Re: Ms Berlanty Azzam (I.D. 801158791)

Ms Azzam is a Gaza resident who is staying in the West Bank illegally. Ms Azzam held a permit to stay in the West Bank for 4 days in 2005 and since the permit has expired has been residing in the West Bank illegally.

As you probably know, every Gaza resident who stays in the West Bank requires a permit, failing to do so is a breach of the law. As Ms Azzam has failed to provide a valid permit she was deported back to Gaza. If Ms Azzam wishes to complete her studies in Bethlehem University, she will need to submit her application to the relevant authorities (COGAT) in Gaza where they will be processed.

Sincerely yours,

Ms Ma’ayan, Israeli Public Affairs Department
Embassy of Israel
2 Palace Green
London W8 4QB
Tel: +44-(0)207-957-9541
Fax: +44-(0)207-957-9555
Email: Public@london.mfa.gov.il

Berlanty was resident in the West Bank since 2005 and all that time resisted the temptation to return home to Gaza to see her folks. If her permit expired in 2005 why did the Israelis wait to ‘discover’ this fact just 2 months before she was due to graduate?

What the embassy tells me does not tally with what the University has been told. In an update issued today Bethlehem University management reports:

• On Tuesday, 3 November 2009 the lawyers at Gisha were informed that the state of Israel claims that Berlanty has no right to be at Bethlehem University – to be in the West Bank. However, Berlanty did not need a permit to remain in the West Bank after entering, and no such kind of permit existed in 2005, so she couldn’t have requested one. Berlanty only needed the Israeli permit to cross through Israel from Gaza to the West Bank, which she received.
• The Israeli High Court of Justice will hold another court hearing on Berlanty’s case next Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 9:00am to have the Israeli military to further explain why Berlanty was removed from Bethlehem to Gaza.
• In their response to the court, the Israeli state admits that a “mistake” was made in removing Berlanty on the night of Wednesday, 28 October 2009. Orders were given by the legal adviser’s office not to do it. It was done anyway and still they refuse to return her to her studies at Bethlehem University.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are internationally recognized as one integral territory. The embassy’s explanation is at odds with the contention by Birzeit (another West Bank university) that similar action by Israel against a number of Birzeit students from Gaza was “in clear violation of the fundamental human right to education, the right to freedom of movement and the right to choose one’s place of residence within a single territory, in accordance with internationally accepted standards of human rights law”.

I’m not a lawyer, but it would be nice to hear a legal expert explain what authority Israel has for its bloody-minded and cruel conduct towards hard-working students.

They killed 952 Palestinian kiddies in their homeland between 2000 and the start of the Gaza blitzkrieg in December 2008 (according to B’Tselem statistics). They murdered at least 350 more during their Cast Lead onslaught and have kept Gaza under daily attack ever since. So the brave Israelis must have eliminated nearly 1400 youngsters by now. Would anyone care to guess how many they left bleeding, maimed and crippled?

The “most moral army in the world” also loves waging war against Palestinian university students. Not long ago I wrote about Merna, an honors student in her final year majoring in English. Israeli soldiers frequently rampaged through her Bethlehem refugee camp in the middle of the night, ransacking homes and arbitrarily arresting residents. They took away her family one by one. First her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while she sat outside her family home during a curfew.

Next the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22 year-old artist, and imprisoned him for 4 years. Then they came back for Merna’s 18-year-old brother. Not content with that the military came again, this time to take her youngest brother – the ‘baby’ of the family – just 16. These were the circumstances under which Merna had to study.

Israeli military law treats Palestinians as adults as soon as they reach 16, a flagrant violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Israeli youngsters, of course, are regarded as children until 18. Palestinians are dealt with by Israeli military courts, even when it’s a civil matter. These courts ignore international laws and conventions, so there’s no legal protection for individuals under Israeli military occupation.

As detention is based on secret information, which neither the detainee nor his lawyer is allowed to see, it is impossible to mount a proper defence. Besides, the Security Service always finds a bogus excuse to keep detainees locked up “in the greater interest of the security of Israel”. Although detainees have the right to review and appeal, they are unable to challenge the evidence and check facts as all information presented to the Court is classified. So much for Israeli ‘justice’.

Faced with this mounting mental stress Merna, far from giving up, determined to carry on with her studies. The most moral army in the world may have robbed her brothers of an education, but she would still fight for hers.

