The Rev George Pitcher is a serving cleric of the Church of England.
The international Red Cross said Tuesday that Israel has fired white phosphorus shells in its offensive in the Gaza Strip, but has no evidence to suggest it is being used improperly or illegally.
The comments came after a human rights organization accused the Jewish state of using the incendiary agent, which ignites when it strikes the skin and burns straight through or until it is cut off from oxygen. It can cause horrific injuries.
The International Committee of the Red Cross urged Israel to exercise "extreme caution" in using the incendiary agent, which is used to illuminate targets at night or create a smoke screen for day attacks, said Peter Herby, the head of the organization's mines-arms unit.
"In some of the strikes in Gaza it's pretty clear that phosphorus was used," Herby told The Associated Press. "But it's not very unusual to use phosphorus to create smoke or illuminate a target. We have no evidence to suggest it's being used in any other way."
Is the Reverend Pitcher aware of the ICRC Report, or does he just reproduce atrocity stories without bothering to ask himself any questions about whether they are reliable?
As for the "shooting children in the back of the head" atrocity story, has it not occurred to the Rev. Pitcher that if it were true, there would be ample evidence through hospital records and photographs and now that the press are able to enter Gaza, any such evidence would be being trumpeted to the heavens by a press keen to publicise atrocity stories about Israel? Perhaps he got his information from this article in the Daily Telegraph. But even that article ends by stating that the accusations that Israeli soldiers shot a number of children in the head cannot be verified. And if you read the account, it's not at all clear that such shots, even if they happened, were deliberately aimed at children with intent by Israeli soldiers. Of this being in any way a deliberate policy of Israel, you will look in vain for any evidence of that, apart from routine and totally unevidenced propaganda statements from pro-Hamas supporters.
Clearly, the Rev. Pitcher isn't a man to let such cold questions of rational analysis stand in the way of such intense emotions as disgust and nausea where Israel is concerned.
However, we need not jump to the conclusion that the Rev. Pitcher is anti-semitic. After all, on his blog he has published a post expressing his admiration for the self-proclaimed pluralist, tolerant stance of the minority group of non-orthodox Jewish religious movements in the UK. So he couldn't possibly be anti-semitic when it comes to his approach to the Jewish state, could he?
First, the one about delivery - the British government is giving £25m to Gazan relief, we don't have a problem getting it in. There's no reason why there should be any problem getting the relief in.
"Secondly, this nervousness about being biased. I'm afraid the BBC has to stand up to the Israeli authorities occasionally."
Asked by Jonathan Dimbleby, the chair of "Any Questions?", whether he was saying that Israeli pressure was behind the BBC decision not to broadcast the appeal, he said he didn't think it was, but went on to make these statements which clearly show that he does believe the BBC has made its decision because:
"Israel has a long reputation of bullying the BBC... The BBC has been cowed by this persistent and relentless pressure, and they should stand up to it."
So here we have a UK government minister claiming Israeli bullying has systematically cowed the BBC, and that it is so successful in doing so that it almost never stands up to it. Does he offer any evidence? No, he does not. Does the UK government support what its minister says -- effectively that the Jewish state exerts some degree of control over the main UK news organization?
On the other hand, there's no shortage of evidence from analyses of BBC and other media coverage of the Gaza conflict of a great deal of anti-Israel bias by key correspondents and news reports.
Via Harry's Place, there's evidence that there is now a concerted campaign, developed in relation to the Gaza conflict at a very recent conference under Hezbollah auspices in Beirut, that the Iranian proxies, with Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, to include campaigns around "humanitarian relief" as ways of promoting their long term war against Western-style democracies. Central to the conference was building alliances with radical western hard left groups under the common banner of support for "resistance". The SWP-Radical Islamist controlled Stop the War Coalition. And here from the current issue of SWP propaganda sheet "Socialist Worker" are the key messages:
Palestine has become a unifying force across the globe. That was the main sentiment of a conference against imperialism that took place in Lebanon last weekend.
The meeting brought together activists from the Middle East and the rest of the world, including Britain’s Stop the War Coalition and the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste in France.
The conference was dominated by messages of defiance in the face of Israel’s assault from the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance movements.
Osama Hamdan, the representative of Hamas in Lebanon, told delegates that the Palestinian resistance inside Gaza would “continue to confront Israeli troops”.
