Following Israel’s recent savage attack on Gaza,
the last two Tory candidates for PM are out
competing each other to offer Israel support
By Jonathan Cook
August 12, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--As
Israel unleashed a surprise wave of air
strikes on
Gaza last Friday, the two remaining
Conservative politicians vying to replace
disgraced Prime Minister
Boris Johnson
publicised letters vowing fealty to Israel.
Their timing underscored the degree to which
British politicians on both sides of the aisle
have now joined their American counterparts in
making commitment to Israel a defining issue in
their campaigns for highest office.
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and Rishi
Sunak, the chancellor, trumpeted their
pro-Israel credentials over the weekend, as
Israel killed 45 Palestinians, including 16
children, and injured hundreds more. Israel said
several Islamic Jihad leaders – the intended
targets – were among the dead. A ceasefire
went into effect late on Sunday night.
As expected, western leaders
came out solidly in support of Israel, even
though on this occasion there was not even the
pretence that Israel was “retaliating” for
rockets fired out of Gaza. Israel initiated the
hostilities,
claiming its strikes were meant to prevent
an alleged attack by the Palestinian resistance
group Islamic Jihad with an anti-tank missile.
One can imagine how politicians in
the United States and Europe would have
reacted had a Palestinian faction justified
firing rockets into Israel unprovoked on the
basis that it wished to deter future Israeli air
strikes. But in any case, if deterrence really
was Israel’s aim, its attack had precisely the
opposite effect. Entirely predictably, Islamic
Jihad
responded by firing hundreds of rockets into
Israel.
In fact, though it is never mentioned by
western politicians or media, Palestinians,
unlike Israel, actually have a right in
international law to resist Israel militarily –
and not only because Israel has been
belligerently
occupying their lands for decades.
Israel has additionally subjected Gaza to
a 15-year blockade that has tightly
controlled who and what is allowed in and out of
the tiny, heavily overcrowded coastal enclave.
Gaza has been left in ruins by a series of
Israeli attacks over more than a decade – what
the Israeli army calls
“mowing the lawn”. Gaza’s trapped 2.1
million inhabitants
suffer serious shortages of food, clean
water, medicines and electricity. Malnutrition
and poverty are endemic.
Last year, the head of the United Nations,
Antonio Guterres,
observed: “If there is a hell on earth, it
is the lives of children in Gaza.” That hell is
entirely manmade – by Israel.
Double standard
Perhaps the most flagrantly
hypocritical comment on the weekend’s events
came from Yevgen Korniychuk, the Ukrainian
ambassador to Israel. He
tweeted out a message of support for Israel
that turned reality on its head.
He expressed “deep sympathy” for the Israeli
public, suggesting that Israel, like Ukraine,
was suffering “a very brutal attack by its
neighbour”. He added: “Attacks on women and
children are reprehensible.”
But it was Israel that initiated the attack,
not the Palestinians. And it was women and
children in Gaza, not in Israel, who died under
Israeli bombs.
Korniychuk’s comments served to underscore
the wider hypocrisy of western politicians who
have expressed outrage at Russian aggression
against Ukraine since its invasion in late
February, but for years have either minimised or
supported Israel’s regular aggression against
Gaza.
The double standard was starkly evident in
the case of the two contenders for Johnson’s
crown. At the weekend, Truss and Sunak laid out
their unwavering support for Israel at the very
moment it was killing Palestinian civilians in
Gaza. They did so to their party’s main
pro-Israel lobby group,
the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI).
Truss
averred: “The UK should stand side by side
with Israel, now and well into the future. As
Prime Minister, I would be at the forefront of
this mission.” Comments from Truss, the
bookmakers’ favourite, particularly stick in the
craw.
As foreign secretary, she has been
outspoken in condemning
Russia’s invasion, calling it an “illegal
occupation”. She has
backed Britons going to fight against
Russia. She has loudly
supported sending weapons to help
Ukraine defend itself. And she has
suggested that the assets of Russian
nationals frozen by the UK should be transferred
to Ukraine.
Of course, Truss wishes to extend none of
those supposedly principled positions supporting
Ukrainians against Russian aggression to
Palestinians facing Israeli aggression.
It is inconceivable that she would ever
approve of sending arms to Palestinians so they
could defend themselves from Israeli attack.
Quite the contrary. Truss’s government has
increased arms sales to Israel to record
levels even as Israel chokes Gaza and Jewish
settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
steal ever more Palestinian land.