To get to Bethlehem University, or any other, many students have to run the gauntlet of Israeli checkpoints. “Sometimes they take our ID cards and they spend ages writing down all the details, just to make us late,” said one. Students are often made to remove shoes, belt and bags. “It’s like an airport. Many times we are kept waiting outside for up to an hour, rain or shine, they don’t care.” The soldiers attempt to forcibly remove students’ clothes and they swear and shout sexual slurs at female students.

Some tell how they are sexually harassed on their way to university and spend the rest of the day worrying what the Israelis will do to them on their way home. The constant humiliation undermines student motivation and concentration.

Five years ago the Israelis forcibly removed four Birzeit University students from their studies in the West Bank and illegally sent them back to the Gaza Strip. All four were due to graduate by the end of that academic year. There was an outcry from around the world and the Israeli Army Legal Advisor was bombarded with faxes and letters demanding that the students be allowed to return to their studies.

The world’s most moral army agreed that the students might be allowed to return to Birzeit if they signed a guarantee to permanently return to the Gaza Strip after completing their studies. This effectively exposed Israel’s policy to impose a final separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, even though the two are internationally recognized as one integral territory. Under international law everyone has the right to freely choose their place of residence within a single territory, but since when did Israel give a damn about international law? The racist regime makes it virtually impossible for Gaza students to reach the eight Palestinian universities in the West Bank. In 1999 some 350 Gaza students were studying at Birzeit. Today there are almost none.

It was no great surprise, then, to hear from Bethlehem University a few days ago that Berlanty Azzam, a 4th year Business Administration student, was being held in detention by the Israeli military authorities with the intention of deporting her to Gaza “for trying to complete her studies at Bethlehem University.”

Berlanty, a Christian girl, is originally from Gaza but has lived in the West Bank since 2005 after receiving a travel permit from the military to cross from Gaza to the West Bank. She too is being robbed of her degree at the last minute. She was detained at the Container checkpoint between Bethlehem and Ramallah after attending a job interview in Ramallah.

The 21 year-old was due to graduate before Christmas. On Wednesday night the “” blindfolded and handcuffed her, loaded her into a military jeep and drove her from Bethlehem to Gaza, despite assurances by the Israeli Military Legal Advisor’s office that she would not be deported before an attorney from Gisha (an Israeli NGO working to protect Palestinians’ freedom of movement) had the opportunity to petition the Israeli court for her return to classes in Bethlehem.

When they’d crossed the border the world’s most moral army dumped Berlanty in the darkness late at night and told her: “You are in Gaza.”

“Since 2005, I refrained from visiting my family in Gaza for fear that I would not be permitted to return to my studies in the West Bank,” Berlanty told Gisha on her mobile phone before the soldiers confiscated it. “Now, just two months before graduation, I was arrested and taken to Gaza in the middle of the night, with no way to finish my degree.”

Bethlehem University wants to mobilize people from around the world to protest. Who better to contact, I thought, than the Palestinian ambassador in London, Professor Manuel Hassassian, who happens to be a former vice-president of that excellent seat of learning? “Have you contacted the Israeli ambassador for an explanation to this outrage?” I emailed him.

Next day, having heard nothing, I emailed again: “Update… She has been removed to Gaza blindfolded and handcuffed! What is the Embassy doing about this please?” Another 24 hours have gone by and the silence is deafening. Still, it’s not unusual for the Palestinian embassy to be fast asleep, out to lunch or off on holiday and no-one covering.

I had of course simultaneously emailed the Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor asking him, please, to make enquiries. “On the face of it, this seems a senseless outrage. The student concerned has, I believe, just started her final year. I wonder what Mr Prosor or Mr Netanyahu would say if the education of their sons and daughters or grandchildren was disrupted in this manner.” And next day, having heard nothing, I sent the same update about Berlanty being blindfolded and handcuffed. Another 24 hours have passed… silence here too; not even the courtesy of an acknowledgement from Israel’s press office, which usually responds like lightning to anything with news value.

If this had been a Jewish girl deprived of her university degree and life chances Israeli embassies around the world would be instantly on the warpath hurling accusations of religious hatred and anti-semitism. But it’s the Jewish state screwing up the young life of a Christian, so that’s alright then.

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

“Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

“Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.”

Substitute American for Iranian and it begins to make sense.

