Conrad Black: Palestinian terror and Israel boycotts aren't a form of 'dissent.' They're just evil and stupid

...The terrorists and Jew-hating leaders of the ostensible Palestinians are incongruously dusted off as dissenters in the same pristine virtuosity as the enemies of thalidomide and ecological pollution and unjust conviction of the innocent and hair-trigger war-making. It is a set-up; the narrative has built up a solid bank of appreciation of the positive role of those who dissent by nature (apart from the light-hearted apologia for the Occupy Wall Street foolishness). But suddenly the tenor and tempo change, and the horribly complicated problem of Jews and Arabs in Israel is rendered as apartheid, oppression, and the whitewashing of Palestinian terrorism and of their claim to a right to swamp the Jews demographically and reduce them, once again, to a minority, sure to be oppressed yet again, and this time in the country the world gave them as a Jewish homeland. It need hardly be emphasized that it is a complicated issue. The British sold the same real estate to both sides in 1917; the United Nations made Israel a Jewish state, and the Israelis have successfully defended and expanded it after Arab-initiated wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973.

The answer is not to give knee-jerk adherence to a campaign of boycott and disinvestment against Israel in favour of an Arab population that will not leave because it is better treated and more prosperous than in Arab countries, and that shelters suicide bombers, knife-assailants of the innocent, and other terrorists. The Palestinians could have their state next week if they acknowledged Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state...