December 27, 2004

Uh-oh, Guardian's Ian Black goes back to Palestine

One of The Guardian's. resident Zionists has turned his attention back to Palestine. Ian Black used to be The Guardian's. man in (or for) Israel. Then they made him Diplomatic Editor. I remember being pleased that they had unleashed him on the world where he could do less mischief. He made some classic references to Israel being the "only democracy in the Middle East", as distinct from Israel being the last of the colonial settler states. And he used to call Palestinian evicted tenant farmers "marauding Arabs". Well now he's singing the praises of Shimon Peres's return to government. He gives a truncated list of Peres's "role in key episodes in Israeli history". For example, the Entebbe raid, the acquisition of nuclear weapons and Grapes of Wrath (without describing what the latter actually was). He even gushes that Peres looks like David Ben Gurion (which he doesn't). Ian Black has obviously been absent from the Israeli scene for so long that he forgot about the Lavon Affair where Peres was implicated in a plot involving the use of Egyptian Jews to bomb British and US civilian targets. The Egyptian conspirators were caught and incarcerated and the consequent backlash led to a wave of emigration of Egyptian Jews, many to Israel. No prizes to Nasser for his witless and cruel response, but how could Ian Black forget such an episode? Also to throw the expression "Grapes of Wrath" into a round-up of Peres's war criminal career doesn't do justice to the victims. Here's a passage from Robert Fisk's description of the offensive against the civilian population of southern Lebanon:

"Israel's slaughter of civilians in this terrible 10-day offensive - 206 by last night - has been so cavalier, so ferocious, that not a Lebanese [barring Phalangists] will forgive this massacre. There had been the ambulance attacked on Saturday, the sisters killed in Yohmor the day before, the 2-year-old girl decapitated by an Israeli missile four days ago. And earlier yesterday, the Israelis had slaughtered a family of 12 - the youngest was a four- day-old baby - when Israeli helicopter pilots fired missiles into their home."

Ian Black should stick to diplomacy, he's certainly very diplomatic where Israel's interests are concerned.

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