“In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza… We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.”

Defenceless Gazans know all about nightmares. Israel, camped on their doorstep and still occupying Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters, lobs high explosives into the tiny enclave’s 1.5 million starving civilians, and there’s no escape.

“There is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

The Nazis launched sophisticated rockets with huge destructive power at London and Southern England from territory they had invaded and occupied. They weren’t firing makeshift missiles built in a garden shed to defend their homeland.

“Israel… tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.”

How considerate. But where were Gaza’s terrified civilians supposed to run to? Into the sea? Bombing their homes was the ultimate terror act. There’s no excuse.

“…If Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.”

What exactly are these “risks for peace” Israel has so bravely taken? In 61 years what peace dividends has Israel’s risk-taking delivered?

The pot calls the kettle black

Netanyahu has a rare genius for irony, except that he himself doesn’t see it. That’s what makes him such a comedian. The irony of what he says is totally lost on him. Nearly every offensive remark he makes about Iran and Palestine can be flung back in his face because Israel is no better and in most respects far worse. Netanyahu’s speech to the UN was the most hilarious example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

His scriptwriters evidently feed off the Zionists’ propaganda training manual, which teaches the art of lying and distortion and how to sugar-coat it all for easy swallowing by gullible audiences. Notice how everything Israel dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”… and how everyone else, too, is in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in Israel’s axis of aggression. Also note how situations are defined in language that suit only Israel’s case.

Less amusing is Netanyahu’s arrogant rejection of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report condemning Israel’s conduct.

By these twisted standards… [they] would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… Will you accept this farce? If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us — my people, my country — of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

The false choice in that last sentence is a propaganda favourite. Why would anyone with any sense wish to stand alongside either?

And how dare Netanyahu equate Roosevelt and Churchill’s epic struggle against the rampaging Nazis with Israel’s brutal crushing of Palestinian resistance against the illegal occupation of the Holy Land?

What has the UN come to when a regime that is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty can call on the world’s nations to gang up against another country for starting its own nuclear programme? Israel itself refuses to submit to inspection and poses an alarming nuclear threat. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either, nor the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And is it not an insult to everyone’s intelligence to hear the UN being lambasted by the leader of a regime that is in open defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions?

The UN Human Rights Council is due to debate the Goldstone report today, when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted on. There are fears that the British government plans to reject the report’s key recommendations. If that’s the case and others follow suit, Israel will be let off the hook and allowed to continue its crime spree.

It will hand Israel’s comic genius a personal triumph. The Zionist network will no doubt show their gratitude in the usual way.

Lewis said: “It is particularly regrettable that he [Livingstone] learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation. Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza”.

Perhaps they aren’t paying attention at the Foreign Office. The only people breaching international law in the Holy Land and violating the rights of Palestinians are the lawless Israelis.

As the MP for Bury South, near Manchester, and a former vice-chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, Lewis voted enthusiastically for the Iraq war and against any investigation. In January, with the stench of death and destruction caused by Israel’s blitzkrieg on Gaza still in the world’s nostrils, he told a rally in Manchester: “This community stands shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel in the good and the bad times. We do not apply double standards to Israel and the challenges that she faces. It’s the first duty of any government in any democracy to protect the security of its citizens. No government in a democracy would survive if it allowed rockets to be fired from a neighbouring territory on to its civilian population and did nothing in response.”

He told the crowd that those who fired rockets “are no different to the terrorists who created murderous carnage in London on 7/7.”

Even by the standards of today’s political class, it is pretty stupid to pledge Manchester’s support to a vicious, racist regime like Israel, and claim equivalence between the perpetrators of the London bombings and a poorly armed resistance movement desperately trying to defend its 1.5 million citizens under blockade and daily bombardment by an illegal occupier.

In July Lewis told the House of Commons: “Israel is a close ally of the UK and we have regular warm and productive exchanges at all levels.” Warm, no doubt, with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) and thousands more maimed and wounded.

Lewis is also chief executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Along with Miliband, he is the unfortunate face of British diplomacy in the Middle East.

A victory for truth and common sense

Lewis claims Livingstone’s conversation with Meshaal, published in the New Statesman, was a propaganda coup for Hamas. Actually the interview was a victory for truth and common sense. The Hamas chief was able to speak openly and, for once, be heard in the British media.

