Government’s moral cowardice laid bare

Stuart Littlewood writes:

Here’s a response from my MP Alister Jack who is also a senior minister. He says:

• I share your concern at the violent escalations we have witnessed recently. The UK Government is urging all parties to de-escalate. As the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have made clear, this cycle of violence must stop, and every effort must be made to avoid loss of life….
• The UK is clear that evictions of Palestinians from their homes causes unnecessary suffering to ordinary Palestinians, calls into question Israel’s commitment to a viable two-state solution and, in all but the most exceptional of cases, are contrary to International Humanitarian Law and the Fourth Geneva Convention. I join Ministers in calling for them to cease with immediate effect.
• The UK regularly makes clear our concerns about the evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem to the Israeli authorities and the Municipality of Jerusalem, both bilaterally and in co-operation with like-minded diplomatic partners.
• The UK Ambassador in Tel Aviv has raised this issue with the Israeli Authorities, as has the Minister of State, James Cleverly, with the Israeli Ambassador in London. The British Consul General to Jerusalem visited families at risk of eviction in Sheikh Jarrah on 3 May to reiterate the UK’s opposition to the practice.
• The UK is clear that the violence against peaceful worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque was unacceptable. Attacks against peaceful worshippers of any faith must stop. The Status Quo in Jerusalem is important at all times, especially during religious festivals such as Ramadan. I encourage all parties to maintain calm, avoid provocation and uphold the Status Quo to ensure the safety and the security of the Al Haram Al Sharif / Temple Mount and all who worship there. I urge all sides to refrain from any kind of provocation so that calm is restored as quickly as possible. The restoration of peace and security is in everyone’s interests.

Let’s be clear. Israel’s crimes are not ‘first offences’ – they’ve been committing them for decades. And all Mr Jack and  other Government figures offer is pro-forma standardised words of no substance penned by scribblers in the Foreign Office or Tel Aviv’s propaganda HQ or, quite possibly, by Mark Regev himself who has returned after a stint as Israel’s  ambassador to the UK to resume his vital work as Netanyhu’s media adviser, disinformation peddler and dirty tricks specialist. The stuff put out is pure garbage to be uttered by obedient politicians at all levels and especially those who  adore the racist regime and the psychopaths who run it. Its purpose is invariably to demonise Iran and Hamas and smokescreen the obscenities perpetrated by Israel.

Under Regev’s watch in January 2017 a senior political officer at the embassy, Shai Masot, plotted with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the rotting political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures including Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan. Masot was almost certainly a Mossad asset. His hostile activities were revealed not by Britain’s own security services but an Al Jazeera undercover news team.

Regev was replaced last year by Tzipi Hotovely, a religious-nationalist extremist committed to the ‘Greater Israel’ project.  After her performance as Minister of Settlement Affairs in the Israeli government many here will regard her as a war criminal. All Israeli settlements (let’s call them what they really are – ‘squats’) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are considered illegal under international law. Israel’s long-running squatter policy is a war crime for the reason that Article 8(2) of the Rome Statute defines “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory” as such.

Hotovely has criticised American Jews for not understanding the complexities of the region because “they never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers”. She herself slid out of compulsory military service by becoming an educational guide in Jerusalem and an emissary of the Jewish Agency in the United States.

She also wants to re-write New Israel’s sordid history: “We need to delete the word ‘occupation’ and we need to redefine the term ‘refugee’….” Hotovely rejects Palestinians’ hopes for statehood and instead dreams of a Greater Israel swallowing up the Palestinian territories, saying “We need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country…. This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.”

Basic truth? She comes from the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic so what ancestral links does she have with the Holy Land? Has she had a DNA test? And what exactly gives her and her kind the right to lord it over the Palestinians who have been there all the time?

No justice, no peace. No sanctions, no change

What we need to hear, after 73 years of obfuscation, is that there will be CONSEQUENCES for Israel if the regime doesn’t end its illegal occupation and in particlarly cease the cruel blockade of Gaza, remove its troops from East Jerusalem (including the Old City) and stop military incursions into the West Bank. International law and UN resolutions have ruled on this countless times and must now be implemented. There will be no peace without justice, and everyone except the Zionist tendency is waiting…. waiting for the major powers, notably Britain who carry the can for this shambles, and the rest of the international community with all their high-minded talk, to actually deliver.

Mr Jack ends by saying: “I note your suggestion about the imposition of sanctions. I do not, however, speculate on potential future designations as to do so could undermine their impact. I know that the FCDO (Foreign Office) keeps all relevant evidence under constant review.”

What impact? We haven’t seen any impact. Constant review by the Foreign Office hasn’t made a scrap of difference. Their policy is to carry on grovelling to the Israel lobby. Sanctions seem far from the Government’s thoughts, and Mr Jack certainly doesn’t offer to push for anything that might disturb Israel’s criminal elite.

As for Mr Cleverly, it’s difficult to image a man more out of touch. He recently admitted that “prior to my ministerial appointment I was a member of Conservative Friends of Israel”. Jewish News reported not long ago under the headline ‘Former Tory chair James Cleverly appointed new Middle East minister – Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev congratulates politician who has close links with Conservative Friends of Israel’ that in 2015, only 4 months after being elected as an MP, Cleverly visited Israel as part of a Conservative Friends of Israel (CFoI) delegation. It was here that he first met Regev, who was Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spokesman at the time.

The delegation visited Sderot “to see the remains of Hamas rockets”.  Speaking at the end of the trip, for a promotional CFoI video, he said: “It’s been a real eye opener. Israel is an amazing country, no doubt about that. It’s a liberal open democracy in a region where that is a real rarity.”

