No one should be in the slightest doubt of the cowardly and hypocritical posturing of the joint declaration of France, the United Kingdom, and Canada last week about Israel and Gaza. The three powers promised strong measures if Israel did not immediately suspend its offensive in Gaza. Israel was blamed for inadequate distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza and admonished to entrust this activity to the United Nations. Everyone remotely acquainted with current conditions in Gaza knows that the United Nations is severely compromised and that the UNWRA is embedded with Hamas, and that Hamas steals most of the ample humanitarian assistance that Israel permits to enter Gaza. The three powers claim to have faithfully supported Israel’s “right to defend itself” after the October 7, 2023 invasion and massacres by Hamas, and they claimed that only an immediate cease-fire could end the war, end Hamas’ governance of Gaza, and put the region on the pathway to a two-state solution. All of these assertions are completely false, and the officials responsible for this declaration and the governments of the three countries that made it must have known that they are false.
All three governments joined the almost universal opinion that the barbarous violation of the existing cease-fire by Hamas, caused by the prospect of a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the brutal massacre of civilians, including many women and children and elderly people, was, in the abstract, a bad thing. The formula that was settled upon for most of the Western countries including the late Biden administration in the United States, was to swaddle their cowardice and ambiguity in apparent self-righteous purposefulness, by stating, as this communique did last week, that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” In practice, what this meant was that Israel has a right to expel terrorist invaders from its territory but has practically no right at all to take retributive measures that might reasonably be hoped to make repetitions of such horrifying outrages less likely. It is like solemnly guaranteeing freedom of expression, while prosecuting anyone who exercises that right.
Most of the world, with the conspicuous exceptions of the United States and a few other countries, are unable to see the October 7, 2023 atrocities as other than another border incident in a long dispute. It is now a truism that the British, in 1917, before they had any authority over the area and when it was still governed by Turkey, promised the same territory simultaneously to the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, the equivalent in international affairs of selling the same real estate to two different parties simultaneously.
Logically, which is not always an applicable method of reasoning in Middle Eastern matters, the solution has always been a division of the territory into two parts, one for each of the parties to which the territory had been promised. Israel has been in principle disposed to such a solution for more than 25 years. The root of the continuing problem is the refusal of the most influential Arabs in what is that part of the old Palestine Mandate not governed by Israel, to refuse to recognise the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. This attitude persists even though it was as a Jewish state that Israel was specifically created out of the old League of Nations mandate, with total legitimacy, by the United Nations in 1948 on the joint motion of the Soviet Union and the United States, and this motion was ratified in the Security Council and the General Assembly. The five permanent members of the Security Council officially founded the United Nations, and the other initial members were co-founders, and scores of other countries have joined since, but only Israel was created by the United Nations itself specifically from its continuing authority as the successor to the League of Nations as a state which it consecrated and recognized at its founding. Though it was not part of the original declaration of the existence of the State of Israel, it was known to the whole world and a sentiment shared by most of the world that this was the least the world could do for the Jews after half of the entire worldwide population of that creative and distinguished people had been massacred in the preceding decade on the most barbarous scale and in the most hideous circumstances in all of human history.
As eminent British military historian Andrew Roberts has pointed out, despite a deafening counter-propaganda which has been credulously accepted by most of the Western media, the Israeli Defense Forces have conducted operations in Gaza in a way that has produced one of the lowest ratios in reliably recorded history in urban counter-guerrilla warfare of civilian to military casualties. The world is accustomed to propagandistic appeasement of terrorists and particularly to craven hypocrisy and moral relativism about anti-Semitism masquerading as unbiased criticism of the conduct of the state of Israel. But for these three countries, long formally the closest allies of the United States in support of democratic and civil rights in the world and at least philosophical opposition to terrorism, effectively to side with the most odious and murderous ragtag of terrorists anywhere against a democratic state that is the continuator of the ancient and very often tragic struggle for survival and security of the Jewish people, is a disgrace.
Shame on the United Kingdom, on France, and on Canada.
European attitude to Israel shows moral rot among leaders