One of the functions of a Zionist stooge is to condemn remarks by anyone they brand a terrorist or belonging to a terrorist organisation. But nobody buys that terrorist nonsense any more. Few people in the UK, apart from Israel’s hirelings, regard Hamas or Meshaal as terrorists. The general public have come to realise that the racist regime in Tel Aviv, of which Lewis is a devoted fan, tops the terror league.

Meshaal made it clear in the interview that Hamas, since it was formed 22 years ago, has confined its military operations to occupied Palestine. He explained the conflict simply and concisely. “Our struggle against the Israelis is not because they are Jewish, but because they invaded our homeland and dispossessed us. We do not accept that because the Jews were once persecuted in Europe they have the right to take our land and throw us out.

“The injustices suffered by the Jews in Europe were horrible and criminal, but were not perpetrated by the Palestinians or the Arabs or the Muslims. So, why should we be punished for the sins of others or be made to pay for their crimes?”

Asked how many elected representatives of Hamas were locked up in Israeli prisons, he replied that around 4,000 members were in Israeli detention out of a total of 12,000 Palestinian captives. “These include scores of ministers and parliamentarians (Palestinian Legislative Council members). Around ten have recently been released, but about 40 PLC members remain in detention. Some have been given sentences, but many are held in what the Israelis call administrative detention. The only crime these people are accused of is their association with Hamas’s parliamentary group.”

Will no-one offer a truce that lifts the blockade and opens the crossings?

Livingstone asked how the blockade of Gaza could be lifted. “The rule of international law must be respected,” replied Meshaal. “The basic human rights of the Palestinians and their right to live in dignity and free from persecution would have to be acknowledged. There has to be an international will to serve justice and uphold the basic principles of international human rights law. The international community would have to free itself from the shackles of Israeli pressure, speak the truth and act accordingly.”

Not a problem for honourable men, surely. But honour is not to be found among those who are bought and paid for.

What was the true cause of the bombing and invasion of Gaza, Livingstone wanted to know. Meshaal referred to the truce with Israel from 19 June to 19 December 2008. The deal entailed a bilateral ceasefire, lifting the blockade and opening the crossings. Hamas observed the ceasefire while Israel only partially did so and then resumed hostilities. “Throughout that period, Israel maintained the siege and only intermittently opened some of the crossings, allowing no more than 10 per cent of the basic needs of the Gazan population to get through.”

Israel blew any chance of renewing the truce by deliberately and repeatedly violating it.

As soon as Hamas is offered a truce that lifts the blockade and opens the crossings, said Meshaal, they will respond positively. So far, no one had made such an offer. Meanwhile the blockade amounted to “a declaration of war that warrants self-defence”.

Livingstone put it to him that Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel was an insurmountable obstacle to peace. “Israel does not recognise the rights of the Palestinian people,” came the reply, “yet this is not raised as an obstacle to Israel being internationally recognised nor to it being allowed to take part in talks.” He pointed out that both Arafat and Abbas recognised Israel but it hadn’t produced peace dividends. “Israel concedes only under pressure.” In the absence of any tangible pressure by the international community, there could be no settlement.

Challenged to clarify whether Hamas wished to establish an Islamic state in Palestine, Meshaal replied that their priority as a national liberation movement was to end the Israeli occupation of their homeland. “Once our people are free in their land and enjoy the right to self-determination, they alone have the final say on what system of governance they wish to live under. It is our firm belief that Islam cannot be imposed on the people.” However, Hamas would campaign for an Islamic agenda as part of the democratic process.

Implementing international law and human rights is the only solution

Does anyone seriously have a problem with the interview or the fact that it took place? It contains nothing to justify hysterical outbursts from the likes of Lewis. The exchanges showed Meshaal to be articulate and moderate in his language. But this doesn’t fit with the demonized picture carefully painted by Zionist propagandists, and it is easy to see why Israel and its chums wish to keep him isolated and muzzled.

As Meshaal pointed out, the conflict can only be resolved by implementing international law and the human rights charter, and putting pressure on Israel. Deep down, everyone knows that. But such a reminder is unwelcome because it requires action of the kind that would embarrass the major powers, whose leaders foolishly pledged undying loyalty to the Zionist entity and have turned a blind eye to its criminal behaviour for 60 years.

