On the morning after the Royal Wedding…
An open letter to the British Prime Minister
By Stuart Littlewood
Dear Prime Minister,
I see your image is splashed across the main page of the Conservative Friends of Israel website and your words warmly endorse that country and its regime.
CONSERVATIVE FRIEND OF ISRAEL
Your loyal lieutenant, the foreign secretary William Hague, cancelled the Syrian ambassador’s Royal Wedding invitation, not that I disagree with such a move. However, the Syrians are only slaughtering their own people whereas the Israelis have been slaughtering their neighbours for 63 years in much larger numbers and continue to do so on a daily basis.
The words Dr Mohamed Khodr uses in his petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/p181p194/petition.html to the UN Secretary General and the Security Council calling for a No-Fly Zone over Gaza describe the appalling situation in the Holy Land excellently well…
For 44 years of Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, the world has been complicit with this illegal occupation in its silence to the suffering, death, injury, home demolitions, imprisonment and torture of civilians, constant confiscation of Palestinian land to build illegal settlements that now house over 500,00 settlers, the Judaization of Jerusalem, destruction of mosques and excavation of Muslim cemeteries, theft of fourth fifths of the water supply to the Palestinians, settler violence, no freedom of movement, the presence of hundreds of humiliating checkpoints, closure of schools and universities at whim, prohibition of Palestinian Muslims and Christians outside of Jerusalem to pray at their Holy Sites, the construction of a “Separation” Fence that confiscates more Palestinian land and divides villages and families, and the outrageous siege of Gaza’s 1.5 million people for 4 years that has led to a deteriorating economy, high unemployment, mass poverty, malnutrition of children, death of civilians due to lack of adequate health care, food, clean water supplies, widespread mental and psychological illness, especially among traumatized children, and thousands of destroyed homes from “Operation Cast Lead” that Palestinians are unable to be rebuild due to Israel’s prohibition of entry of cement and construction materials.
No other nation on earth could commit these “war crimes” for such a lengthy time without an enraged world acting immediately to end the illegal occupation and suffering of millions of Palestinian refugees in and out of the Occupied territories.
Throughout its history Israel has defied the UN Charter, hundreds of UN resolutions, international laws and the Fourth Geneva Convention, nor has it ever accepted US, EU and Quartet peace initiatives, nor the Arab Peace Plan of 2002 that met all of Israel’s “peace” demands.
Israel has never accepted or cooperated with any International investigation into its atrocities against Palestinian civilians, nor has it ever been held accountable for its history of war crimes against the Palestinians that continue till this day.
On April 2006 the U.N. Security Council affirmed the principle of “Responsibility to Protect” against four crimes: genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity… “If a State is manifestly failing to protect its citizens from mass atrocities and peaceful measures are not working, the international community has the responsibility to intervene at first diplomatically, then more coercively, and as a last resort, with military force.”
Under International Law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel is considered the “occupying power” and thus the sovereign state responsible for protecting Palestinian civilians, the principle and norm of the “Responsibility to Protect” is applicable to Israel.
Israel, as you must know, Mr Prime Minister, was founded on terror and thrives on land theft, ethnic cleansing and aggression. True to form, your friends in Tel Aviv now respond to the news of unity between democratically elected Hamas and rivals Fatah in the Occupied Territories with dire threats. It crosses a “a red line”, says foreign minister Lieberman who talks of taking an array of measures against the Palestinian Authority, such as preventing free movement for Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad and freezing (again) the transfer of taxes collected by Israel for the PA.
Netanyahu. I hear, warns that Abbas must “choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas” – as if peace has ever been possible with Israel – while Ehud Barak as usual is all for using the “iron fist”.
You told the Conservative Friends of Israel: “The ties between this party and Israel are unbreakable. And in me, you have a Prime Minister whose belief in Israel is indestructible.”
And you recently told a Jewish audience: “I want to be clear, we will always support Israel… when Iran flouts its international obligations Britain is and will remain at the forefront of the international community in ratcheting up the pressure with tough sanctions. We will not stand by and allow Iran to cast a nuclear shadow over Israel or the wider region.”
Is this not an irresponsible thing to say when it is Israel which casts the nuclear shadow, menaces the region and flouts international obligations? You seem keen to make Israel’s enemies Britain’s enemies when we have no quarrel with them. In which case how can it be in our national interest to ratchet-up anything?
James Arbuthnot, chairman of the Defence Select Committee and Parliamentary chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel – a dangerous conflict of responsibilities if ever there was one – has said: “Everyone in this House should have an interest in Israel, because it is a country that embodies the values that we should stand for. Israel [has] become a bastion of the rule of law…”
The strenuous efforts by your administration to shield and cosset Israel make us all complicit in that regime’s crimes – that is how the rest of the world sees it.
How does this devotion to a foreign military power square with the Seven Principles of Public Life which your government is supposed to uphold, especially the Principle of Integrity? This lays down that holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organizations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.