Hamdan said that “our fighters have managed to halt the Israeli offensive, and would continue to battle until the troops withdraw”.
He called on the Arab regimes to back the resistance and European governments to cut all links to Israel.
“We do not trust Mahmoud Abbas,” he said in reference to the Palestinian Authority leader. “He does not represent the Palestinians.”
In a message to the global movement, Hamdan said, “The resistance will survive because all the free people of the world support us.
“Our fighters are drawing hope from the solidarity they are seeing across the world.”
The conference debated the practical measures to help the Palestinians’ struggle.
“Humanitarian appeals are now part of our political struggle,” one delegate told the conference
All the UK media have been reporting a large scale protest about the Gaza appeal refusal outside BBC headquarters in central London. But as can be clearly seen from the clip above, none of the reports have made clear that this was no spontaneous protest by would-be charitable humanitarians. For a start, it's obvious that almost all the banners concerned are the standard issue of the current SWP/Stop the War campaign-- Stop Gaza, Free Palestine. If you have the patience to watch the whole clip, you'll hear the repeated orchestrated chants, which soon switch from "Shame on the BBC" for "From the Jordan to the sea, Palestine will be free" and the other standard slogans which make it quite clear that this is a campaign for the destruction of Israel, not the relief of Gazans. You can hear a commentator asking protesters why they are taking part. The overwhelming majority state that they're there because they want to see the "whole of Palestine' freed from occupation--meaning all the land which is the state of Israel, not just territory under Israeli control since 1967.
In the BBC's case, is this somehow the result of being cowed by the bullying of the Israeli government? Will Ben Bradshaw explain exactly what evidence he has of his claims about Israel having this effect on the BBC? And why are none of the media carrying his accusation?
I've now heard that the SOAS student union is occupying the School's prestigious Brunei gallery with the aim of attacking a current exhibition there (nothing to do with Israel). It's clear that their agenda goes far beyond anything to do with Gaza. It refers to "the occupation of Palestnian Land" but also to a much wider agenda. I'm writing this from my iPhone, so I can't do a fully informative post, but Harry's Place has the whole story-- link on the sidebar of this blog. Now here's the really fine thing.
Our lecture series
‘Tel Aviv at 100: 1909-2009’ began last term and followed the normal pattern of
lectures that we organise around a theme each year.
Professor Joachim
Shlöer of Southampton University started the series when he spoke about his
academic studies on the history of Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Ambassador,
Professor Manuel Hassassian, formerly of Bethlehem University gave a paper on
‘Tel Aviv and Ramallah: The Next 100 Years’. Professor Reuven Snir, an
anti-Zionist Israeli Professor from Haifa University spoke about Arabic
literature in Israel. This term, academics from Tel Aviv University were due to
speak on the same theme on non-contentious subjects such as architecture and
music. The first lecture this evening is by Professor Anita Shapira, on of
Israel’s leading historians on the early history of Tel Aviv.
It is therefore
terribly unfortunate that these lectures, planned months ago, have coincided
with the terrible events in Gaza.
Any call for
cancelling this series will be seen as not based on opposition to the
centenary, but on the participation of Israeli academics. A resurrection of the
attempt to boycott academics simply because they are Israeli regardless of
their opinion about the tragedy in Gaza. SOAS as an institution and the British
government have always strongly opposed and condemned such a boycott.
Academic institutions
rightly do not suppress different narratives and different opinions. Its ethos
is that the violence of the street should not be brought into the classroom. On
a personal level, it is something that I hold to dearly and even if I am in a
minority of one, I will adhere to this and not bow to any intimidation.
I have never called
for the cancellation of a lecture at SOAS even if the views expressed were not
to my liking – such as the participation of a Hezbollah representative in a
recent conference or the talk, given by the hijacker, Leila Khaled in the past.
In the ten years that
I have been at SOAS, I have always worked hard for my students, regardless of
their opinions and background. I will continue to do this.
I hope that colleagues
will not discriminate against students whose opinions on the Israel-Palestine
conflict they do not agree with.
These are difficult times for all of us. I am grateful to the many colleagues – whether they share my views or not – who have contacted me. Let us hope that the killing ceases this week and we can attempt to rebuild the bridges between us.
This morning at 8:34, the BBC Radio 4 Today programme gave extended airtime to the impeccably bland establishment voice of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, speaking on behalf the Forward Thinking pressure group. It sees itself as a promoter of peace through dialogue in the Middle East conflict.