The spectacle of the US House of Representatives voting 404 to 1 to condemn the Palestinians’ makeshift rocket attacks while saying nothing about Israel’s assassinations, ethnic cleansing and military assaults with the most modern weapons, killing women and children in their hundreds, gave us a glimpse of what passes for democracy in the ‘Land of the Free’.

Netanyhu is now trumpeting louder than ever his determination to reject all codes of civilised conduct and continue the crime spree, believing he can do so with impunity. He pushes his luck too far. Obama may cave in but for decency’s sake, and for justice and reason, it is time the rest of us consigned that ridiculous pledge by the west to the wastepaper basket.

Obama meets Netanyahu and Abbas today. Let’s hope he remembers what the man said about implementing international law and upholding human rights. The idea is for Obama to free himself from Israeli pressure and turn the screws on Netanyahu, not the other way round. The idea is to show that there are serious consequences for lawlessness.

It’s a clever document

The manual teaches how to justify the slaughter, the ethnic cleansing, the land-grabbing, the cruelty and the blatant disregard for international law and UN resolutions, and make it all smell sweeter with a liberal squirt of the aerosol of persuasive language. It is designed to hoodwink us ignorant and gullible Americans and Europeans into believing that we actually share values with the racist regime in Israel and that its abominable behaviour is therefore deserving of our support.

Israel is hoping for a PR massacre. The other side — the Palestinian Authority and the PLO — don’t take communications seriously and have neglected to correct Israeli distortion. They are happy, it seems, for Israel’s one-sided definitions to prevail, which of course makes the task for Israel so much easier. This latest propaganda offensive is potentially the ‘coup de grace’ to finish off the tormented Palestinians.

And the manual will no doubt serve as a communications primer for the army of cyber-scribblers that Israel’s Ministry of Dirty Tricks is recruiting to spread Zionism’s poison across the internet.

This quote at the beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

Top priority: demonise Hamas

The manual’s numerous messages are aimed at the mass of “persuadables”, primarily in America but also in the UK. The strategy from the start is to isolate democratically-elected Hamas and to rob the resistance movement and the Palestinian population of their human rights….

Clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There is an immediate and clear distinction between the empathy Americans feel for the Palestinians and the scorn they direct at Palestinian leadership. Hamas is a terrorist organization – Americans get that already. But if it sounds like you are attacking the Palestinian people (even though they elected Hamas) rather than their leadership, you will lose public support. Right now, many Americans sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, and that sympathy will increase if you fail to differentiate the people from their leaders.

The plight of the Palestinians under Israel’s heel was an international concern long before Hamas appeared on the scene.

But this scorning of leaders is familiar ground. We scorned Bush and Blair and had to differentiate between them and their respective peoples. We now have to do the same with Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. We are tired of having to make that same differentiation between the Israeli people and the dreadful leaders they produce.

ISRAEL’S RIGHT TO DEFENSIBLE BORDERS: With more than three years of violent history since Israel’s agreement to withdraw from Gaza and portions of the West Bank, Americans have had time to take stock of the situation and form opinions. The big picture: they believe that Hamas’ leadership of Gaza has made Israel and the region less safe, while some are more receptive to what they perceive as a moderate approach in the West Bank by Mahmoud Abbas. Based on these experiences, they are willing to grant Israel more leeway in resisting calls to give more land for more peace.

Here we clearly see the motive for demonising Hamas….Israel wants more leeway to continue its land-grabs and other criminal activities.

If… If… If…Then.”: Put the burden on Hamas to make the first move for peace by using If’s (and don’t forget to finish with a hard then to show Israel is a willing peace partner). “If Hamas reforms… If Hamas recognize our right to exist… If Hamas renounces terrorism… If Hamas supports international peace agreements… then we are willing to make peace today.

How daft can you get? Substitute Israel for Hamas.

Words that work

The manual sets out numerous examples of “words that work” — supposedly.

We know that the Palestinians deserve leaders who will care about the well being of their people, and who do not simply take hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance from America and Europe, put them in Swiss bank accounts, and use them to support terror instead of peace.

No mention here of the billions of tax dollars Israel takes from the US and spends on munitions to obliterate and vaporize its neighbours.

Peace can only be made with adversaries who want to make peace with you. Terrorist organizations like Iran-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are, by definition, opposed to peaceful co-existence, and determined to prevent reconciliation. I ask you, how do you negotiate with those who want you dead?