It is also unthinkable that Truss would agree
to freeze Israeli assets in the UK and use them
to help reconstruct long-suffering Gaza. Or that
she would back Britons going to fight with the
Palestinian resistance against Israel’s
suffocating blockade of Gaza.
For Trump, the move was
intended to pander to his electoral base of
US evangelicals. They
wish to shore up Jewish control of the
region to bring about an end times in which
Christians alone rise to be with God.
Now Truss appears ready to emulate Trump.
In her letter, the foreign minister also
promises to “cement” Britain’s ties with
Israel by expediting
a Free Trade Agreement being drafted by the
government. Truss has said “closer trade” is a
priority.
Human rights groups like Amnesty
International have
warned against Britain hastily negotiating
such an agreement, saying it may “incentivise
Israel’s system of apartheid”, help Israel
expand its illegal settlements and give a stamp
of approval to Israeli efforts to annex
Palestinian land under occupation.
Truss vows too a further crackdown on the
international boycott movement, backing
a US-style bill to prevent public bodies,
including local councils, from
joining the BDS campaign to divest funds
from Israel for its illegal activities in the
occupied territories.
She says BDS causes “needless division”.
Presumably the division that concerns her is
antagonising Israel’s aggressive lobbyists in
the UK, not fuelling tensions with Palestinians,
their supporters and human rights groups.
Given inaction by western governments,
solidarity expressed through boycotts is
effectively the only non-violent way for
individuals and organisations to punish Israel –
whether for its continuing crimes against
ordinary Palestinians, or its efforts to steal
and colonise their land, or its moves to
frustrate the emergence of a Palestinian state.
By outlawing peaceful resistance to Israel’s
belligerent occupation, Truss would leave
Palestinians and their supporters with a stark
choice: either promote violent forms of
resistance, or sit quietly while Israel inflicts
death by a thousand cuts on Palestinian
statehood and any hopes of peace.
Global power dynamics
Truss makes clear that she will characterise
any effort to hold Israel to account as
“antisemitism”. She intends to silence
criticism of Israel for its human rights abuses
at the United Nations, one of the very few
international forums where Israel faces
scrutiny.
And she promises to toughen the UK’s stance
towards Iran, the only counterweight to Israel’s
military dominance in the Middle East.
Sunak is barely less extravagant in his
advocacy for Israel. He too extols the Free
Trade Agreement, calls for intensified
intelligence cooperation with Israel against
Iran, promises to outlaw boycotts, and grossly
mischaracterises the Abraham Accords – signed by
some Gulf states to further isolate the
Palestinians- as a
“new era of peace”.
Whether it is Truss or Sunak who replaces
Johnson, each is already committed to
championing Israel against the Palestinians and
crushing dissent at home.
The opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer is
not offering any kind of corrective to the
Conservatives’ lockstep support for Israel.
His predecessor,
Jeremy Corbyn, a strong supporter of justice
for the Palestinians,
faced a relentless, years’-long,
evidence-free campaign tarring him as presiding
over an institutionally antisemitic party.
Starmer has learnt that lesson. During his
campaign for the Labour leadership, he
declared himself a Zionist, subscribing to
an ideology that in practice insists Israel has
a right to usurp Palestinian land and colonise
it.
Since then, he has
ignored a vote by his own party conference
to declare Israel an apartheid state and deny it
arms to oppress Palestinians. He has also
blurred a long-accepted distinction between
anti-Zionism, opposition to Israel’s oppression
of Palestinians, and antisemitism, bigotry
towards Jews.
Like Truss and Sunak, Starmer has
unequivocally
supported helping Ukrainians resist Russian
aggression while denying that right to
Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.
The truth, as illustrated by these bipartisan
double standards, is that no UK party leader is
prepared to found their foreign policy on
genuine ethical principles or humanitarianism,
whatever they claim.
Their kneejerk support for Israel follows
from a recognition of global power dynamics.
Western neocolonial interests are what sets the
agenda in the oil-rich, conflict-prone Middle
East, a region where the super-powerful lobbies
of the fossil fuel industry and the arms
manufacturers have so much at stake
financially.
It is those narrow, cynical, elite interests
that British governments serve, not some notion
of the greater public good. Which is why Israel
knows it is free to pound Gaza whenever it
chooses – with no consequences, except for the
Palestinians facings its bombs.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2022-08-09/truss-sunak-fealty-israel/
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in this article are
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