Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair is Israel’s best friend in Europe. And he’s not a very good friend.
Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., Blair was instrumental in convincing President Bush to view the Palestinian jihad against Israel as a conflict completely separate from the global jihad. His success in convincing Bush of this distinction turned the anti-Semitic – not to mention strategically disastrous – view that terrorists who kill Israelis should be treated differently from terrorists who kill anyone else into one of the cognitive foundations of the U.S. war on Islamic terror.
This foundation was first enunciated in Bush’s address of September 20 to a joint session of Congress where he identified “every terrorist with global reach” – that is every terrorist who isn’t part of the Palestinian Authority – as enemies of the U.S.
Later, Blair was a principal force behind Bush’s move to abandon the guidelines for dealing with the Palestinians that he enunciated in his speech of June 24, 2002. In that address, Bush stipulated that the Palestinians needed to transform themselves from a society that supported terror into one that combated terror in order to receive U.S. support for Palestinian statehood.
Shortly after Baghdad fell to coalition forces in April 2003, Blair convinced Bush to accept the road map plan for Palestinian statehood. The road map, which effectively locks in American support for Palestinian statehood irrespective of Palestinian terrorism and radicalism, represented a practical abandonment of the positions that Bush set out in his June 24, 2002 address.
During his visit to the region last week, in keeping with his studied habit, Blair ignored the fact that the Iranian-backed Hamas government was elected to lead the Palestinian Authority by a large majority of Palestinians. He ignored the fact that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has voiced support for the abduction and continued captivity of Cpl. Gilad Shalit and for the continuation of the terror war against Israel. He ignored the fact that rather than working to overthrow the Hamas government, Abbas has begged Hamas to allow Fatah to join its government.
To this end, Abbas has accepted Hamas’s policy guidelines rejecting the possibility of recognizing Israel’s right to exist and committing all Palestinians to unite in the war against Israel. Ignoring all these inconvenient facts, Blair called on the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government to renew negotiations with Abbas on the basis of the road map.
And yet, for all this, Tony Blair is Israel’s best friend in Europe. He is Israel’s best friend because, in contrast to all his colleagues in Britain and the EU, Blair at least recognizes that the global jihad is a threat to the free world and that the price of not fighting the forces of jihad would be the loss of our freedom.
Soon, Israel’s closest European friend will exit the world stage after being effectively sacked by his own Labor Party. British political commentators say the chances are slim that Blair will manage to hold onto the reins of power as a lame duck for the next 12 months, as he pledged. More likely, he will leave 10 Downing Street in a matter of months.
The two men most likely to succeed Blair – Chancellor Gordon Brown and Tory leader David Cameron – will be more similar to French President Jacques Chirac than to Blair in their attitudes toward Israel and the U.S. This is the case first and foremost because that is what the British people expect of them.
British antipathy toward the U.S. and Israel was clearly exposed in an opinion poll published on September 6 in the Times of London. The poll reported that 73 percent of Britons believe that Blair’s foreign policy, and especially his “support for the invasion of Iraq and refusal to demand an immediate cease-fire by Israel in the recent war against Hizbullah, has significantly increased the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain.”
More than 62% said that to “reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain, the government should change its foreign policy, in particular by distancing itself from America, being more critical of Israel and declaring a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq.”
The day after the poll was published, Blair announced that he would leave office in a year.