Hamas and Hezbollah are only regarded as terrorists by the White House and Tel Aviv and by US-Israeli stooges and flag-wavers at Westminster and elsewhere.

In Executive Order 13224 – BLOCKING PROPERTY AND PROHIBITING TRANSACTIONS WITH PERSONS WHO COMMIT, THREATEN TO COMMIT, OR SUPPORT TERRORISM – Bush used this definition: “The term “terrorism” means an activity that —

(i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and

(ii) appears to be intended —

(A) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;

(B) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or

(C) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.”

It describes the antics of the US and Israel perfectly.

There is NEVER, EVER, any justification for the deliberate slaughter of innocent women and children. NEVER…. there is one fundamental principle that all peoples from all parts of the globe will agree on: civilized people do not target innocent women and children for death.

Fine words, but where does that leave Israel, which recently killed 320 children in Gaza and 773 civilians including 109 women? From the start of the second Intifada (uprising against the Israeli occupation) in 2000 to the end of last year Israel had slaughtered 4,936 Palestinians in their homeland, including 952 children, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. In the same period Palestinians killed 490 Israelis in Israel including only 84 children. So Israel’s kill-rate is at least 10 to 1, and rising since the blitzkrieg on Gaza.

Iran-backed or US-backed – take your pick

Use humility. ‘I know that in trying to defend its children and citizens from terrorists that Israel has accidentally hurt innocent people. I know it, and I’m sorry for it. But what can Israel do to defend itself? If America had given up land for peace – and that land had been used for launching rockets at America, what would America do? Israel was attacked with thousands of rockets from Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. What should Israel have done to protect her children?’

Palestinians too have a right to defend themselves. Hamas was the popular choice of Palestinians at the last election and is entitled under international law to take up arms against an illegal occupier and invader. If it is supported by Iran, so what? Israel is extravagantly funded and supplied by the US. Here’s part of their begging-bowl “Military Aid Speech”….

Israel makes the request for military assistance out of self-defense. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect our borders. As a democracy, they have the right and the responsibility to protect their citizens.

Israel does not ask for U.S. troops to protect itself. It does not ask for a single American soldier to protect its borders. It only asks for the funds for them to protect themselves. They need the equipment so that their own troops can ensure the safety of their civilian population through this gathering conflict with the enemies of democracy.

They didn’t ask to have our nation built in range of Iranian missiles. They didn’t ask that their nation be a focal point for religious extremists who have declared war on the West and on democracy.

But they are, and they need your help.

And here’s the rationale behind it….

Americans fundamentally believe that a democracy has a right to protect its people and its borders. And while Americans don’t want to increase foreign aid in a time of significant budgetary deficits and painful spending cuts, there is one and only one argument that will work for Israel (in four easy steps):

1) As a democracy, Israel has the right and the responsibility to defend its borders and protect its people.

2) Terrorist groups, including Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to pose a direct threat to Israeli security and have repeatedly taken innocent Israeli lives.

3) Israel is America’s one and only true ally in the region. In these particularly unstable and dangerous times, Israel should not be forced to go it alone.

4) With America’s financial assistance, Israel can defend its borders, protect its people, and provide invaluable assistance to the American effort against the war against terrorism.

It’s evident that Americans don’t believe in democracy enough to allow Palestinian democracy to flourish.

“When the terror ends, Israel will no longer need to have challenging checkpoints to inspect goods and people. When the terror ends we will no longer need a security fence.”

There are no rockets coming out of the West Bank, so why is the security fence still there – and still being built? Why are the occupation troops still there? Why are hundreds of checkpoints still there? Why is Israel still stealing land, demolishing Palestinian homes and building settlements there?

Remind people – again and again – that Israel wants peace.

Reason One: If Americans see no hope for peace—if they only see a continuation of a 2,000-year-long episode of “Family Feud”—Americans will not want their government to spend tax dollars or their President’s clout on helping Israel.

Reason Two: The speaker that is perceived as being most for PEACE will win the

debate. Every time someone makes the plea for peace, the reaction is positive. If you want to regain the public relations advantage, peace should be at the core of whatever message you wish to convey.

Israel does NOT want peace. It has never met its peace agreement obligations. Every action is directed at keeping the conflict going until the Israelis have stolen enough land and established enough ‘facts on the ground’ – Jews-only settlements, highways, disconnected Palestinian Bantustans – to enable them to redraw the map to suit their expansionist agenda and make the occupation PERMANENT.

