Moodey Blues: Prominent Christian anti-Zionist's insupportable defence of BDS

Stephen Sizer's staunch champion Jeremy Moodey, who heads the Embrace the Middle East NGO (formerly BibleLands), has been pontificating about BDS.

He states, inter alia:

'.... I do not accept that BDS is all about stigmatising just one side in the conflict. It is a recognition that there has been, since Israel's seizure of Palestinian land in the 1967 war, a grossly asymmetrical power balance in Israel's favour. This is an inevitable consequence of occupation and US military backing for Israel and has been illustrated in the last two Gaza conflicts (2008/09 and 2012) when the Israeli death toll of 19 was dwarfed by the Palestinian death toll of 1,642 ...

Israel often makes the point about the power balance between itself and the surrounding Arab states, but this is a red herring. At the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict is an inter-communal power imbalance, between two peoples endeavouring to share the same land. This is not any more about an interstate conflict.

So, where there is an asymmetric power balance, and the stronger power refuses to engage in meaningful dialogue ... then the international community is entitled to bring pressure to bear on the stronger power. BDS is a non-violent tool to this end...'

Stephen Sizer is on record as stating: "Israel has attacked openly every one of its neighbours in its short history," a despicable distortion of the truth, of course.

Is Mr Moodey of the same mind?  Surely he, who now decries"a grossly asymmetrical power balance in Israel's favour," cannot be so ignorant of the history of the Middle East since 1948 that he fails to recognise that, reflecting the grossly assymetrical power balance prevailing in Israel's disfavour, in 1967 Israel was attacked yet again by neighbouring Arab countries .  Fighting for its very existence against five hostile forces, the tiny Jewish State won a famous victory that was nothing short of miraculous and the territory that Mr Moodey describes as having been seized  was territory that Israel found itself in possession of at the ceasefire. 

five Arab armies

Surely he is well aware that those Arab armies included Egypt's, the most powerful of them, and Jordan's, which had ignored Israel's warning not to do so, and that it was they who in 1948 had seized what he would consider Palestinian land.  Surely he is aware that from 1948-67 Egypt held Gaza and Jordan the West Bank, and that neither country had made the slightest attempt to establish a Palestinian state.  Furthermore, the Arabs were entrenched in their characteristic rejectionism of Israel's right to exist: until the 1970s not one Arab nation was prepared to negotiate with Israel.

Mr Moodey's comparison of Israeli and Palestinian casualty rates is a non sequitur,  an idiotic point: during the Second World War far more Germans were killed in air raids than were Americans.  Does that mean that Germany had a better moral case than America had: by his logic, it looks that way.

And of course in raising that matter Mr Moodey overlooks the many 100s of Israelis, including infants, who have over the years  been murdered by PLO terrorists and by suicide bombers.

Sadly, like Sizer, Mr Moodey lacks any empathy at all, it would seem, for the Israelis, surrounded as they are by fanatical Muslim extremists dedicated to their country's destruction; he ignores the fact that Israel has had to become strong in view of the prevailing threat to its very existence.

(Incidentally, off topic but still in the field of interfaith relations, see this disturbing article)