Senior parliamentarians warn the foreign secretary that there must be “consequences” if the apartheid regime persists with its horrendous crimes against the Palestinian people.

By Stuart Littlewood

Sadly, our foreign secretary, James Cleverly (pictured above), isn’t the brightest bauble on the Christmas tree and doesn’t seem to understand that Israel’s decades-long military occupation and annexation of the Palestinians’ homeland is illegal under international and humanitarian law. “Successive Israeli governments have acted with impunity – violating international law at will, building and expanding illegal settlements, and expelling occupied people from their land,” say the parliamentarians in their letter to him. “The incoming Israeli government has already shown that it will intensify these breaches of law. Consequences must follow.”

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But Cleverly is compromised. He admits that prior to his ministerial appointment he was a member of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFoI). And in 2015, only four months after being elected as an MP, he visited Israel as part of a CFoI delegation. The trip included Sderot “to see the remains of Hamas rockets”. Speaking afterwards for a promotional CFoI video, Cleverly said: “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 the propaganda tour for gullible politicians and journalists. Only a mile from the Gaza Strip, it has become known as “the bomb shelter capital of the world”, residents having little time to take cover from 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-plus villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee.

Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. 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.

And Cleverly’s belief that Israel is some kind of Western-style democracy is sadly deluded. All he needs to do is read its discriminatory Nation-State laws which clearly show it as a vile racist enterprise.

Other gems from Cleverly include:

“There is no legitimacy and no justification for indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel… All countries, including Israel of course, have a legitimate right to self-defence and a right to defend their citizens from attack.”

How an illegal military occupier can claim a right of self defence against the very people it occupies, oppresses and murders is something even the most warped Israeli stooges can’t explain.

Cleverly insists rocket attacks from Gaza are unacceptable without criticising Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate bombardments of Gaza by land, sea and air with state-of-the-art ordnance, causing huge civilian casualties. He’s careful never to say that the Palestinians have a prior right to self-defence, being the ones under illegal and brutal military occupation, and that 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.”

A two-state solution has been doomed for the last 25 years. Israel has no intention of allowing such a thing to happen, and if 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 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 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. Refusal to talk with Gaza’s government is disrespectful to the British and Palestinians alike and a denial of the principles of diplomacy. In the meantime, Westminster happily talks to the Israeli regime whose crimes perfectly fit the definition of state terrorism.

“The UK government position is clear: the UK will recognise a Palestinian state at a time when it best serves the object of peace. Bilateral recognition in itself cannot, and will not, end the occupation. The UK government continue to believe that without a negotiated peace agreement, the occupation, and the problems that come with it, will continue.”

They’ve been saying that for years. Nothing so far, not even ad nauseam peace talks, have ended the occupation. Lopsided “negotiations” aren’t intended to deliver justice, and without justice there’ll be no peace. So, you’d think it’s time to try something else. But no.

“We are firmly opposed to boycotts or sanctions against Israel. We believe that open and honest discussions… best support our efforts to progress the peace process and to achieve a negotiated two-state solution.”  

Well, that’s gone well hasn’t it?

It beggars belief that an ignoramus like Cleverly was given a job like this.

As long ago as 2015, Israel’s Netanyahu felt untouchable enough to announce that if he was returned to power, a Palestinian state would not be established because handing back territory threatens Israel’s security.

And in August 2017 he said that Israel would hang on to the West Bank permanently and there would be no more uprooting of squatter “settlements”: “We are here to stay forever… This is the inheritance of our ancestors. This is our land.” But the true inheritors are the Palestinian people who have been there since Jerusalem was a Canaanite city. Few, if any, ancestors of Netanyahu’s government had any connection with the Holy Land, so their claims to it are fake.

And who are the two Israeli extremists mentioned in the letter who will effectively control Palestinian lives from now on?

Bezalel Smotrich is an Israeli lawyer born in a religious Israeli “settlement’, or squat, in the illegally occupied Golan Heights. He grew up in another squat in the West Bank and now lives in yet another illegal squat. That makes him a war criminal. For a lawyer, he shows scant respect for the law. His ancestral links are with Ukraine.

Smotrich has advocated a shoot-to-kill policy against Palestinians (mostly youths) throwing stones in confrontations with the occupying Israeli military. He is said to have also played a key role in Israeli legislation to legalise the annexation of Palestinian lands and a law banning advocates for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement from visiting Israel.

Itamar Ben-Gvir’s grandparents were Kurdish and Iraqi Jewish immigrants. He belonged to a youth movement that was branded a terrorist organisation and outlawed by the Israeli government, and he avoided military service with the Israeli army because of his extreme-right political background.

Ben-Gvir, a lawyer with a long criminal record himself, also lives in an illegal squat on the outskirts of Hebron, so is a war criminal too. He used to have a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Muslims at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1994, hanging in his home.

These two thugs with no ancestral links to the Holy Land will be ordering Palestinians around in their own homeland and, we can be sure, making their lives a misery with the full backing of the racist occupying power.

For too long our foreign policy has been scripted by Tel Aviv. The message of the UK parliamentarians’ letter’s is clear enough – it’s a must-read and a must-act.

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