Gaza in a vice

Israel made painful sacrifices and took a risk to give peace a chance. They voluntarily removed over 9,000 settlers from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, abandoning homes, schools, businesses, and places of worship in the hopes of renewing the peace process. Despite making an overture for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, Israel continues to face terrorist attacks, including rocket attacks and drive-by shootings of innocent Israelis. Israel knows that for a lasting peace, they must be free from terrorism and live with defensible borders.

Israel never left. It still occupies Gazan airspace, coastal waters and airwaves, and controls all borders except Rafah where it nevertheless exerts a veto. Israel has Gaza in a vice, which is crushing the tiny enclave’s economy, starving its 1.5 million citizens and creating a huge humanitarian crisis in an attempt to bring the elected government to its knees.

Draw direct parallels between Israel and America—including the need to defend against terrorism…. The more you focus on the similarities between Israel and America, the more likely you are to win the support of those who are neutral. Indeed, Israel is an important American ally in the war against terrorism, and faces many of the same challenges as America in protecting their citizens.

Note how Israel’s strategy is almost totally dependent on the false idea that they are victims of terror and western nations need to huddle together with Israel for mutual protection. Fortunately, level-headed people are beginning to realize who the terrorists really are.

It is surely obvious by now that allowing parallels to be drawn between Israel and America only serves to increase the world’s hatred of America. US citizens need to wake up to this, and British citizens should avoid falling into the same trap.

Inject with “core values” and repeat over and over again…

The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ’security,’ and ‘peace.’ These four words are at the core of the American political, economic, social, and cultural systems, and they should be repeated as often as possible because they resonate with virtually every American.

If so fluent in this language, why won’t Israel acknowledge their neighbours’ rights to democracy, freedom, security and peace and end their military oppression?

A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick—that is just about the time the public will wake up and say ‘Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!’ But don’t confuse messages with facts….

Never let facts get in the way of a good message!

How can the current Palestinian leadership honestly say it will pursue peace when previous leaders rejected an offer to create a Palestinian state just a few short years ago and now refuse to live up to their responsibilities as outlined in the Road Map?

This must be a reference to Barak’s so-called “generous offer”, another of the myths Israelis love to peddle. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip, seized by Israel in 1967 and occupied ever since, comprise just 22% of pre-partition Palestine. When the Palestinians signed the Oslo Agreement in 1993 they agreed to accept the 22% and recognise Israel within ‘Green Line’ borders (i.e. the 1949 Armistice Line established after the Arab-Israeli War). Conceding 78% of the land that was originally theirs was an astonishing compromise on the part of the Palestinians.

But it wasn’t enough for greedy Barak. His ‘generous offer’ required the inclusion of 69 Israeli settlements within the 22% remnant. It was plain to see on the map that these settlement blocs created impossible borders and already severely disrupted Palestinian life in the West Bank. Barak also demanded the Palestinian territories be placed under “Temporary Israeli Control”, meaning Israeli military and administrative control indefinitely. The ‘generous offer’ also gave Israel control over all the border crossings of the new Palestinian State. What nation in the world would accept that? The unacceptable reality of Barak’s offer, contained in the map, was hidden by propaganda spin.

Later, at Taba, Barak produced a revised map but withdrew it after his election defeat. Don’t take my word for it – the facts are well documented and explained by organisations such as Gush Shalom.

Why is the world so silent about the written, vocal, stated aims of Hamas?

Why is the world so silent about the written, stated aims of the racist regime and its political parties? Read their manifestos.

Successful communications is not about being able to recite every fact from the long history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is about pointing out a few core principles of shared values—such as democracy and freedom—and repeating them over and over again…. You need to start with empathy for both sides, remind your audience that Israel wants peace and then repeat the messages of democracy, freedom, and peace over and over again…. we need to repeat the message, on average, ten times to be effective.

Is democracy a shared value? Israel is an ethnocracy. Is freedom a shared value? The world is still waiting for Israel to allow the Palestinians their freedom.

The situation in the Middle East may be complicated, but all parties should adopt a simple approach: peace first, political boundaries second.

