Makiya is appeasing the Zionists

I find it difficult to accept Kannan Makiya's remarks at an award ceremony in his honour at the University of Tel Aviv. Bad as it is visiting Israel when Palestinians are being killed daily, he panders to the Israelis in his carefully chosen words.

In his apologetic speech where he extends an "Iraqi" hand to Israel despite her atrocities in the West Bank and Gaza, Makiya chooses to forget the catastrophe of 1948. The Iraqi dissident, who returned to Iraq after a prosperous career as an architect in London and then as an academic in the U.S., allows himself to indulge in rhetorical fancy.

He appeals to Israelis to stop "walling" themselves "off" from the "others", meaning the Palestinians, as if they are victims and not occupiers.

He ignores the narrative of the oppressed - the Palestinians who face Israeli tanks. Instead of saying Israeli bulldozers are there to destroy houses and wreck people's lives, he talks of bulldozers working to "build a wall between the people of Israel and their Palestinian neighbours".

Makiya blames Arabs for thinking like victims and taking "pleasure" in "victimhood", which is an absurd point of view. He chastises the Arab state, society and culture for failing to "engage" in dialogue with Israel and indulging in "pure negativism", an obscure and relative term.

He chooses to forget it was the Arabs who tried to reach a peaceful solution after the 1967 war and who continued soon after, with the latest attempt made by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia.

He attacks Arab nationalism. Although once a leftist who believed in Arabism, he told his audience in Tel Aviv that the concept is responsible for our ills, calling it "virulent" but "secular".

These terms appear contradictory since the latter aspires to liberalism, while the former is a pathological disease. Many will also dispute his argument that it legitimised the Baath take over of Iraq in 1968.

His claim that 20 per cent of Iraqis in Baghdad are Jewish is a gross exaggeration. Jews have always lived in peaceful coexistence with the rest of the population in the Arab world, an existence that goes back to millennia, and not just with the creation of Israel in 1948.

Many will dispute the fact that most intellectuals of the 20th century were Jews. Surely it would have been better appreciated if Makiya had linked intellectualism to universal existence rather then to insidiously appeal to one race, group or ethnic minority.

Finally, it is hard to fathom a point he kept harking back to during his speech, regarding post-war Iraq and Israel.

Both cases are too different for comparison unless the intention is to establish diplomatic relations.