Beware The Urgings Of Ardent Friends

When it is politic or socially agreeable to state so, out they come, professing their undying support and admiration. Your friends are their friends. Your enemies are their enemies. Mostly because they truly are, but that's another story. A rather awkward one, in a politically correct atmosphere of neutrality until dire necessity proves otherwise.

Israel is like the canary in the mine. She's out there, vulnerable, forever susceptible to the ongoing provocations of violence. Violence in the typical overblown rhetoric that passes for reasoned debate in the Middle East. And violence as practised by hate-mongers for whom Israel's presence in that sacred Islamic territory remains anathema.

As the sole outsider-nation within the larger community of Muslim states most of whom remain defiantly, bitterly, resistant to her presence, Israel's is a rather lonely albeit courageous existence. As the only truly representative liberal democracy in a region ruled by tyrants, dictators, oil sheikdoms, monarchies and fundamentalist-crazed theocracies she remains an insult on the collective body politic.

Semitic, yes indeed, but definitely not of the tribe. In celebration of her 60th anniversary, however, a succession of tentative well-wishers have come and gone and will continue to land temporarily, to observe the landscape and the passing scene, lend their undying support, condemn signal elements of the country's basic survival needs, and move on.

Britain's Gordon Brown, for example, urging Israel to "make key concessions" to the Palestinians; to "grasp the chance" for peace. Speaking before the Knesset Britain's prime minister leaves no one guessing at the depth of his commitment to Israel, nonetheless offering up his "honest analysis". Being that Israel must do more to assist the Palestinians in the occupied territories and withdraw its settlements there.

Consolidating his concern and his friendship with the assurance that "For the whole of my life, I have counted myself a friend of Israel. Britain is your true friend." Nice, if it were so. Nice to think it to be so. So sad to be persuaded otherwise so very often by proceedings erupting from that fair isle. Interesting too, how blind Israel's supporters deliberately make themselves to her reality of existence.

No mention made of the sincerity in suing for peace of the Palestinian Authority, but great support given equally to its Fatah President, Mahmoud Abbas. On whose behalf an official Fatah spokesperson said on PA TV "the Fatah movement sends warm blessings to Hezbollah, to all the resistance and to the Lebanese nation, and the Palestinians for their historic victory over the Israeli arrogance in their victorious July war..."

And just in case the message wasn't sufficiently clear: "And on the return of the heroes of freedom, the heroes and the Martyrs, headed by the great Samir Kuntar and the martyr fighter Dalal Mughrabi, who led the most glorified sacrifice action in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle.

"The Fatah party vows to the Palestinian people that Fatah will continue to struggle in the way of the pure Martyrs, until the state is liberated and the Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as the capital. The Fatah movement turns on this day that abounds with sincere blessings to Hezbollah. The battle against the theft of Palestine is the battle of all the fighters and all the Arab nations.

"Blessings to the free heroes and their head, the heroic fighter Samir Kuntar, and blessings to the spirit of the heroic Dalal Mughrabi and to the friends of the heroes. President Mahmoud Abbas congratulated yesterday's exchange of prisoners and bodies of Martyrs. The president sent blessings to Samir Kuntar's family."

Another unfortunate, inconvenient truth, that Israel must bargain in good faith with the Palestinian Authority, for a peaceful resolution of the situation that resulted when the Palestinians refused the UN's offer of partition to result in an immediate state of their very own. The terrorists that prey on Israel and her people are recognized as heroes and martyrs by the Palestinian Authority, yet Israel is urged to be more compassionate.

Why isn't the Palestinian Authority and Mahmoud Abbas being urged to reconcile themselves with the reality of their own failure? To re-structure and re-arrange their violent demands, to authentically commit themselves to peace, to responsibly act in the best interests of the people they claim to represent? To disavow terrorism, and the plague they continue to encourage on their neighbour.

Britain's Gordon Brown might do well to lend an attentively sincere ear to Benjamin Netanyahu when he stated at their meeting the truth on the ground: "Further Israeli concessions in Judea and Samaria will strengthen Hamas and will enable the construction of another Iranian base in the heart of Israel."

Fact is, the situation is a puzzle inside a conundrum inside an intractably irreducible maze of incongruent impossibilities.