Zionism

Extract

The Editor has responded to my criticism of what has often seemed to me the almost automatically pro-Palestinian “line” followed by this and other journals when treating of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, by agreeing to publish this article in which I set out to redress the balance by supplying some of the crucial facts of Israeli and Jewish history which are ignored by partisan accounts. To omit more recent examples of this kind of bias, the reviewer of Lucas Grollenberg’s book Palestine Comes First in “New Blackfriars” of May 1980, after giving a tendentious resume of the “true facts” of the history of the conflict which glossed over a number of salient facts, ended with the revealing assertion that since Grollenberg’s facts are “right”, any other account is “wrong” and therefore should not be published — an attitude which should speak for itself. Fair-minded people — as one assumes the great majority of the readers of New Blackfriars strive to be — will wish to weigh all relevant facts. This account aims not to deny legitimate Palestinian claims but to supply some facts which are the context of those claims and to invite readers to enter into the minds of the other side in the historical conflict, the Israelis and the wider Jewish community. It will already be clear, I hope, that for me “fair-minded” does not necessarily equal fashionable liberal bien-pensant.