But you've only got to listen to speakers from Forward Thinking in full flow to see that they are in fact apologists for Hamas. Greenstock stressed that Hamas' charter commitment to the destruction of Israel is to be regarded as purely rhetorical, because their 2006 election manifesto did not include the elimination of Israel as a goal. The latter part of his statement is quite true. It just leaves out the equivalent statements of commitment to increasing jihad and ending "the occupation" which I've documented in my previous post today. And astoundingly, Greenstock actually claimed that the rockets currently being fired at Israel were not being fired by Hamas, but by Fatah and by Islamic Jihad.
Unsurprisingly, this particular statement was not nailed by the Today presenter.
Hamas, while under the PLC dome, will propagate the culture of resistance among the Palestinian people in addition to the love of Jihad. The Qassam Brigades, armed wing of Hamas, and its weapons will stay solid and solely pointed at the Israeli enemy for as long as the occupation on our land lasts".
"The armed wing will increase in quality and quantity, and its weapons will be effectively upgraded to drive the occupation out of our Palestinian lands.
"We are proud to be the servants of the Palestinian people, and we shall extend a helping hand to families of our martyrs, wounded, and jailed heroes. And we will use all means in our possession to liberate our prisoners, including kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and officers.
It's all too commonly argued that the Palestinians, and especially the Gazans, only voted for Hamas because of the corruption of Fatah. But no electorate can take selective responsibility, saying I only voted for this part of the manifesto, so the rest of it isn't anything to do with me. It can hardly absolve the Gazans from responsibility for electing a government whose aims and priorities clearly put attacking Israel with increasing ferocity at the top of the agenda.
Judaism yes, zionism, no! The state of Israel has to go!
The UK commentariat today is positively operatic in condemning Israel for the shelling of the Jabalaya UN school.
Mr Brown, who has (limited) form on getting tough, told the Knesset last July that Israel must pursue peace with its neighbours. David Miliband, the grandson of Jews who escaped the Holocaust, recently infuriated Israel by demanding, rightly, that food and cosmetics imported by Britain from illegal Israeli settlements should be labelled accordingly....
Bring back the politics of denunciation. Yes, Hamas is a vicious neighbour. And yes, the West also has dubious warfare on its conscience. But nothing excuses acts so sickening that, if perpetrated by a less-blessed state, they would be reviled throughout the world as war crimes. Once again, the world has declined to tell Israel, in terms, that it has no divine mandate for destruction.
Those of us who are horrified by the killing in Gaza are forced to criticise its grossly disproportionate nature rather than condemn it outright.
The reality that this obscures is that the Israelis have the Palestinians tied like a donkey on a rope. They deny the animal much that it needs, they poke it and humiliate it. From time to time the donkey kicks out. The Israeli response is then to shout ¨Bad Donkey,¨ and to hit it, and hit it, until it is cowed and subdued. The failure of the West is to bring in the police and make an arrest for mistreatment of an animal!
The racism that goes to the heart of the Israeli approach is to assume that the Palestinians can be beaten and beaten until they are subdued and will then do what they are told. It fails to recognise that the Palestinians might respond to such treatment in exactly the same way as Israelis would – with defiance.......
It is time for Liberal Democrats to call a halt to the attempt to ride two horses and to try not to upset the Israeli lobby. Our support for the Palestinian cause is well enough known amongst those (by no means all!) in the Jewish community who will not countenance criticism of Israel. It is not well enough known amongst the majority who are appalled by Israel´s behaviour.
We should make clear that we will campaign tooth and nail for a viable and independent Palestinian state and will demand an end to deals with an Israeli government that bases its policy approach on a stance that is fundamentally racist.
All this evening, I've been checking out UK and Israeli versions of today's incident at Jabalya in which 30 Palestinians died after a hit by Israeli fire close to a UN-run school.
Israeli tank shells killed at least 40 Palestinians today at a UN school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said, in carnage likely to boost international calls for a halt to Israel's Gaza offensive.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said she was looking into information on the incident at al-Fakhora school in Jabalya refugee camp.
People cut down by shrapnel lay in pools of blood on the street. Witnesses said two Israeli tanks shells exploded outside the school, killing at least 40 civilians - Palestinians who had taken refuge there and residents of nearby buildings.
