Melanie Phillips

It is a measure of the truth of Ben Brogan’s very welcome piece in the Telegraph today that it was such a surprise to see it in a British ‘quality’ newspaper. For Brogan wrote in support of Israel and in protest at the prism of lies through which it is routinely portrayed in the UK. This is a rare event indeed in the British media.

More than that, he correctly identified the urgent need to repair the gaping hole at the heart of the British government’s currently confused and uncertain foreign policy. For despite the protestations of indestructible support for Israel expressed by David Cameron, the actual attitude of his government has become so inimical to Israel’s security and interests that relations between the two countries are at a low ebb and sliding further very fast. As this blog has repeatedly warned, at the point in history where not only has the west been under attack for years by the Islamic jihad but where turmoil within the Arab and Muslim world may well fatefully end up making these enemies of the west even stronger, the British government has chosen to bully and expose to further danger the one country which is not only its sole indisputable ally in the region but also the sole exemplar there of democracy and human rights, and the victim of six to nine decades of genocidal Islamic aggression. And yet the British government treats Israel as if it were a rogue state acting in defiance of law and human rights, the regional aggressor and the cause of regional instability and Muslim rage.

As Brogan also correctly observed, the government is not acting in a vacuum. Britain – with a number of British Jews all-too prominent in this wicked process -- has become the west’s global laundry for the production and dissemination of anti-Israel libels, hatred, bigotry and incitement. But Brogan’s call for Cameron to translate his professed support for Israel into an intelligible policy has, alas, very little chance of being heeded. For it is not only that the government’s hostility to Israel is based on a fundamental and long-term geopolitical and strategic error of the first magnitude about where the interests of the United Kingdom actually lie. To reverse this would mean that Cameron also had to confront the profound moral sickness at the heart of British intellectual society, which fawns over the racist Holocaust-deniers and anti-Jewish ethnic cleansers of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas while libelling Israel as a nation of war-mongering, bloodthirsty child-killers whose right to their own country must be considered forfeit.

To confront this evil that has all but consumed British public life would take spectacular moral courage for any British politician -- not to mention a deep understanding of the history of the region and of the Jewish people. And these are characteristics which so far David Cameron – whose talent for easy platitudes is undoubtedly unrivalled -- has not displayed.