An Irish Journalist On Selective Condemnation Of Israel

Remarks Irish journalist Kevin Myers sensibly of the anti-Israel rant of Irish broadcaster Vincent Browne, who obscenely called Israel "a cancer in the Middle East" (see more about that rant here; hat tip reader Jean):

'Browne's diatribe -- if his incoherent drivel merits such a lofty term -- included the allegation that Israel "stole the land from the Arabs". Only partly true. Vast tracts of land were bought from Arabs by early Zionist settlers, and funded by the Eretz Yisrael Office.

Much the same is true of settlements in the West Bank. To be sure, some atrocious things happened in 1948, and many Arabs were intimidated into flight. But that is nearly 65 years ago: as much time as elapsed between the Battle of Little Big Horn and Pearl Harbour. Who would have proposed in 1941 that Montana and the Dakotas should be given back to the Cheyenne and Lacota Indians?

The Arabs who fled Israel were not then assimilated into the populations of neighbouring Arab states, but were confined in refugee camps, which remain to this day.

Compare roughly contemporaneous events in Pakistan and India, where 14 million people fled in waves of terror and mass-murder that dwarfed events in Israel.

Refugees were then incorporated into the lives of both new states. And in 1945, millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and were duly assimilated into the Federal Republic of Germany.

In other words, bad things happened: so get on with it. But the one ethnic group that cherishes a grievance, and picks at the scab until it is an open and weeping abscess and finally, yes, cancerous, are Israel's Arab neighbours, who have ruthlessly used the Palestinian refugees as a propaganda tool in their existential war against the Jewish state.'

Read Myers' entire article here