BRITISH LEFT: ONLY DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL WILL BRING PEACE

Israel in the eyes of the Left
The Guardian in Why Blair's trip will not succeed presents its view and that of the left generally of the Arab/Israeli conflict, namely that the creation of Israel was an injustice to the Arabs that must be rectified.

[...]It is not that US presidents have ever underestimated the importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The trouble is that, thanks to the partisanship noted in the Pentagon, they can never acknowledge the real nature of the problem: essentially one of decolonisation. So, far from opening up new opportunities, Arafat's death will almost certainly reconfirm that congenital inability - though this time because of Iraq and al-Qaida in more critical circumstances than ever. If the Palestinians were to secure the redress that other colonised peoples have, there would either be no Israel - as there is no Algérie Française - or a bi-national state, like South Africa, in which it would lose its exclusively Jewish character.

But the Palestinians are not demanding that. They have committed themselves, via Oslo, to the loss of 78% of their original homeland. If there ever is a settlement, this concession will rank as the greatest single contribution to it. It was under Arafat's auspices that they made it. Yet the US called him an "obstacle" to peace who had to be replaced by a "moderate" leadership that would persuade its people to give yet more.

But a new Palestinian leadership won't do that, least of all if it is clean and democratic, because, reflecting the popular will, it simply couldn't. That Sharon is no less an obstacle to peace than Arafat ever was, and Israeli "moderation" as necessary as Palestinian, is a thought that might occur to Bush, but it isn't one which, as similar thoughts in his first term taught him, he will find politic to act upon. US Middle East policies have always been shaped more by domestic politics than realities on the ground, and never more distortingly than today. [...]