Daniel Finkelstein in the Times – Key to Middle East peace is accepting the past. His fine family home, built by his grandfather in 1938, stands at the top of a hill in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, formerly Lwow, formerly Limburg, He's not expecting it back any time soon.
What I don’t think I could reasonably expect is that if I embarked on a march through central London demanding my home back I would turn round and find many people following me. Even (or perhaps especially) Jeremy Corbyn. And you can’t organise a march through central London without him.
It is not only the home that has gone. When Lviv was Lwow it was a multi-ethnic city, shared by Jews, ethnic Poles and Ukrainians. After the war ended, part of Germany became Poland and part of Poland (the part with Lviv in it) became Ukraine. The remaining Poles moved out and there were hardly any Jews any more.
For me to insist that the boundaries of Germany be redrawn to match those of 1939, followed by the boundaries of Poland and Ukraine, would clearly be absurd. As it would be for me to ask that all the property rules for 85 years in Lviv be overturned, allowing people to move back into property once owned by their grandparents.
The parallels with Palestine and the Middle East are obvious enough.
For decades, the Palestinians and their allies have launched wars they then lose and complain to everyone about losing. It never seems to strike them that a better idea might be not to launch these wars.
In the West, the various campaigns that express solidarity to Palestinians are not, in fact, showing them any solidarity at all. They have their own agenda about their own power and status and which uses Palestinians as a rhetorical prop. And they are misleading the people they pretend to support. They are like a friend who would advise me to throw up my life, pick up a gun and go and invade Lviv by myself in the name of Marshal Pilsudski and his brigades of Polish legionnaires.
These western-based supporters provide solidarity only for the most violent rejectionists and leave bereft those people in Palestine itself who might be willing to come to terms with both reality and Israel. For as long as Palestinians hold out hope that there will be a Palestine “from the river to the sea” there will be war and death, however hard we all work to prevent such calamities, such horror.
Any protester chanting this slogan is encouraging others to go to their death, and to go and kill innocent people, while themselves promising only to write a cross message on a piece of cardboard and wave it outside the Garfunkel’s restaurant near Trafalgar Square.
Unfortunately at the moment it's doubtful that "those people in Palestine itself who might be willing to come to terms with both reality and Israel" number more than a handful. For that we must thank not only radical Islam and Hamas and Iran, but also UNRWA, and the tens of thousnds of Free Palestine marchers and students across the West.
Also, of course, it's not just the Palestinians displaced in the course of Israel's founding. That was just one factor in the general "ethnic cleansings" of the last century. There's also the equivalent number – possibly more – of Jews displaced from the Middle East and North Africa, where they'd lived for thousands of years before their expulsion. Not to mention Greeks/Turks, Indians/Pakistanis, Germans expelled from Poland, etc. etc.. All forgotten and resolved – apart from this one exception…
