The campaign against the Israeli “settlers” amounts to racist ethnic cleansing.
The Jewish refugee ship “Exodus” at Haifa docks, 1947, after the British rammed it at sea before deporting most passengers back to Europe
Astoundingly, the British government is not only demanding that Israel ethnically cleanse its own people from their ancestral homeland but is proposing to punish it for refusing to do so.
The new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is poised to announce “robust” sanctions targeting trade with Israeli “settlements” in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well as the sanctioning of Israelis linked to businesses there.
The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, objected to the Israeli government’s tender for the construction of thousands of new homes in the E1 corridor connecting Jerusalem to the Israeli city of Ma’ale Adumim in Judea, which he described as an “unacceptable and destructive act”. He summoned the Israeli chargé d’affaires to demand “an immediate reversal” of the E1 development.
It is, of course, quite extraordinary for the foreign minister of one country to order the government of another country to alter its policy because he disapproves of it.
Miliband justified this by claiming that “the impact of settler violence and terrorism has been catastrophic for Palestinian communities”.
“Settler violence” is indeed a festering sore that needs urgently to be dealt with. But it is perpetrated by a very small minority of extremist Jewish residents in these territories. Many incidents claimed as “settler violence” are fabricated by malicious actors, both Israelis and others on the far-left.
And the true incidents that do occur, however disgraceful, are totally eclipsed in scale by the many thousands of murderous attacks by Arabs on those overwhelmingly law-abiding Jewish residents.
Neither Miliband nor the media ever mentions this onslaught against these Jews. Instead, now that the “Israel genocide” lie has been exposed as wickedly false in every respect, the Israel-haters have moved seamlessly on to create “settler violence” as the next pretext for Israel’s demonisation, delegitimisation and eventual destruction.
Miliband’s real target was every Jew living in Judea and Samaria, since he claimed all settlements were a “flagrant breach of international law”.
Settlement expansion and attempts to create “irreversible divisions on the ground,” he said, “threaten peace, security and the prospects for a viable Palestinian state. Britain will not stand back and accept the destruction of the two-state solution”.
Quite apart from the colonialist-style arrogance, what an absolute farrago of falsehoods, bigotry and historical and legal illiteracy.
The construction of Israeli homes in E1, a natural extension of both Ma’ale Adumim and Jerusalem, doesn’t prevent a state of Palestine. During the “peace process,” it was always understood that Ma’ale Adumim, along with two other Israeli blocs in these disputed territories — Ariel and Gush Etzion —would remain part of Israel under any division of the land.
Some 20 per cent of Israel is Arab. There’s no reason why “Palestine” can’t be 20 per cent Jewish. Viewing the “settlers” as an obstruction to a Palestine state means that Miliband, Burnham and all who take this view are demanding the ethnic cleansing of Jews from such a state. They are racial bigots.
Britain has always claimed that the Israeli settlements are illegal under international law and that the “settlers” are in illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
That’s false. The “West Bank” is not, and has never been, Palestinian land because there never was any Palestinian land. There has never been a Palestinian state. Palestine was merely the name given to Judea by the conquering Romans who wanted to erase its Jewish character. The Jews are the only people for whom the holy land has ever been their national kingdom.
The “West Bank” was indeed illegally occupied, but by Jordan after ceasefire lines were drawn up in 1948 when the fledgling State of Israel defeated the Arab armies that had tried to destroy it at birth.
Britain’s claim that Israel is in illegal occupation of the “West Bank” is based on, among other errors, a gross misreading of the Geneva Conventions.
Israel is entitled to these territories under international law many times over, going back to the terms of the 1922 Mandate under which Britain was required to settle the Jews and restore their ancient homeland in what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza — an obligation in law that has never been abrogated.
Yes — the same Britain that is now asserting that the Jews are in “illegal occupation” of the “West Bank”.
Far from being the “only” solution to the Israel-Palestinian Arab impasse, as so many claim, the two-state solution would be a Final Solution. As the Palestinian Arabs have always said, their aim is to destroy Israel and a Palestine state is a “stage” towards realising that infernal aim.
That’s because the problem to which “two states” are supposed to be the solution is not, as is so widely assumed, the need to divide a territory between two peoples with a legitimate claim to it. The problem is that the Palestinian Arabs have spent the past century trying to destroy the Jewish homeland altogether.
Israel is entitled, in law and in any moral universe, to determine its own borders against an enemy that’s determined to destroy it.
It’s outrageous to single out Israel alone for this kind of imperious and punitive treatment. No such campaign is waged against, say, Turkey for having invaded Cyprus and divided the island from the Greeks by Turkish occupation.
It’s even more outrageous since the United Kingdom is principally responsible for the whole rotten history of the never-ending Middle East conflict.
That’s because, when it was the Mandatory power in pre-Israel Palestine, Britain tore up international law. It went back on its binding undertaking to settle the Jews alone in the land of Israel and instead tried to divide the land by offering much or most of it to the Arabs.
This was an early “two-state solution,” minted by perfidious Britain as a reward to the Arabs for their genocidal aggression in attempting to exterminate the legitimate homeland of the Jewish people. Rewarding terror merely incentivises yet more of it; and Britain has been pursuing that very same strategy ever since then, being repeated now yet again by the Burnham government.
Britain is behaving as if it’s still the colonial master, treating Israel with utter contempt by instructing it to shred its lawful inheritance and expose its people to genocidal assault — and then punishing it for refusing to bow the knee.
British officials have warned, however, that since settlement goods would be almost impossible to distinguish from other Israeli products, this would inevitably morph into a full-blown boycott of Israel.
Since Burnham and Miliband are playing into a hysterical left-wing narrative of demonic Israel that has consumed not only much of their party but most of progressive opinion, that’s unlikely to trouble them.
Nonetheless, they’re making a very grave mistake because they have overlooked a crucial point.
Britain is highly dependent on Israel for its own security. The United Kingdom has emasculated itself so that it no longer possesses armed forces that can defend the country. From Israel, it gets both priceless intelligence —vital for defending its people against Islamist attack — and cutting-edge military technology.
Yet it is proposing to boycott its key military and security ally at a time when the moth-eaten British lion is facing unprecedented, mounting and immediate threats from Russia and Iran.
Israel might now suggest politely that since the United Kingdom apparently hates the Jewish state so much, it surely won’t want to benefit any further from Israeli intelligence or arms supplies, which will accordingly be drastically curtailed.
What Israel should also say is that Britain’s precious “two-state solution” is profoundly immoral. People who wage a 100-year campaign of mass murder to prevent and then exterminate a legitimate country, while turning down repeated offers of a state of their own because they want to murder yet more of those people and destroy that country, and who indoctrinate their own children to do so in perpetuity, deserve absolutely nothing.
Those like the British government, who have spent the past century rewarding such a programme and are now punishing its intended victims, can be described in two words: morally depraved.
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