Ian Gilmour

Soon after they have ensnared their young victims, the Moonies brainwash them, I am told, into hating their parents and families. Other Californian cults may do the same. The British Conservative Party is a long way from California, and it is still some way from being a cult: yet in recent years odd things have been happening to the Conservative Party. Conservatives have been asked to believe that virtually everything done by post-war Conservative governments was profoundly mistaken and a serious deviation from the path of true Conservatism.

Arabs often lament that America does not use her ability to influence Israeli policy. Dean Rusk, shortly before he ceased being Secretary of State, warned Mahmoud Riad: ‘Do not ever believe that any future American administration will put pressure on Israel.’ But the Arab cride coeur misses the point. The difficulty is not merely that America does not put pressure on Israel, who is militarily and economically dependent on her, but that Israel effectively controls American policy in the Middle East. The consequences of this extraordinary – and, for the Americans, humiliating – state of affairs are far-reaching. The great majority of Palestinians are in exile; the rest live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. Having lost three-quarters of their country, the Palestinians are not allowed an independent state in the remaining quarter. Lebanon has been wrecked. Other Arabs are fearful of suffering from Israeli expansionism. The Soviet Union gains in prestige; and pro-Western Arab states are undermined by their subjects’ contempt for the impotence of their governments. America tries to disguise its feebleness and double standards by making out that the Palestinian issue is secondary to the problem of Soviet penetration. Nobody is deceived, and the risk of a conflagration in the area grows.

The Labour Party was born in 1900, and died in 1983. There can be argument over the exact date of its death. Some may maintain that it did not die until about 1990, others that electorally it died in 1980 or even earlier. There will be similar controversy over the role of Michael Foot: did he lead it to its death or did he just accompany it? Was he one of the physicians who killed it, or was he merely the undertaker?

The most appealing Zionist slogan has always been ‘the land without a people, waiting for the people without a land’. What, in that case, could be more natural than for Palestine to become the land of the Jews? The trouble was that the epigram was not true: Palestine already had a people. On belatedly discovering this, Max Nordau, Herzl’s friend and follower, exclaimed to his leader: ‘we are committing an injustice.’ Much later Arthur Ruppin, who directed Zionist colonisation in the 1920s, warned ‘that Herzl’s concept of a Jewish state was only possible because he ignored the presence of the Arabs.’ Undeterred, Zionists continued to implement what in other circumstances might have been the wholly creditable objective of ruling Palestine and colonising it with Jews. Yet in the circumstances which actually existed – a country already populated with Palestinian Arabs – the building of a Jewish state involved not just brave pioneering or even ordinary imperialism but the displacement of most of the indigenous population and the subordination of the rest. The basic falsity of the slogan has remained to plague political Zionism.’

In 1903 Winston Churchill said that if the Conservatives adopted protection, the old Conservative Party would disappear, and something like the American Republican Party would probably take its place. Churchill was wrong, in that the Conservative Party had already largely disappeared – not for the last time. By the end of the 19th century the disintegration of the Whigs had led to the Conservative Party’s becoming for the first time in its history the natural choice of the wealthy; the Party already resembled the Republican Party in the United States and was near to being dominated by a single interest, the rich. The difference was that under the Republicans American capitalism flourished, while the British economy was already in relative decline.’