The horrifying line about Liz Truss
It didn't take long for Britain's new prime minister to be hit by Israelphobic ordure
Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister who “kissed hands” with the Queen today, does not — it is fair to say — so far enjoy the full-throated support of her Tory colleagues, nor that of assorted political commentators.
One of these latter critics is Melanie McDonagh, an Irish journalist who writes for various publications including the conservative Spectator, the Catholic Tablet and numerous others.
On the Spectator site, she has torn into Truss for the short speech she delivered outside 10 Downing Street this afternoon before going inside the prime minister’s residence to take up the reins of office.
Under the headline “The horrifying truth about Liz Truss”, McDonagh says she has no eloquence, charm, sincerity, charisma, humour or conviction. The only thing she’s got going for her, apparently, is her “iron ambition”.
Then she lists Truss’s major failings, the ones that are supposed to make us all smite our brows yet further at quite what a useless, incompetent, thorough-going menace this new prime minister is. McDonagh writes:
What she has got, of course, are a string of appointments to the highest offices in the land — Environment, Foreign Office, Lord Chancellor — all of which she occupied without distinction. Actually, so far as her time at the Environment goes, it seems that her lax approach to inspection meant that she allowed some farmers to pollute English rivers unchecked. At the Foreign Office, her ignorance of Russia (mocked by Sergei Lavrov) and her insistence that Ukraine must take back Crimea make her to my mind downright dangerous. Oh and she’s uncritically supportive of Israel. Of course she is.
Wait, what??! Supporting Israel is a “horrifying truth”? What’s horrifying about it —on a par with helping turn English rivers into sewage and stirring up world war over Crimea? What can McDonagh have meant by this?
A quick glance at her previous work soon tells us. Here she was writing for the Spectator — again — back in May 2018. After spinning a variation on the “some of my best friends are Jews” canard —
For myself, I count lots of my friends as Jewish and others, like my Cambridge director of studies, Zara Steiner, as deserving of my gratitude
— she wrote:
Because when it comes to the founding of the state of Israel 70 years ago, the inescapable fact is that it was founded on the expulsion or displacement of over 700,000 people, Palestinians who had next to no involvement with the persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust which gave urgency to the question of a Jewish state. They did not intend to vacate their homes for the founders of the new state; they left terrified, but, by and large, fully intending to return. Three, four, generations on, they are still refugees, and the consequences for neighbouring states like Lebanon has been nothing short of catastrophic.
There is nothing of course new about this reflection. It is stark, staring obvious. The founding of Israel was the consequence of an historic injustice to the people already living there. But to say so has become not just an error of taste but risks putting yourself in very bad company, of antisemites and the kind of people who make up groups such as Momentum.
Most of the objections to the founding of the state of Israel were best expressed by Edwin Montagu, the Jewish colleague of Asquith, in his famous 1917 memorandum. But the fundamental objection to the event that is being celebrated tomorrow can be put even more briefly in the second part of the Balfour Declaration, dishonoured in the non-observance of both its aspects: that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”. It was, of course, written before the Holocaust, but it still stands as a reproach now.
There was nothing, of course, new about these reflections. They were constructed around stark, staringly obvious falsehoods, prejudice and propaganda — which are indeed promulgated day in, day out by the extreme left and other Israel-haters and antisemites.
Israel was not founded on the displacement of anyone. It was created after the world body in the 1920s, the League of Nations, committed itself to re-establishing under international treaty obligation the ancient homeland of the Jewish people in what was then called Palestine.
The Arab armies that tried to destroy this nascent Jewish state at birth in 1948 told the Arabs living in Palestine to leave on the basis that they would return in short order as conquerors, with the Jews having been driven out.
Far from having “next to no involvement with the persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust”, the leader of those Palestinian Arabs, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al Husseini — who is Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s all-time hero and pin-up role-model — formed an alliance with Hitler to whom he undertook that, in the event of a Nazi victory, al Husseini would organise the extermination of every Jew in the Middle East. Hundreds of Palestinian Jews were slaughtered in the pogroms incited by al Husseini’s genocidal rhetoric.
Unlike every other people who were ever displaced by war, the Palestinian Arabs of today are —ludicrously — “still refugees” only because the UN created for them a unique category of hereditary refugee status passed down through the generations. It created this purely to forge these subsequent generations into a permanent, murderously embittered weapon of permanent warfare designed to finish the job of exterminating Israel that the Arabs have never managed to achieve.
The consequences for Lebanon that have been
nothing short of catastrophic
have flowed from the use of that country as a launch-pad for Israel’s extermination, from the encampment there of PLO terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s to the country’s takeover by Iran’s proxy army Hezbollah, which has situated upwards of 150,000 missiles aimed at the whole of Israel among Lebanon’s civilian population — thus turning them into cannon fodder and human shields.
Yes, the Jewish Edwin Montagu did indeed oppose the 1917 Balfour Declaration that committed the UK to establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His main concern was that such a homeland would revive the antisemitic canard in Britain of “dual loyalty” and thus put rocket fuel behind British Jew-hatred — hardly the kind of objection that should attract any admiration, from McDonagh or anyone else.
McDonagh then concluded this travesty with a twisted interpretation of the Balfour Declaration’s commitment that
nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Contrary to McDonagah’s mendacious claim that this was
dishonoured in the non-observance of both its aspects
it has been honoured in Israel to the letter. The “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” are upheld and protected in Israel, a protection afforded to such rights in no other Middle Eastern country. The Declaration deliberately did not commit to those non-Jewish communities “political” rights in Palestine, precisely because those “political” rights were to be given to the Jews alone — the only people for whom that land had ever been their national kingdom.
This column by McDonagh was, of course, written well before the premiership of Liz Truss was even a twinkle in the eye of Larry the Downing Street cat; but it explains that odious line in today’s piece, and still stands as a reproach now.
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