Britain’s Betrayal of Israel

Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a moving speech to the Conservative Friends of Israel last month, praising the “true friendship” between her country and the Jewish state. Yet only a few weeks later the United Kingdom lent its support to the UN resolution condemning Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank and Jerusalem—whose wording, it seems, British diplomats helped to craft. Douglas Murray, rather than seeing pure contradiction between May’s words and the actions of her diplomats, finds a common thread in two “discordant notes” in the speech itself. The first was an awkward attempt to balance complaints about anti-Semitism with others about “Islamophobia.” As for the second:

[It] came when she mentioned Israeli settlement building. It was carefully placed in the speech, after a passage in which May congratulated her own Department for International Development Minister, Priti Patel. In the days [prior], Patel had announced . . . an investigation to determine whether British taxpayer money being sent to what May called “the Occupied Palestinian Territories” was being used to fund salaries for Palestinians convicted of terrorism offenses against Israelis. Following this, May said: “When talking about global obligations, we must be honest with our friends, like Israel, because that is what true friendship is about. That is why we have been clear about building new, illegal settlements: it is wrong; it is not conducive to peace; and it must stop.” . . .

[H]aving lavished praise on Israel, a castigation apparently seemed necessary. It is wrong, but hardly possible for a British prime minister currently to do otherwise. If there are terrorists receiving funds from British taxpayers thanks to the largesse of the UK government, then this may—after many years of campaigning by anti-terrorism organizations—finally be “investigated.” However, throughout any such investigation, the British government, while saying that it remains committed to a peace deal that comes as a result of direct negotiations between the two sides, has for years announced its own preconditions for peace: a freeze on the building of what it calls “settlements.” . . .

At the same time as the prime minister was talking about “true friendship” in front of friends of Israel, her government was conspiring with the outgoing Obama administration to kick that friend in the back. . . . The most obvious [response] is simply a reflection that friends do not kick friends in the back.

Read more at Gatestone

More about: Israel & Zionism, Settlements, Theresa May, United Kingdom, United Nations

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF