Melanie Phillips:
A lesson British Jews have not yet grasped, "being anti-Zionist does not endear you to the non-Jews.
After the Balfour Declaration, Christian Evangelism, Christian Zionism and Christianity itself started to decline in Britain.
The Church progressively devalued the Hebrew scriptures for a much vaguer understanding of the divine.
And now - surprise, surprise - the Church of England is deeply hostile to Israel, and, as a further amazing coincidence, it is also struggling to fill its pews. The Church of England is dying on its feet, and for a closely related reason: that it has lost its essential connection with the Jewish precepts of the Hebrew Bible without which Christianity is nothing.
And without Christianity, Britain, as we know it, is nothing. Or at least will become something very different indeed.
And that perhaps is the deepest lesson of all of the Balfour Declaration, that it was the high watermark not just of Evangelical Christianity, but also of British decency towards the Jews and that what has drained away since then is not that particular decency, but the soul of Britain itself."
ISRAEL AND BRITAIN
Should one regard Britain as an ally? Yes, one should regard it as - the analogy is perhaps not quite right - as an uncle that has taken to drink and crime. And you love your uncle, and he's still your uncle, and he's family and you'll go through a jungle for your uncle, and you'll do what you can for him, but ultimately, he's into drugs and crime and that's not good and you've got to basically get him out of that. It's that kind of relationship. Is he an ally? It's like an ally the way mainland Europe is an ally. Is it an ally like America? Well, it depends which President happens to be in the Oval Office at that particular time.
BREXIT AND THE JEWS
I don't think Israel's government looks kindly on Brexit, everyone's very frightened by Brexit because everyone likes Britain where it can be neatly corralled as part of a bloc which is called the European Union. Like many diaspora Jews, I don't quite know exactly the proportion of Israeli politicians think this, certainly some of them think that only the European Union stands between Europe and Neo-Nazism, and that Britain leaving might precipitate the break-up of the European Union and that will lead to fascism in Europe, well, hello? Anyone looked at what's going on in Europe at the moment? This is, like, absurd. Israel can't look up from its navel to see the wider picture, in my view, which is that if you suppress people's legitimate and natural desire to express their own culture through their own democratically elected Parliament which passes its own laws and a Parliament and a government which can be thrown out by the people, if you prevent people from expressing their culture through a democracy and if you furthermore rubbish and vilify the desire to be a nation - a self-governing democratic Western nation - if you vilify that as racism, then you do get racism and people turning against minorities, you get frustration and you get what we are seeing at the moment which is the people and the rulers in Europe becoming more and more further apart. It's a very dangerous and unsettled situation.
So would Brexit be good for Israel?
Actually, I think it would be terrific for Israel for this reason alone: one of the reasons why Israel is so vilified by the so-called progressive forces in Britain and the West is that Israel commits three terrible crimes.
First, of all it's a nation.
Secondly, it's a Western nation.
Thirdly, it's an ethnic Western nation.
So it's triply damned.
Britain leaving the European Union is similarly damned by the same forces as being motivated by racism, ethno-primitivism, nativism and all that sort of stuff. It's basically: if you leave the European Union, you're a Nazi. If you want to leave the European Union, you're a Nazi.
When Britain leaves the European Union and becomes a nation, then it becomes much more difficult to vilify Israel for wanting to be a nation expressing its own culture through its own laws, much more difficult, and so from that point of view alone, I think that it would actually be a good thing.
1:17
"AMERICA IS A JEWISH COUNTRY AND WAS FOUNDED ON JEWISH PRINCIPLES."
America is fundamentally a Jewish country in the way Britain is not.
"The Church of England is basically a con-trick."
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