But all the key Israeli news media English websites since the early evening have been telling a very different story. And it's one in which the strike took place because Hamas were firing mortars from the school at the Israeli troops. In other words, a clear multiple war crime of using a neutral NGO site--a girls' school-- and treating the Palestinian civilians as human shields. And a situation in which Israeli forces are justified in firing back in self defence according to international law.
An inquiry into the incident revealed that the IDF soldiers acted according to procedures and fired back at gunmen firing mortar shells from the school. The investigation also revealed that Hamas launching cells were operating within the school. The shells landed outside the school yard.
IDF and intelligence sources said that Hamas was attempting to hide the circumstances of the incident. Members of the organization were also killed in the strike.
The army released a video showing the terrorists firing mortar shells from the school yard, and the cabinet is considering using the video in a possible complaint filed with the UN.
The cabinet will meet again Wednesday to discuss the continuation of the military operation in the Strip.
Sources in the IDF said earlier that several Hamas gunmen were inside the UNWRA school, including Imad and Hassan Abu-Askar. The army also said that a rocket launching cell had been firing rockets at Israel from the school.
John Ging, director of operations in Gaza for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said that three artillery shells landed at the perimeter of the school where 350 people were taking shelter. "Of course it was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties," he said.
Asked whether there were Hamas militants in the area at the time of the attack, Ging said it was the scene of clashes "so there's an intense military and militant activity in that area." He said UN staff vetted Palestinians seeking shelter at their facilities to make sure militants were not taking advantage of them. "So far we've not had violations by militants of our facilities," he said.
This last statement seems rather far-fetched since Reuters last May reported that the headteacher of a UN school was openly feted by Islamic Jihad as having used his expertise to develop and run a rocket making operation--and that the UNRWA officials had required the school not to discuss information about his involvement:
Qiq's body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, "the chief leader of the engineering unit", would now find "paradise".
That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq's activities.
No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq's widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.
Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher's surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter.
"We have a zero-tolerance policy towards politics and militant activities in our schools. Obviously, we are not the thought police and we cannot police people's minds," he said.
He added that staff were also regularly instructed not to engage in political or militant activities of any kind.
The Israeli army said its April 30 attack at Rafah, close to the Egyptian border, hit a workshop used for making rockets and other improvised weaponry. An Israeli intelligence source told Reuters that Qiq was involved in developing rockets and mortars.
Yet Qiq, a physics graduate with eight years' experience of teaching at UNRWA schools, was also described by colleagues as a rising star in education. Relatives said he was promoted to run the school last year, with the title of deputy headmaster.
It’s absolutely horrifying. The people of Gaza are terrorized. They’re traumatized. And they are trapped.
On the humanitarian front, a million people across the Strip are without electricity, because we’ve been unable to get fuel in, though we did get some fuel in today to the main power plant that’s been shut down since Sunday. At least a quarter of a million people, probably more, are without running water. Our food distribution centers have, all but two of them, managed to keep going, and all but five of our eighteen health clinics have opened.
But when I hear Israeli politicians—excuse me—say that there is no humanitarian crisis, there are plenty of supplies in Gaza, Israel’s obligations as an occupying power do not end when they dump a handful of trucks on the edges of the fence that they’ve built around Gaza. We have to have a humanitarian strategic breathing space around certain facilities so that we can get goods in at the sufficient quantities, namely the Nahal Oz crossing point for industrial-level fuel. And if we can’t gstet that in, then these one million people without electricity will continue to be without electricity. And we need to get in grain, wheat grain, at the main conveyor belt at the Karni crossing, an industrial-sized crossing. Without that, our food stocks will run out in the next forty-eight hours, and people, particularly those cut-off communities around the fighting in northern Gaza, face the serious threat of hunger.
There is a humanitarian crisis, and it ill-behooves Israeli politicians simply to say there is no shortage of anything in Gaza. There is a shortage of wheat, and there is a shortage of fuel, and that means that people are facing a humanitarian crisis.
Try comparing the language and perspectives of the way the BBC and the mainstream UK press is reporting the Israeli campaign in Gaza with their reports on the British Army campaign in Afghanistan.
Operation Sond Chara - Pashto for Red Dagger - was named after 3 Commando Brigade's shoulder badge.
It aimed to provide better security in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah following Taleban attacks in October and to pave the way for a forthcoming voter registration programme.
