Galloway – Sensible points shocker!

Okay, I must admit to sitting up and taking note of Galloway on Sky a month or so back. Yes, he delivered the usual rhetorical jibes against the presenter (perhaps I’m overly sensitive to such things but he struck me as a tad misogynistic in his treatment of her). Yet, what he said once one wiped away the rhetoric and the bombast was in fact – er…very sensible two-state solution stuff.

And what’s this, why an article in today’s Guardian which while using the usual language of ‘with the victory of Hizbullah, a terrible beauty is born’ and ‘If there is no settlement there can only be war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders’ intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads’, reiterates that, and with slightly less bombast.

Or as he says:

A comprehensive settlement now would of course look much like it has for decades: Israeli withdrawal from land occupied in 1967; respect for the legal rights of Palestinian refugees to return; the emergence of a real Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital – a contiguous state with an Arab border, with no Zionist settlements and military roads, and with internationally guaranteed Palestinian control over its land, air, sea and water. In exchange there would be Arab recognition, normalisation and, in time, acceptance of Israel into the Middle East as something other than a settler garrison of the imperial west.

I’d agree with almost every word – bar my own preference (do you hear me Tel Aviv and Ramallah?) for Jerusalem to become an international city with the rights of all upheld by the international community.

Could it be that underneath all the rhetoric George Galloway is actually almost sensible? That what he projects is bluster that obscures a more moderate heart. That the marxist George, buried for so long beneath the persona of George of Baghdad, is reasserting itself with a good strong dose of pragmatism?

The world wobbles on it’s axis. Yet one wonders how all this will play within certain factions of Respect. The comrades of the SWP are perhaps a little more trenchant in their anatagonism to Israel, to say nothing of the other factions within the party.

Now if only he could detach himself from his ludicrous identification with the so-called resistance in Iraq “If the fierce thicket of the Iraqi resistance stopped the Bush war spreading to Syria then the extraordinary Hizbullah victory has surely made the world think again about an attack on Iran” and then a lot of leftists would find him a vastly more congenial character. But that I fear is a step too far.