Sderot is a compulsory stop on propaganda tours for gullible politicians and journalists. Being only a mile from the Gaza Strip it has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’. Residents have little time to take cover though very few have been killed by Gaza’s erratic garden-shed missiles. What Cleverly doesn’t tell us is that Sderot is built on the lands of a Palestinian Arab village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee. Britain, the mandated government, was on watch while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia.

Najd was one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns wiped off the map by Zionist Jews. Its inhabitants became refugees in Gaza and their families are probably still living in camps there. The irony is that some of them could be manning the rocket launchers….

When Barack Obama visited Sderot he spouted the well-worn mantra backing Israel’s right to protect its citizens from rocket attacks. “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Well said, Obama. But let’s hope you wouldn’t be so stupid or arrogant as to live on land you stole from your neighbour at gun-point.

And if Cleverly believes Israel is some kind of western-style democracy he is sadly deluded. He should read its discriminatory Nation State laws which confirm and reinforce its status as a racist enterprise. Here are some other gems from our Minister of State for the Middle East:

Israel does have a right to defend itself and we have made it clear that, in doing so, it must abide by international humanitarian law and make every effort to minimise civilian casualties… There is no legitimacy and no justification for indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel.

He continually focuses on the rocket attacks from Gaza as being unacceptable without ever criticising Israel for its disproportionate bombardment by land, sea and air with state-of-the-art ordnance which they use in an indiscriminate way causing huge civilian casualties. He never acknowledges that the Palestinians have a superior right to self-defence because they are under an illegal and brutal military occupation and international law allows them to put up armed resistance.

Ultimately, the two-state solution is, in our assessment, the best way of bringing about lasting peace for the people of the region, and that will continue to be a priority area for UK foreign policy in the region.

The two-state solution has been dead for the last 25 years.  Israel has no intention of allowing such a thing to happen, and if Mr Cleverly doesn’t know this he hasn’t been paying attention. Or maybe he does know it and is playing along with the conspiracy to buy time for Israel to complete its annexation programme. The Zionists from the start have been determined to grab the lot and everyone by now knows the UK Government is stuffed with Zionists and Zionist sympathisers eager to help them achieve their warped ambition.

Instead of making silly remarks Cleverly and others like him ought to stop and consider what kind of people they are, posing as friends and admirers of a criminal regime that is contemptuous of all norms of human decency.

The military wing of Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, and we have a policy of no contact with Hamas in its entirety.

That’s a pretty dumb position to take when the non-military wing of Hamas has been the democratically elected government in Gaza since the last election in 2006. I’d say refusal to talk with the Gaza people’s elected government is disrespectful to the British and Palestinian people and to the principles of diplomacy. In the meantime Westminster happily talks to the Israeli regime whose conduct perfectly fits the definition of state terrorism.

The above quotes by Cleverly are taken from Parliamentary Questions on Violence in Israel and Palestine, 12 May. It’s quite an achievement to pack so much nonsense into such a short space of time. I commend to James Cleverly and anyone else with his mindset this statement by Bradford West MP Naz Shah in the Commons earlier this week:

We sit here in the mother of Parliaments, the House of Commons, living under the rule of law, upholding fundamental freedoms for all who live in our green and pleasant land without any fear and without having our rightful connection to it denied. Palestinians do not live in the same security; rather, they live in constant fear of being forcibly dispossessed from their ancestral homes by the Israeli army. They have been abandoned by the international community, and they have been abandoned by us.

This weekend was the 73rd anniversary of what the Palestinians call the Nakba—the catastrophe; the day that marked the beginning of their dispossession in 1948. That dispossession continues—by bombs, by mob lynching, by expulsions, all against innocent Palestinian civilians. These crimes are the root cause of the tragic violence we are seeing across the Holy Land today. When this Government urge the restoration of calm in Palestine, they must remember that Palestinians have been robbed of their calm for 73 years, with the occupation’s checkpoints, the siege in Gaza and the various types of discrimination against Palestinians across the Holy Land.

Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem, international groups such as Human Rights Watch, and others have concluded from painstaking analysis that the Israeli Government stand guilty of the internationally defined crime of apartheid. I ask: how should that affect our relationship with Israel? This is not a conflict with two equal opposing sides; rather, one people dominates the other through illegal occupation, siege, dispossession and discrimination.

If we claim that there are two equal sides, why is it that we recognise only one while we have yet to recognise Palestine? Israel is the occupier of the Palestinian Territories, not the other way round. Israel has placed Gaza under siege, not the other way round. Israel is dispossessing Palestinians with illegal settlements, not the other way round. Israel applies policies of apartheid, not the other way round.

The just and peaceful solution we all seek will not be possible until the UK and its allies recognise this imbalance and take effective action to address it. The violence will not end until impunity does. The Government’s support for a ceasefire in Gaza is welcome and vital to preventing further needless loss of life, but there will be no sustainable and just peace in Palestine and Israel until all are equal and accountable before the law.

The Government must therefore urgently support the following actions: an independent investigation by the International Criminal Court into the situation in Palestine; a special session of the Human Rights Council looking into potential war crimes and accountability based on human rights; a review, in line with our own laws, of all licences issued for arms and equipment used by the Israeli security forces that may be used, directly or indirectly, to commit acts of internal repression, external aggression, including de facto annexation, or violations of international humanitarian law; and an end the empty words of a two-state solution while recognising only one state; and, finally, recognition of the state of Palestine.