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Britain Should Recognize Israel for the Ally It Is, and Act Accordingly

Sept. 11 2020

According to longstanding policy, Britain merely “recognizes Israel’s de-facto authority” over those parts of Jerusalem that have served as its capital since 1948; it regards the rest of the city a “under Israeli military occupation.” The Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley notes the absurdities:

There is a UK embassy in the capital of China, inflicter of coronavirus and mass incarcerator of Uighurs. There is a UK embassy in the capital of Iran, one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism. There is even a UK embassy in the capital of North Korea, a slave state and the closest thing to hell on earth. In Israel, however, the Foreign Office maintains the fiction that Tel Aviv is the capital and hides away our embassy there because admitting the truth would be too painful for the activist-diplomats of King Charles Street.

Israel, it is worth reminding those diplomats and the prime minister they nominally serve, is a steadfast ally. It sells us plastics and minerals and buys our machinery and vehicles. Just one of its pharmaceutical companies supplies one in seven National Health Service prescriptions. It signed a continuity trade deal with us a year before we left the EU. It trains our police to detect and stop “lone-wolf” Islamist attacks. It furnishes us with vital intelligence. If you don’t remember Hizballah bombing London in 2015, it is because the Mossad tipped off MI5 about a terror cell in northwest London where the [police] went on to find three tons of ammonium nitrate stockpiled. This faithful friend we reward by calling it an occupier in its own capital city.

Daisley believes the Tory prime minister Boris Johnson when he declares himself “a life-long friend, admirer, and supporter of Israel.” What then, is the reason Johnson’s policies remain indistinguishable from those the UN Human Rights Council? Most likely

the Foreign Office, the world’s leading exporter of certainty and paternalism, has defeated another prime minister who would like to have his own foreign policy but doesn’t have the time or energy to challenge [its] rule.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Boris Johnson, Israel diplomacy, Jerusalem, Mossad, United Kingdom

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic