However, Britain’s Labour Party, which is
widely expected to win power at the general election that has been
called for July 4, backed the prosecutor’s move.
This outright hostility was a marked
change from Labour’s previous cautious support for Israel’s attempt to
destroy Hamas. Many have assumed that the party is running scared of
Muslim voters, who have emerged as a significant bloc demanding
anti-Israel and Islamic policies as the price of Muslim electoral
support.
Hostility to Israel, however, goes far wider and deeper than this.
The ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, is a
British lawyer from a barristers’ set in London that deals with common
law issues such as personal injury and employment law.
Khan drew upon the opinion of a panel of
mostly British human-rights lawyers he had appointed to advise him, and
whom he used as a human shield for his claim that Israel had been
starving Gaza’s civilians, willfully killing them and obstructing
delivery of humanitarian aid.
These lawyers were described by the
prosecutor as “impartial.” However, they were anything but. Some had
associations with Palestinian causes; others had previously expressed
often virulent anti-Israel views.
One member of this panel was the lawyer
Baroness Helena Kennedy, a longtime radical-left campaigner and
honorary patron of the London-based charity, Medical Aid for
Palestinians.
Three weeks after the Oct. 7 pogrom,
Kennedy warned against “collective punishment” by Israel, referred to
the Gaza Strip as “being reduced to rubble” and accused Israel of
cutting off Gaza’s water supplies.
But her most disgusting statement was in a
speech she made on genocide in March. She told the House of Lords: “The
current conflict between Hamas and Israel follows decades of terrible
conduct, by both the IDF and Hamas, before, during and after 7 October.”
So in the view of this doyenne of “human
rights,” Israeli soldiers who desperately tried to fight off the Hamas
stormtroopers, even while they were continuing to perpetrate depraved
atrocities against Israeli women, children and men, were guilty of
“terrible conduct” in doing so.
It is hard to fathom the obscenity of such
a condemnation. Yet this moral bankruptcy was no one-off. Others in the
intellectual classes have been heard to issue exactly the same
condemnation of the Israelis for killing Hamas murderers on Oct. 7
itself.
In other words, Jews are not to be allowed
to defend themselves against genocidal attacks. Indeed, they are
actually condemned for doing so. More astoundingly still, the genocidal
attack has actually galvanized the global attempt to destroy Israel
altogether.
That’s what’s happened in Ireland, Norway
and Spain, which have said they will recognize a non-existent “State of
Palestine.” They are thus rewarding Hamas for its barbaric onslaught.
The message to all Palestinians is that slaughter, rape and
hostage-taking are their route to victory.
Unilateral recognition of “Palestine” is a
form of lawfare against Israel. And the principal motor behind lawfare
is “human rights” law.
This was developed in the middle of the
last century, largely by British lawyers, to protect Jews and other
minorities against tyrannical regimes that denied human rights. Yet in
the hands of politicized international courts, it has turned into a
weapon against the democratic Jewish state.
The “human rights” establishment—the United Nations, the ICC and the
International Court of Justice, and NGOs like Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International—has become a key weapon to demonize, delegitimize
and ultimately destroy Israel.
International “human rights”—the secular
religion of the left—is also an unquestioned dogma among so-called
conservatives who have gone along with anti-Western causes such as the
obsession with climate change, “white privilege” and support for the
Palestinian Arabs.
Britain’s foreign secretary, David
Cameron, is a conservative in this mold. In recent months, he has
accused Israel of killing too many civilians in Gaza, of deliberately
obstructing the supply of humanitarian aid and of not abiding by
international law. He has threatened to cut off the United Kingdom’s
(very small) supply of arms to Israel and even implied that the country
might unilaterally declare a Palestinian state.
This week, however, there was an abrupt
change of tone. In the House of Lords, Cameron not only roundly
condemned the ICC prosecutor’s move. He also softened his approach to
Israel. Urged again to suspend arms export licenses, he noted that just a
few days after the last time he was asked to do so, Iran attacked
Israel “with a hail of over 140 cruise missiles”.
Cameron isn’t an ideologue. With woolly
liberal ideals largely uninformed by factual evidence, he has generally
gone with the flow of fashionable consensus. Now, however, he may be
starting to realize that things are rather more complicated than he had
assumed.
He has apparently been taken aback by the
fierce reaction to his softer tone from within the Foreign Office, where
his officials are viscerally hostile to Israel and are currently
demanding that the government throw it to the wolves.
Moreover, in the wake of the U.N.’s
drastic reduction of its Hamas-dictated and falsely inflated numbers of
Gazan civilians killed in the war, Cameron has begun to realize that the
evidence he was given by his officials that fueled his threats against
Israel was fabricated.
Whether this signals a more general shift
towards Israel by Britain’s foreign secretary is now almost irrelevant.
For unless the Conservative Party somehow reverses the near-universal
contempt in which the public currently holds it, Labour leader Sir Keir
Starmer will become prime minister on July 5.
Although he is falling over himself to
reassure the Jewish community that he has now cut out the antisemitism
in the party associated with his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, few British
Jews believe him. Starmer may have purged Labour of the most egregious
offenders, but too many members of parliament and others in the party
remain viscerally anti-Israel.
Starmer will also be keen to appease the
Muslim community, which presages a harsher attitude towards Israel and
may also mean an unwillingness to tackle extremist imams or Muslim
antisemitism. The main problem, however, is that support for the
Palestinian cause serves as the defining foreign-policy issue for
progressive circles. This support drives Jew-hatred and a wish to
destroy Israel.
That’s because Palestinianism is itself
driven by Islamic Jew-hatred and is constructed entirely on the desire
to annihilate Israel, erase the history of the Jewish people in the land
and appropriate it for itself.
And that’s why the belief in the
“two-state solution” is itself such a lethal error. Its premise is that
the “Middle East conflict” is a dispute over the division of the land
between two peoples with legitimate claims to that land. But that is
simply wrong. The “conflict” is, in fact, a war of extermination waged
by the Palestinian Arabs against Israel’s existence, in which a state of
Palestine is to be a final solution to the existence of the Jewish
homeland.
The failure of America, Britain and Europe
to acknowledge this war of extermination has led to their sanitizing,
incentivizing and funding Palestinian terrorism. Without this backing,
the Palestinian cause and its terrorist strategy would not exist.
The requested arrest warrants and the
performative posturing over “Palestine” are all part of the pincer
movement of genocidal terror, brainwashed street insurrection and “human
rights” lawfare aimed at the destruction of Israel. And this infernal
process only exists because for decades, Britain, America and Europe
have willed it so.
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