Troops have been revealing details of the gruelling offensive, which involved some marines trudging more than 60km through mud while fighting insurgents at close quarters.
Capt Dave Glendenning, commander of the marines' artillery support team, said: "Almost every day we were involved in intense fire-fights ranging from rocket-propelled grenades and small arms 'shoot-and-scoots' to four-hour battles with the enemy forces as close as 30 metres."
It's true that the BBC does allow for some dissent and questioning of the British role in Afghanistan. But that's always on a side panel set against an upbeat and supportive main panel report of whatever the Ministry of Defence and the Army spokesmen offer, alongside cosy personal-story detail that adds to the humanization of the British soldiers' image.
I've been a regular reader and fan of Clive Davis' blog since before the time when he became one of the Spectator's resident bloggers. He published the photo above on Friday, with just the included caption and no further comment, headlined "In Gaza".
What so interests me about this image is that you could not have a more blatant image of a war crime in action. Here is a missile very clearly being fired from the midst of a crowded city; it is not as if the territory of Gaza lacks open areas, orchards, farms and other places away from civilian areas. And Hamas openly boasts that its rockets are deliberately targeted at civilians in civilian areas. Both are war crimes.
Why does Clive Davis ignore this?
Why does the BBC, which so tirelessly refers to Israel as illegally occupying Palestinian land choose not to mention that when it reports Hamas launchings of rockets from within Gaza City that Hamas is committing a double war crime, both in the location from which it chooses to launch its rockets and in its targeting?
Clive's caption is also curiously phrased ("rockets are launched") so that it glosses over the role of Hamas as the launcher of the rockets and the enabler of terrorism and war crimes from the territory it controls.
Meanwhile, the BBC News website has a lengthy feature casting doubt on the widely publicised Israel Defence Forces' Youtube video of its strike on a claimed shipment of Grad rockets. It goes on to refer to the IDF Youtube channel and its use of spokesmen as a "propaganda campaign", a term it does not use when the BBC reports British forces' accounts of their actions in Afghanistan including obviously staged PR interviews with celebrity soldiers like Prince Harry.
One of the curious and regrettable features of the Israeli and IDF campaigns is that they too rarely point up that the rocket launches from Gaza City and their strikes on Israeli cities, towns and villages are double war crimes. It's true that Israeli government spokesmen and supporters regularly refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization, which it is. But in the present situation, it is going beyond terrorist acts, because it is a de facto governing entity. State or quasi-state authorities which station combatants and store military equipment in the midst of civilian populations commit war crimes
Perhaps the Israeli authorities and the IDF could consider repeatedly and invariably using the terms " Hamas war crimes" every time they report or publicize any rocket launched from inside Gaza City and any mortar or rocket launched from Gaza with no other purpose than to hit Israeli civilian areas, including repeated "war crimes" references every time its spokespersons appear on international news media. Maybe the Twitter feed that logs Hamas' Qassam rocket attacks on Israel as they happen could update its name to "Qassam War Crime Count".
The Palestinian cause was hugely furthered by the PLO and subsequently Fatah adherence to its mantra of "illegally occupying Palestinian land."
To some extent, the wider world public can recognise Hamas as a terrorist organization when it's parading masked would-be suicide bombers at mass rallies. But as soon as it goes into victim mode, and puts up quietly spoken "Gaza residents" and spokesmen who rail about Israeli "genocide" operations, it's as if the wider world envisages an embattled, besieged tiny country of democrats whose government is unable to function because of Israeli intransigence and vindictiveness.
"War crimes" continue to resonate with the wider world public. They are all too ready to believe that any bombardment of a group based in a civilian setting is a war crime. Michael Totten's summary of some key scholarly discussions of international law on proportionality in national self-defence actions shows that Israel's actions are not war crimes. But those of Hamas clearly are. And this point is not being made nearly clearly or regularly enough.
It isn't often that I see David T of Harry's Place expressing his support of Ehud Olmert, the right of centre Prime Minister of Israel. But there he is, saying how much he agrees with Olmert's description of settler attacks on Palestinians in Hebron as "a pogrom".
It's wonderful to be able to blog from my iphone while sitting in first a cab then a car repair centre in Willesden. The downside is that the very pretty Typepad iPhone app doesn't seem to have a "save post" option.
It's publish or nothing.
So I'll have to publish as is when they bring my car round and demystify you as to what I'm on about later.
