THE WEST BANK NEEDS SCARLETT JOHANNSON, NOT DOGMA

Daily Mail
 Peter Hitchens,
THE WEST BANK NEEDS SCARLETT JOHANNSON, NOT DOGMA

One of my favourite people in the Middle East is a witty and wry Arab citizen of Israel (yes, they do exist and very interesting they are too). On my last visit to Jerusalem, he drove me up to Ramallah through the wearisome security barriers that now divide Israeli territory from the West Bank.
And he sighed: ‘Oh, for the good old days before we had “Peace” .’ What he meant was that, until the world began seeking to solve the Israeli-Arab question, the two peoples lived reasonably happily together.

Arabs worked in Israel, crossing freely backwards and forwards and supporting their families instead of relying on political handouts.  Incredibly, Israelis used to go to Gaza (now behind an impassable barrier) for its beach-front nightlife (now suppressed with Islamic ferocity).

Actually, some of this sensible human pragmatism has recently begun to return. Israeli settlers help Arabs decode the Hebrew labels in a cut-price supermarket on the road to Nablus. Tamallah’s town centre, once gruesomely adorned with the dangling corpses of alleged collaborators, is now a pleasant spot for an evening out. It has a shopping mall with a cinema multiplex, just as Israeli towns do.  This is why I side with Scarlett Johansson, left, and against Oxfam, which has condemned her for promoting an Israeli-owned factory in the West Bank.

She is right. Helping to promote and sustain the normal things of life – work, homes, ordinary pleasure, mutual interdependence – is the road to peace. Oxfam’s dogmatic utopian desires lead to murder and terror. Oxfam was not founded to preach politics, but to relieve hunger. It should go back to doing that, and I for one won’t give it another penny until it does.