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July 14, 2009
Britain Maligns Israel: It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again
So now the veil is well and truly ripped off. All the warning signs have been there for months: Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s boilerplate leftist agitprop about Operation Cast Lead in Gaza; Britain’s pressure on the EU to renege on the agreements it made with Israel and boycott produce from the settlements; Miliband’s statement that Jerusalem should be the capital of “Palestine” as well as of Israel. Now there has been a step-change. Ha’aretz reports that the British government has revoked a number of arms export licenses to Israel following the Gaza war. Five export licenses have been revoked over spare parts for ships’ guns. The decision apparently resulted from
heavy pressure by both members of Parliament and human rights organizations.
The unhinged malevolence over Cast Lead can no longer be brushed off as the foamings of the far-left and its acolytes in the media, NGOs and fashionable society. This is the British government now acting to punish Israel for defending itself against relentless rocket attack by an enemy bent on its destruction.
It says Israel’s actions were “disproportionate.” What is it talking about? The actual evidence showed that the proportion of civilians killed in Gaza was very small – far smaller than might have been expected given the tactics Hamas was using of embedding itself within the population. The claims of large numbers of civilians and children killed were fabricated by Hamas and recycled by the Israel-bashers of the UN and media. Far from being “disproportionate,” Cast Lead was a carefully targeted operation which, given the circumstances, was astonishingly successful in its aim of confining its attack to terrorist operatives. The only people claiming “disproportionate” are enemies of Israel. Now the British government has openly joined them.
Even now, however, the Foreign Office is in weasely fashion attempting to deny that this is what it is. This partial arms embargo, it says, is not a partial arms embargo – because all export licenses will continue to be considered individually:
“Future decisions will take into account what has happened in the recent conflict. We do not grant export licenses where there is a clear risk that arms will be used for external aggression or internal repression. We do not believe that the current situation in the Middle East would be improved by imposing an arms embargo on Israel. Israel has the right to defend itself and faces real security threats. This said, we consistently urge Israel to act with restraint and supported the EU Presidency statement that called the Israeli actions during operation Cast Lead ‘disproportionate.’”
Sorry, but an embargo is an embargo. An act of ideological spite is still an act of ideological spite. The false flag of “disproportionality” is hoisted only by those who find it “disproportionate” that Israel should ever defend itself against the Palestinians by military means at all. Israelis are expected instead passively to die under rocket and bomb attack – or perhaps live in shelters for ever. That's proportionate.
It is time now for all decent people of goodwill everywhere to boycott NGOs like Amnesty, War on Want and all the others who are pushing these obscene lies and libels about Israel. No decent person should have anything to do with these organizations. No one should give money to these inciters of hatred and purveyors of lies. They have sided with the forces of genocide and Islamic fascism against the Jewish people, truth and conscience. They have become a force for evil in the world.
As for the current British Labour government, it can no longer be counted a friend or ally of Israel. The odious Miliband made this as plain as could be when he called two months ago for
a ‘new coalition of consent’ between the West and the Islamic world.
He went on:
Decisions taken many years ago in [the Foreign Office] are still felt on the landscape of the Middle East...Ruined Crusader castles remain as poignant monuments to the religious violence of the Middle Ages. Lines drawn on maps by colonial powers were succeeded, among other things, by the failure to establish two states in Palestine.
There was only one reason why a Palestine state did not arise, and that was because the Arabs refused precisely such a proposal – offered not just by the “colonial” power, Britain, but again in 1947 by fiat of the United Nations. As Miliband did not recall, the Arab response was a rejection of a state of Palestine and a war of extermination against Israel instead. This in turn followed decades in which Arab rejectionism of “two states” and of the Jews’ right to be in their historic homeland at all was directly related to the systematic British appeasement of Arab terror. Britain’s history in Palestine was in fact one of repeated betrayal of its pledges to the Jewish people made under international law, and its appeasement of Arab tyranny.
Let us not hear any more sickening cant from Gordon Brown about how he learned to love Israel at his father’s knee. In this latest act of malice, Britain has merely reverted to shameful colonial type, courtesy this time of the post-modern left.
It’s déjà vu all over again.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Melanie Phillips is the author of the powerful and frightening Londonistan, and she blogs at The Spectator.
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