Clue: It's about an unexpected side of the normally ultra-rationalist male bloggers who include founders and leading signatories of the Euston Manifesto.
I vow that this people is destined for a future in their own homeland. For is there any other people who have kept alive similar mourning and hope for so many years?"
Here I was standing at the foot of the actual steps that led up to the Second Temple all those years ago. It wasn’t just an old story. It wasn’t a myth. It really happened. And I am a descendant of these people who came to this place to worship....
I always get a bit teary at the Wall, and I’m never sure why. Friday was no exception, standing at the foot of those steps.
I always thought it was all this spirituality in the air that got to me. But perhaps it’s something deeper than that.
When we went over to see Robinson’s Arch , or what’s left of it, the enormity of the destruction really hit me and I was very sad. This has never happened to me before. I must have needed to be able to envision this as a real place, for me to begin to understand the terrible tragedy of what happened back then.
These are actual stones from the outer wall of Herod’s Temple, bearing the distinct features of Herodian masonry, excavated just as you see them, apparently toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple.
And as these things always happen, today was the 17th of Tamouz, believed to be the day the Romans broke through the city walls (among other things), all those years ago (precisely 1938 years I think, if I’m not miscounting).
July 17, 2008
There are always funerals going on somewhere
Even if you never knew the people
When they were alive
Sometimes
in the fresh grave
slowly being covered in earth
is a part of yourself.
.
Would the largest ever programme of co-operation and exchanges between British and Israeli academics have come into existence were it not for the UK government's opposition to the UCU's and its predecessor unions' last three years of tolerating and encouraging campaigns to condemn and boycott Israeli academics? Was it simply a by-product of Gordon Brown being in Israel today, marking the first official visit to the country by a serving UK Prime Minister?
Julia Smith, deputy director of the British Council, told The Jerusalem Post Sunday, "This program is not something related to the boycott. The British Council and British government are opposed to an academic boycott of Israel. Boycott calls have come from a small minority of the academic community in Britain.
"BIRAX will hopefully be a long-running program to strengthen the existing ties between Britain and Israel," she said.
You get a rather different view from Professor David Newman of Israel's Ben Gurion University, who has been on a sabbatical in England during the current year:
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Prof. David Newman, who has been active in fighting boycott efforts during his sabbatical in England this year, told the Post that the program "has a great deal to do with the boycott."
"Because of the ongoing discussion of boycotts, the British government decided that the most appropriate response was to strengthen research ties," he said. Newman added that he had been involved in planning the program since its beginning.
And here's a still more revealing comment in the same article from an anonymous source "close to the boycott issue":
A source close to the boycott issue told the Post that the choice of targeting junior academics was not coincidental.
"By choosing starting academics, when the unions start discussing a boycott there will be more people who have had some contact with Israel and will have some knowledge. We've discovered that 80 percent of those who attend the union meetings don't know anything about Israel or the issue. So it's sort of a value added element to the program," he said.
There is also the wider issue of why this happens to be the first time a UK Prime Minister has paid an official visit to Israel, despite over 20 years of British rule via the former League of Nations Mandate.
The last few months have seen the new key ruling pollticians of Germany, France and England rushing to be identified with policies more sympathetic to Israel than in recent years, in contrast to their predecessors' widespread criticism of what they condemned as "disproportionate action" by Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
What seems to be happening here is a jostling for primacy within an enlarged European Union, whose dynamic, with the accession of so many former Soviet satellites, whose governments continue to wish to shake off the reflex anti-imperialist/ anti-zionist rhetoric of their past, is showing signs of shifting away from its left-wing socialist focus of former near-partisan support of the Palestinians. Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and now Gordon Brown all seem to be keen to make more gestures of sympathy towards Israel, including high-profile official visits, than most EU leaders have done in recent years.
And, behind the scenes, the dynamic of the diplomatic struggle to head off Iran from developing nuclear weapons and so avoid Israel taking a pre-emptive strike may well be a further reason why all these visits have happened over so few months. The Telegraph reports that Brown will make a strongly anti-Iranian statement when he addresses the Israeli Knesset tomorrow, as does The Independent.
This is what Ha'aretz reports of Gordon Brown's account of that process, giving a view that he hasn't yet articulated in the UK Parliament, as far as I'm aware:
...the new European leadership - Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and himself - is interested in bolstering the collaboration with the United States in affecting change in the global agenda, including that of the Middle East.
