By Melany Phillips 28th
Dec. 2016
Dear Prime Minister,
It was sickening to see that your
government last week voted for the declaration of diplomatic war against Israel
embodied in resolution 2334 passed by the UN Security Council.
Bad enough that Britain didn’t use
its position as a permanent SC member to vote against this vicious resolution
and thereby stop it in its tracks. Worse, far worse was that your government
voted for it. In doing so, Britain signed up to propositions that repudiate
law, justice and truth.
Now reports have surfaced that, yet
more appallingly, Britain was actually instrumental in getting 2334 passed by
helping draft the resolution and then stiffening New Zealand’s resolve in
proposing it.
I don’t know whether that is
correct. I suspect it may well be. I think, nevertheless, that you spoke from
the heart the other week when you told the Conservative Friends of Israel of
your admiration for Israel as a “remarkable country” and a “beacon of tolerance”
and your warm feelings towards the Jewish people.
I also think, however, that you know
little about the history of the Jews in the Middle East, the part played in
that history by previous British governments or the infernal strategic aims of
the people known as the “Palestinians”. I believe, therefore, you might not
fully grasp the implications of supporting UNSC resolution 2334.
So let me spell out exactly what
your government has done by voting in this way.
It has put itself firmly behind the
attempt to exterminate the State of Israel under the cowardly cover of vacuous
pieties about supporting two democratic states and opposing terrorism and
incitement. It has done this by endorsing the inflammatory falsehoods and legal
and historic fictions deployed by those whose purpose is to destroy the State
of Israel.
It has shredded the concept of
diplomatic integrity by delegitimising Israel’s legal actions in defence of its
survival while legitimising the manifestly false claim to the land by those who
want Israel gone.
It has put rocket fuel behind the
discriminatory and bigoted BDS movement whose aim is to delegitimise Israel and
bring about its destruction.
By declaring that Israel’s borders
should be established on terms demanded by its mortal enemies, the British
government has backed coerced surrender to aggressors bent on Israel’s
extermination.
Through this vote, your government
has shown its contempt for international law. It has helped tear up the treaty
obligation under the Oslo Accords to decide through negotiation the borders of
Israel and the status of Jerusalem.
Prime Minister, your officials will
not be informing you of crucial facts about the legal validity of Israel’s
actions. So I will.
Despite the wilful misreading by the
Foreign Office of the Geneva Conventions through flagrantly twisting and
distorting the meaning of the word “transfer” in that context, Israel’s
settlements are legal several times over.
Under the 1922 Mandate for
Palestine, the British administration was instructed to “facilitate… close
settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not
required for public purposes”.
The land on which the international
community thus gave the Jews the right to settle included what is now Israel,
the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. That legal right has
never been abrogated.
Israel has no borders, only
ceasefire lines which marked the cessation of hostilities in 1949 after it
defeated the Arab attempt to destroy it at its rebirth. It continues to have no
borders because the war of extermination mounted against it by the Arabs has
never ended.
A country is entitled under
international law to occupy land it seizes from a belligerent enemy and retain
it as long as the belligerency continues. That was why Israel was entitled to
retain land beyond the ceasefire lines seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.
UN resolution 242 called for
Israel’s withdrawal merely from “territories” seized at that time. It
deliberately eschewed the definite article, which would have required
withdrawal from all “the” territories, on the understanding that they would
only be yielded up if the Arabs ended their aggression. That has never
happened. To this day, these territories are used as a launching pad for the
mass murder of Israelis.
Worse even than ignoring these legal
realities, your government has now struck at the very heart of Jewish identity.
The essence of the strategy to
delegitimise and destroy Israel is the attempt to airbrush the Jewish people
out of their own history in the land – a history which gives them and them
alone the right to live there. In voting for this resolution, your government
has now endorsed that pernicious endeavour.
The resolution refers to “occupied
Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem.” There is no such thing as
“Palestinian territory” and never was.
