Biological warfare

Spectator, The, Sep 6, 2003 by Davis, Douglas

It was a view Arafat himself espoused with much fervour during the 1970s. His rallying cry for a 'secular, democratic Palestine' that would encompass people of all faiths living in perfect harmony between the Mediterranean and the Jordan might have sounded like sweet reason at the time. But things quickly turned sour when Arafat realised that a hurgeoning new Islamic extremist constituency was neither secular nor democratic. He also realised, as his old Soviet patron began to wobble, that such a proposition would not play in Washington.

But the dream lives on. As Israel was preparing to pull out of Palestinian towns in the West Bank last month, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister, Nabil Sha'ath, travelled to Beirut to assure Palestinian refugees that their 'right to return', not only to the West Bank and Gaza hut also to Israel, was embedded in the 'road-map'. Palestinian spin doctors were quickly deployed to explain this as 'a slip of the tongue'.

Other non-Palestinian adherents to the notion of a unitary state have remained faithful. Two stalwarts are the American linguist Noam Chomsky and the Arab-American darling of the liberal-Left, Professor Edward Said.

The tantalising hint of a possible new convert came from half a world away in the form of Britain's very own former foreign secretary, Robin Cook. Without actually bestowing his imprimatur on the notion, Cook told fellow delegates at an Aspen Institute conference in Colorado (with what one delegate took to he considerable approval) that he was hearing increasing support for the concept of a one-state solution from his Palestinian interlocutors.

Cook is not alone among senior New Labour figures who have problems with the existence of the Jewish state. In a former incarnation, his protege, Peter Hain, now Leader of the House of Commons, wrote (more in anger than in sorrow) that 'the present Zionist state is by definition racist and will have to be dismantled. . . . Territorially, the new Palestine will be equivalent to the pre-1948 Palestine defined during the British Mandate. It will not be shunted off into the occupied West Bank or the Gaza Strip.'

The questions that occupied Hain were not whether but how the Jewish state should be 'dismantled' and how the secular, democratic Palestine should emerge. 'It can be brought about in an orderly way through negotiation, as the PLO would prefer,' he wrote, 'or it will be brought about by force. The choice lies with the Israelis. They can recognise now that the tide of history is against their brand of greedy oppression, or they can dig in and invite a bloodbath.'

The problem for Israelis, even those who might otherwise have been inclined to accept the Cook/Hain concept of a binational state, is that there is no precedent for secular democracy among any of the existing 21 Arab states. Nor does the Palestinian Authority give cause for hope that its own future state will deliver a democratic, pluralistic Utopia. Rather, it stresses 'the Arabncss of Palestine' and the intrinsic place of Palestine within 'the Arab nation' (it is difficult to understand, in light of such language, persistent Palestinian complaints of Israeli 'racism' when it seeks to safeguard its existence as a Jewish national home).