Dhimmitude at 10 Downing

by Sha’i ben-Tekoa (April 2016)

In February, British Prime Minister David Cameron occasioned much gnashing of teeth in Israel by calling Israel’s presence in Jerusalem an “occupation” and settlements “illegal.” Nevertheless, this writer, although based in Judea — what Cameron likely calls “occupied Palestinian territory” — is going to defend him. He was only doing his duty as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and pro-Israelites have to understand that without rancor.

Here is what Cameron said that prompted Prime Minister Netanyahu to snap back that without Israeli rule, its Christian holy sites would be destroyed. Cameron, challenged in the House of Commons by a Muslim MP, had replied to him, “I am well known for being a strong friend of Israel, but I have to say the first time I visited Jerusalem and had a proper tour around that wonderful city and saw what has happened with the effective encirclement of east Jerusalem, I found it genuinely shocking. We are supporters of Israel but we do not support illegal settlements and we do not support what is happening in east Jerusalem. It is very important for this capital city to be maintained as it was in the past.”

What shocked him was not slums or destruction by Israel of Arab property. It was the new buildings built and lived in by Jews whose government does not accept that the division between an Arab east and a Jewish west Jerusalem was the correct order of things that must be restored. In calling the eastern side of the city “occupied,” Cameron used code for the belief that what was in 1948 wholly in Muslim hands, which included the Jews’ Temple Mount, is Muslim property that the Jews have occupied illegally since 1967.

This, of course, is an antisemitic lie. Jew-hatred in every generation is characterized by telling lies about the imagined evil that Jews commit, and in our time one whopper is that Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria and the Jewish communities built there since 1967 are illegal.

David Cameron is, I believe, as he says, a friend of Israel. I do not believe he is an antisemite. He is too intelligent, educated and sophisticated to harbor in his mind the hallucinations about Jews that are the stuff of the antisemite’s fantasy life. Unfortunately, he has uncritically adopted and assimilated, as most people have, this antisemitic lie.

A friend of Israel he is, but his duty as prime minister is greater than that. He must defend the British people as best he can, and it would be reckless to speak other than he does. If Cameron had answered the Muslim provocation by saying that he saw nothing wrong with Jews building, developing and living in the former Jordanian sector, he would endanger his people. If he said that the settlements are legal, that too could ignite a terrible chain of events.

A Prime Minister who takes Israel’s side in these matters would be playing with the fire of potential civil unrest, riots all over the U.K. in every Muslim area. Enraged Believers in the One True Faith could dwarf the massacre in Paris last November tenfold.

When Cameron said Jerusalem should be “maintained as it was in the past,” his intent was pre-1967, when the Temple Mount and the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives were wholly in Muslim hands; when Jews were prevented from praying at the Western Wall after King Abdallah, a direct descendant of the Prophet, without any sanction from the United Nations, invaded westward across the Jordan River in 1948, overran and ethnically cleansed Jerusalem of its Jewish community and in 1950 annexed the Holy City, Judea and Samaria. That is the past to which David Cameron wants to return, which should not surprise.

The only two states in the world to accept Jordan’s presence in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were the U.K. and another state the Empire had created, as it had invented Jordan: Pakistan. Between 1948 and 1967, the U.K. was perfectly comfortable with a Judenrein/Jew-free “West Bank.”

In this way, Prime Minister Cameron’s policy has been British policy from the beginning. At that time, Britain was content to see all Jews driven from Jerusalem, deprived as well of the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, the “family plot” of the Jewish people. In fact, it was a British General John Glubb, seconded to the Arab Legion a.k.a. Jordanian Army, who led the conquest of Jerusalem and presided over the expulsion of the Jews, all of whose immovable property was of course plundered.

So I defend David Cameron, loyal son of the U.K. More than he supports Israel, he is the captain of the British ship of state, steward of Her Majesty’s Government who dare not deviate from these policies regarding Israel’s presence on the lands it liberated from the Muslim Empire. To do that would risk igniting the savage breasts of people in his country capable of mass, hysterical destruction and rampage.

In this way, 10 Downing Street has become a zone of dhimmitude, made so by the threat of satanic violence as seen in Paris and in German cities last New Year’s Eve when thousands of Muslim barbarians went around molesting, robbing and raping civilized European females.

David Cameron and the great bulk of humanity see in Israel’s presence in Judea, birthplace of the very word “Jew,” an “occupation” that needs to end.

On the contrary, it is David Cameron’s England that is “occupied territory” these days, where the Muslims are slowly bringing the once great British Empire to its knees.

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Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com and www.deprogramprogram.com. Formerly the lead commentator in English for Israel National News, he is a graduate of Columbia University in Comparative Religion who continued his studies at the University of Chicago and Hebrew University. A traveler in Arab lands, he served in the Yom Kippur War effort of 1973. In 1991, in preparation for the Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, he worked on assignment for the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir. Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, Midstream, Congress Monthly and other publications. He has also appeared on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

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