First of all, the term “Palestinian”
is itself bogus. Palestinian identity was an artificial creation invented
solely to destroy the Jewish entitlement to their own homeland.
“Palestine” was invented by the
Romans to rename Judea, in order to eradicate Jewish entitlement to land the
Romans had conquered and to expunge all trace of its Jewish identity.
Arabs who lived in pre-Israel
Palestine were either nomadic or considered themselves Syria or pan-Arab. As
many Arabs have acknowledged over the years, there is no such thing as a
“Palestinian”.
Second, the land in dispute never
belonged to the “Palestinians” nor indeed to any Arab state. Jordan illegally
occupied Judea and Samaria, which it renamed the West Bank, between 1949 and
1967. That territory is in effect no-man’s land. And given the terms of the
British mandate which have never been overturned, it is only Israel which has
any legal, moral or historical right to settle its people there.
Prime Minister, the picture
accompanying this letter is of a young girl who was one of the victims of the
1929 Hebron massacre. Hebron, one of the holiest places in Judaism, had a
substantial Jewish community until in 1929 the Arabs carried out a three-day pogrom,
slaughtering 67 Jews. The rest of the Jewish community was driven out,
rendering Hebron empty of Jews for the first time in hundreds of years.
During the war to destroy Israel in
1948, the Jewish residents of Gush Etzion were expelled and murdered. The Arabs
similarly depopulated the Jewish villages of Kalya and Atarot, drove out the
Jews living in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem and blew up all
of their synagogues.
Obscenely, resolution 2334 deems all
these places and more that were ethnically cleansed of their ancient Jewish
populations to be “Palestinian territory” and that it is against international
law for any Israeli to live there. Prime Minister, in supporting this
resolution the British government has made itself party to the proposed racist
ethnic cleansing once again of the Jews from their own ancient land.
Worse yet, it has also struck at the
very heart of Jewish religious identity.
By stating that everything beyond
the 1949 ceasefire lines is “occupied Palestinian territory” the resolution
denies the Jewish claim to the Old City of Jerusalem and thus to Temple Mount,
the holiest place in Judaism.
Nor is this the only way the British
government has now struck not just at Israel but at the Jewish people.
Recently, and with great fanfare, it officially adopted the definition of
antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Providing
examples of where this definition might apply, the IHRA states that it may do
so in respect of the State of Israel by “Applying double standards by requiring
of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”
That double standard is precisely
what the British government has applied in voting for resolution 2334. For
other countries have disputed borders and displaced populations: Cyprus, for
example, or western Sahara. Yet it is only Israel that is singled out for
condemnation in this way. By the standard the British government has itself
adopted, it therefore now stands condemned for an antisemitic act in voting for
resolution 2334.
Prime Minister, the Israeli
settlements are not the impediment to a solution of the Arab-Israel impasse.
The war against the Jewish homeland started decades before Israel took over
these disputed territories. A state of Palestine cannot possibly be the
solution because the “Palestinians” have been repeatedly offered it; their only
answer has always been to launch yet more wars or terrorist campaigns against
Israel.
As the Arabs have repeatedly made
clear, the sole purpose of a state of Palestine is to bring about the
extermination of the Jewish homeland. The Arab-Israel impasse continues
principally because Britain, Europe and America have consistently sanitised,
rewarded and incentivised Arab aggression against Israel while punishing it for
trying to defend its right to the land.
Britain bears primary responsibility
for this. In the thirties, it betrayed its Mandate obligations by reneging on
its treaty obligation to settle the Jews in the land and instead rewarded
genocidal Arab aggression by offering the Arabs part of the Jews’ own
entitlement to the land. Voting for UNSC resolution 2334 merely continues that
history of British infamy.
There are now well-sourced reports
that President Obama intends to take even more malicious action against Israel
at the UN before he leaves office. Prime Minister, is your government intending
to support those moves too? If so, it will be a dreadful irony that someone who
is so obviously well-disposed towards the Jewish people should go down in
history as one of its most bitter enemies.