If the Israel lobby has no influence, how do you explain the claim that 80 percent of Conservative MPs are Friends of Israel? How do you explain the appointment of a Foreign Secretary who has been a Friend of Israel since boyhood and a minister in charge of Middle East affairs who is a former officer of the Conservative Friends of Israel?
And why is our Prime Minister, of all people, a patron of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that stands accused of racist land practices?
Your parliamentary colleague, Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Jew whose family suffered horribly during the Holocaust, knows the Israeli regime for what it really is… “They’re not simply war criminals, they’re fools”. He calls Israel itself a “pariah state”.
After the Israelis’ Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in which they slaughtered 1400 mostly civilians including hundreds of children, the decent thing, surely, would have been to immediately shut down the Friends of Israel movement. “My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza,” observed Kaufman.
But for the Friends of Israel, and the political parties that harbour them, it’s been business as usual. After all, what’s a little wholesale slaughter between “friends”?
I write this on the day of the Royal Wedding – a day that’s supposed to make us intensely proud to be British. The bride came into Westminster Abbey as plain Miss Middleton and left as Duchess of Cambridge and Countess of Strathearn and a senior member of a glittering royal family. Such fairy-tale dreams can only come true in England.
You. of course, were at the wedding. As you sat in the Abbey, with its thousand-year history, soaking up the pageantry and splendor and humming along to the anthem “Jerusalem”, did it not cross your mind that in the Holy Land your Israeli friends prevent Palestinian Christians and Muslims from visiting and worshiping at their holy places, many of which are older than Westminster? Thanks to the failure of the international community to discharge its responsibilities their most modest dreams of basic freedoms have remained at the fairy-tale level for decades.
Basking in the glory of this great Royal occasion, as we all are, you’re no doubt feeling extremely British right now, Mr Prime Minister. But true Britishness includes a fearless sense of fairness and justice. The question is, are you British enough to snap your fingers at the evil and unjust Israeli regime?
Stuart Littlewood Photographer and Journalist
Stuart Littlewood is a marketing specialist turned writer-photographer in the UK. His articles are published widely on the web. He is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.Read Full Bio
Answer to your question: No, he is not British nor man enough.
Just finished reading an exquisite novel by the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni. Comments should be brief so I won’t mention all the brilliant facets of this work of art, but merely provide a bit of context so that readers may understand this reverie of Veltroni’s main character.
“The Discovery of Dawn” is the story of Giovanni Astegno who, in his middle years, still seeks to understand why his father disappeared in 1977, the era of Italy’s Red Brigade, when Giovanni was just 13 years old.
Among the reasons Giovanni considers is that his father was targeted by the mob and left to protect his son and the boy’s mother.
The reverie:
“When I got home I remembered, shortly before falling asleep, . . .how Uncle Giorgio . . .told me, with a very proud tone, “Always remember that in life you only need to do mone thing: Stand up straight.” Those words have stuck with me ever since. And they’ve inspired deep respect in me for two types of people–those who have principles, and those who are on their way out. Or, more precisely, those who stick to their principles, even when the going gets risky or dangerous, and those who dismount from their horse with dignity, without protesting, without shouting. The first type I’ve encountered in many books, and also in [many records of real lives]. Some of them merely claimed to have principles; they were the worst. But others had truly followed a path of denial so as not to betray their own values.
“There was a time–in fact, not just one–when everyone said yes. But at some point someone very simply said, “I would rather not.” I admire such small acts of courage, the kind that are found on the front lines of battle, where lives are risked and lost. Acts that are like closing a door forever behind oneself, acts undertaken solely out of principle. During the Fascist regime there were twelve professors who had the courage to refuse to take the loyalty oath. They did this without any show, with unassuming simplicity. One of them in particular had a huge impact on me. This was Professor Bartolo Nigrisoli, who held the chair of surgery at the University of Bologna. He had already declined the nomination to senatorship that had been enthusiastically proposed by a Monsignor in the Church, saying, “Please take my name off the list; I don’t wish to have any part in this honor for a number of reasons: in part, because I do not deserve it, but also because my beliefs are in total opposition to all that it represents.” But the gesture that I most admired of his was another. The day on which the Faculty of Medicine was abuzz with the news that Professor Nigrisoli had refused to sign the loyalty oath and had consequently been removed from his chair, he came into the large classroom. There he was received with a courageous ovation from students and teachers, which he cut short, requesting them to “Stop immediately, for otherwise I will walk out this instant and never return.”
“A simple “no.” A willingness to give up everything in order to preserve an invisible link with one’s own core values.”
Vittorio Arrigoni, riposi in pace.
Mr Cameron, can you say No?
Watching the William/Kate ceremony at Westminster Abbey where God was mentioned so many times, I found it absurbed that William and others wore a military uniform. Of course the military has nothing to do with God. Anyone who has followed the British Empire will note that the indignous people’s rights of conquerred areas were never respected. The US government unfortunately follows the same path.