Whatever happens to Gordon Brown over the next few months, and even up to the likely coming to power of David Cameron under a new Tory administration, it looks unlikely that any change of Prime Minister or government will change this course.
Were Israel to launch a pre-emptive attack on Iran, where would the EU stand? No doubt the sudden rush of prime ministerial meetings has provided the opportunity to leave a few messages which would not be sayable in the public realm.
Meanwhile, back in Euston, UCU and its SWP-dominated executive will be continuing to devote hours of their energy and a great deal of their members' money to supporting and hosting the Stop the War Campaign, fighting for their pro-Cuba campaign and of course appearing on platforms and in demonstrations supporting the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with its central plank of boycotting all Israeli goods, facilities and services, including Israel's universities, theatres and films and the people who work in them.
Tonight's BBC Radio 4 radio news reports have centred solely on the new financial aid being set up for the Palestinian Authority, although this is little more than a further episode of a long established relationship. The BBC news website takes up Brown's pro-Israel comments, seen on the ITN news ciip above, from his visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial Museum, but remains silent on the new academic co-operation initiative.
And The Guardian goes even further, focusing only on Brown's visit to Ramallah, and amplifying everything he said that was supportive to the Palestinian cause, whilst remaining silent on his condemnation of Palestinian terrorism and on the enthusiastically supportive pro-Israel statements reported in Ha'aretz and the rest of the Israeli press. There is not tonight one UK media mention of the academic agreement, which delivers a socking response to UCU and the pro-boycott campaigners, despite the high profile coverage these campaigns have previously received in the UK media.
UPDATE: The Independent now covers it here. The Guardian on Monday morning still doesn't refer to the exchange and includes an amazing subhead "Echoes of the Holocaust as Ahmadinejad singled out" which presents President Ahmadinejad as a victim. That's a particularly resonant use of "singling out," because it refers both to what happened to Jews in Nazi Europe and is the main focus of the criticism of the UCU and the anti-Israel boycotters, who campaign only for the boycott of Israel, whilst remaining silent on the actions of other states with arguably much more serious records of oppression, suppression of academic freedom and the like.
Question for the Guardian: "Singling out" usually implies a collective of offenders from which just one is selected. How many other heads of state are currently regularly making speeches asking for other countries to be wiped off the map?
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I wholly disagree with the use of the word “pogrom” to describe the actions of the people who attacked the Palestinians in Hebron. Firstly, using that word does the same job of creating moral equivalence that’s so often used by antisemitic propaganda which tries to neutralize terms like “holocaust” by demonstrating that Jews are the equivalents of their historical murderers.
Pogroms were organized mass racist attacks on completely peaceful and quietist Jews, organized with the connivance and sometimes the active assistance of the Tsarist authorities and the Russian Orthodox Church. They were usually started as the result of antisemitic preaching at the time of Easter. There was also a small number of pogroms by Polish Christians against Polish Jews returning to their home villages in 1945-46 having survived the Holocaust. A distant cousin of mine was murdered in 1946 in such an attack. The Jews were attacked as Jews, with claims that they were destroying Russia, or in the case of the Poles, because they were returning to reclaim their own homes into which Poles had moved. They involved many murders, vicious physical attacks, looting, wholescale destruction of property and the rape of women. They almost invariably went unpunished.
Here we have an account of a small number of Jewish Israeli individuals who shot at a number of Palestinians at a time when some other Jewish Israeli individuals were being evicted from property whose ownership is contested, but whose eviction has been carried out by the Jewish state in defence of the rights of Palestinians. The individuals have been arrested, and if found guilty will be rightly sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. However, they do claim they were being threatened with lynching, and my understanding is that there is footage showing they were being stoned by Palestinians before they started shooting. Not that that would be a justification for shooting or otherwise attacking individuals, but it does show how wrong it is to describe this as a “pogrom" and how much using that term is intended to smear a particular set of Jews as being the equivalent of the murderous anti-semites of recent history.
Olmert has his own reasons for using the word “pogrom”. He is clinging onto power and trying to create a position for himself outside the mainstream of Israeli politics, where he has wholly lost credibility and has no remaining constituency. He is currently being indicted for crimes of corruption, and it seems to me this particular bit of opportunism is fully consistent with the more despicable side of his history. He may well end up on the same circuit as Jimmy Carter once he’s out of office.