certain propositions. It justifies Zionism, not vaguely understood but taken as the founding and maintaining of Israel in roughly its original 1948 borders. The morality of humanity also condemns neo-Zionism, understood as the taking from the Palestinians at least their freedom in the last fifth of their homeland. It gives to them a moral right to their liberation-terrorism against neo-Zionism in historic Palestine, including Israel.

The morality of humanity judges 9/11 to have been monstrously wrong, an irrational means to ends that included resistance to neo-Zionism. It condemns our Iraq war as moral barbarism for our intentional killing of many thousands of innocents. It as entirely condemns the terrorism of 7/7 in London. It maintains that Blair is not effectively an enemy of such horrors as 7/7, since he is not tough on both terrorism and the causes of terrorism.

All this involves the judgement that neo-Zionism and American and British policies and actions in support of it have been a part, one part, of the explanation of 9/11 and of a good deal else. They have, of course, not been the whole explanation. They have been necessary conditions rather than a sufficient condition. Certainly, they have been necessary conditions of particular significance.

But if you state this common belief, you may find other propositions assigned to you: "Al-Qaida isn't the fault of poverty, it turns out. It's the fault of the Jews."

Thus the journalist Nick Cohen in a recent piece on me in the New Statesman. This is more than the raising of the question of whether the common belief is anti-semitic. It is more than the raising of the question of whether I am an anti-semite. Yet more is done by what follows, the report that I blame all of a lot of violence on "the Jew".

What this comes to, then, is an unveiled, if safeguarded imputation of anti-semitism based on a ludicrous falsehood about my common beliefs as to the explanation of 9/11, the weighting of necessary conditions, shares of responsibility, and so on.

In a television programme, another journalist, David Aaronovitch, was first concerned to argue that judgment on neo-Zionism is inconsistent with a lack of judgment on other crimes against humanity.

Well, there is a uniqueness about neo-Zionism. There have been 39 years of the violation of the only indigenous people of a place by another people, violation by a people of knowledge and experience, in two centuries of history when the violation could be seen for what it is. A violation of the weak by the strong. A violation unhidden by impertinent pretences about the course of ancient history. A violation whose attempted justifications lack numbers for populations at relevant times and also for deaths. A violation not made weakly defensible, even, by the proposition that it has been required for the good or security of a larger society of the same people, as in the case of the Russian crime against Chechnya. A violation almost without precedent for wider consequences in the world. A violation supported by religious affirmations of the sacredness of Jewish lives against others.

To come round to Iraq, not much consideration is needed of the piece of moral stupidity that to do a thing in the knowledge that it will kill innocents is not intentionally to kill innocents - and so we are not killing innocents in Iraq. An introductory word will do.

Think for a start of the husband whose wife leaves him and who cannot handle the fact. He goes to the house she is in, with glue for the door locks and petrol to start the fire. He sees a cleaning woman go into the house. He goes ahead anyway. Think a little of the judge's verdict on his claim that he only intended to kill his wife, and so is guilty of only one murder, and is sorry about the cleaning woman. Think a little about the family of the cleaning woman and their view about his prate of his intention, and his note of condolence.

It needs asserting and repeating that it is Jews first of all who must, without equivocation, condemn that necessary condition of Iraq that is neo-Zionism. They can have a little more effect on it than others. They have the special obligation that comes with that fact. They have a special obligation that must overcome the plain fact of kinship, loyalty and other connection that understandably unites Jews, owed in one part of the history of anti-semitism. They have more obligation than anyone else to resist change away from decent Jewish moral attitudes, to maintain their membership in the high tradition of Jewish realism and compassion - to resist change in those attitudes owed to the pressure of being Jewish.

They need to look to their proper and great leaders, including leaders of us all, Noam Chomsky at their head. Those who are of a reflective turn of mind need to get onto their bookshelves The Case Against Israel by Professor Michael Neumann. It offers the clarity, perhaps the Jewish clarity, that the Palestinian problem is not complex, not difficult, not a problem. The decent solution is simple, without need for bargaining or hesitation or qualification.

It is, of course, that Israel withdraws without negotiation or any other delay from the last fifth of the historic homeland of its indigenous people, the Palestinians. To declare that, without caveat, is the part of Jews actually against neo-Zionism.