Both Israel and the UK Conservatives have in the past week shown a chronic inability to grasp political realities, writes TONY KINSELLA
FANTASISING AS to how you would like your world to be, or how you would like to be perceived by others, in the privacy of your own home, can be entirely reasonable. An element of reality must, however, be brought into play when you step out into the real world. Failure to engage with reality compounds the delusions, and acting out those delusions publicly can expose you to ridicule – and others to much worse.
Last week brought us classic examples of public figures, some in office and others in opposition, ridiculously stumbling over their self-delusions, in Washington and Jerusalem.
You almost had to feel sorry for William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, on his US visit. The visit itself and his quest for a meeting between David Cameron and president Obama can be seen as standard pre-election moves, with a particular significance for Tories keen to highlight their non-European international credentials.
Perhaps the most pathetic demonstration of their Pavlovian hostility to all things European comes from Cameron’s selectively reiterated pledge to “replace the 1998 Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights”. The 1988 Act is a transposition of the 1948 European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Little matter that one of its architects was Winston Churchill, or that it is the responsibility of the 47-state Council of Europe, not the EU.
Cameron’s euro-hostility has gritty origins. He was 26 and a special adviser to the then chancellor of the exchequer, Normal Lamont, when the UK had to embarrassingly exit the European exchange rate mechanism on “Black Wednesday” in 1992. Four years later he occupied a similar post with the then home secretary, Michael Howard, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK could not deport a Sikh separatist.
A photograph with Obama would work nicely as evidence of Cameron’s international stature, while offering some cover from the slings and arrows over his party’s less-than-savoury European bedfellows.
During Hague’s meeting with Hillary Clinton, those very bedfellows and the relationship between a future Conservative government and the EU were mentioned. Washington sources suggest that the US secretary of state raised the latter, while Hague claims he raised the former in response to unfavourable media coverage.
Whichever way around, the message was abundantly clear. Obama’s Washington values its British ally largely within its constructive engagement with the EU. While this reflects an understandable analysis of US national interests, it effectively torpedoes Tory fantasies about the UK playing some key international role outside the EU based on its “special relationship” with the US.
While oppositions are free to relish delusions, however devastating, it would be nice to believe governments are obliged to confront realities, however unpleasant.
The reactions of the Israeli government, and more alarmingly of much of Israel’s respected foreign affairs community, to last week’s Turkish rebuff is a frightening demonstration of governmental self-delusion.
Late last December, Israel launched its unfortunately named “Cast Lead” operation into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in retaliation for rocket attacks on Israeli towns from the enclave. Jerusalem was, presumably, prepared for criticism from its perennial critics, for embarrassed silence from many of what it would see as its “fair-weather” friends, and varying degrees of support and understanding from its allies.
The operation caused devastation to Gaza’s already creaky infrastructure, and resulted in over 1,100 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths. Internationally respected South African jurist Richard Goldstone headed the UN commission of enquiry. Although the findings of the commission were highly critical of both Israeli and Hamas actions, they were particularly damning about Israel’s military, and suggested that individual soldiers could risk prosecutions for war crimes.
A wide swathe of Israel’s leadership, from prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his Labour party defence minister, Ehud Barak, his controversial foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, to opposition leader Tzipi Livni, seem genuinely surprised at the degree of outrage over the operation.
Turkey has been a close, and often usefully discreet, ally of Israel’s for many years. The two countries share intelligence and military equipment, and Ankara has provided Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with invaluable backdoor access to a number of publicly hostile Arab capitals, most notably Damascus.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, walked out of a session with Israeli president, Shimon Peres, at the Davos Forum last January in outrage over the Gaza offensive. Last week, Ankara let it be known that Israeli troops would not be welcome at the long-scheduled “Anatolian Eagle” military exercises. US and Italian contingents were then withdrawn, and the exercises cancelled.
Israeli ministries, newspapers and foreign policy institutes have all been buzzing with attempts to analyse and explain away this rebuff from their most important regional ally. Turkey’s rapprochements with Armenia and Syria have been cited, as have arguments about Ankara’s disappointment with the slow progress of its EU membership negotiations.
It seems clear that many in Jerusalem do not, and more frighteningly cannot, grasp that last January’s Gaza offensive did enormous damage to Israel’s reputation and interests.
Self-delusion and blinkered denial of obvious realities offer dangerous bases for decision-making, as Danish mathematician and poet Piet Hein warned in one his famous grooks, or short, terse poems, On Problems:
Our choicest plans have fallen through,
our airiest castles tumbled over,
because of lines we neatly drew
and later neatly stumbled over.