Renounce resistance while still under Israel’s jackboot? The correct approach is for the international community to first insist that Israel complies with international law and the many UN resolutions it has contemptuously ignored. The boundaries are already defined. Whatever issues remain to be decided, Palestinians should not have to negotiate under occupation or duress.

Rockets, bombs and atrocities: the language of peace

Bottom line: What will happen if we fail to get the world to care about the fact that Israeli parents in southern Israel need to literally dodge rockets when they drive their children to kindergarten in the morning? What will happen if the world allows Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, to get nuclear weapons? What will Israel do if bad press causes American citizens to ask [their] government to turn its back on Israel?

Why do I care so much about the success of your communications efforts? I care because I never want our children to live through what my family and yours lived through in the Holocaust.

Only one in 500 makeshift Qassam rockets causes a fatality, small beer compared to the devastation and carnage resulting from Israel’s state-of-the-art rocketry targeted on Gaza. How does it look when Palestinians are forced to pay a heavy price for the Holocaust in Europe? And how much does Israel care about the Palestinian holocaust it has caused?

The manual then gives a long glossary of terms. Here’s a sample….

“Deliberately firing rockets into civilian communities”: Combine terrorist motive with civilian visuals and you have the perfect illustration of what Israel faced in Gaza and Lebanon. Especially with regard to rocket attacks but useful for any kind of terrorist attack, deliberate is the right word to use to call out the intent behind the attacks. This is far more powerful than describing the attacks as “random.”

Israelis know all about bombarding civilian targets. And they are careful not to mention that Sderot, until recently the only Israeli township within range of Gazan rockets, is built on the ruins of an ethnically cleansed Palestinian village whose inhabitants were forced from their homes by Jewish terrorists.

“Economic Diplomacy”: This is a much more embracing and popular term than the current lexicon of “sanctions.” It has appeal across the political spectrum: the tough economic approach appeals to Republicans, and the diplomacy component satisfies Democrats.

This is a game we can all play. Israel is now beginning to suffer “economic diplomacy” in the form of worldwide boycotts.

“Economic Prosperity”: Whenever Israel talks about the “economic prosperity” of the Palestinians, it puts Israel in the most positive light possible. After all, who can disagree?

What sort of prosperity is it when nothing can be imported or exported without Israel’s approval and fisherman can’t even put to sea in their own waters without having their boats shot up by the Israeli navy?

“Human to Human”: “We know that the average Palestinian and the average Israeli want to come together and make peace. They want to live in peace. Israeli leaders have come together with Arab leaders to make peace in the past. But how do you make peace with Hamas and Hezbollah?

Simple. You get off their land and stay off. There can be no peace under occupation. You have to be very stupid not to understand that.

“Humanize Rockets”: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb shelter.

Would Israel care to tell the world how many bombs, rockets and shells (including the illegal and prohibited variety) its F-16s, tanks, armed drones and navy gunboats have poured into the densely-packed humanity that is Gaza?

Still more advice….

“Living together, side by side”. This is the best way to describe the ultimate vision of a two-state solution without using the phrase.

Sounds cute but is worn out. Who would want to live alongside bigots and extremists who have made your life a misery for 61 years?

When talking about a Palestinian partner, it is essential to distinguish between Hamas and everyone else. Only the most anti-Israel, pro- Palestinian American expects Israel to negotiate with Hamas, so you have to be clear that you are seeking a ‘moderate Palestinian partner’.

Where are the moderate Israeli partners?

The fight is over IDEOLOGY – not land; terror, not territory. Thus, you must avoid using Israel’s religious claims to land as a reason why Israel should not give up land. Such claims only make Israel look extremist to people who are not religious Christians or Jews.

If the fight isn’t about land, why did Israel steal it at gunpoint? And why won’t they give it back when told to by the UN?

Think PRO-PALESTINIAN. While I have spoken about Israeli casualties, I want to recognize those Palestinians that have been killed or wounded, because they are suffering as well. I particularly want to reach out to Palestinian mothers who have lost their children. No parent should have to bury their child.

Israel won’t even allow cement into Gaza to build the graves.

And so I say to my Palestinian colleagues … you can stop the bloodshed. You can stop the suicide bombings and rocket attacks. If you really want to, you can put an end to this cycle of violence. If you won’t do it for our children, do it for your children.

This is recommended to activists as “an effective Israeli sound bite”.

I want to see a future where the Palestinians govern themselves. Israel does not want to govern a single Palestinian. Not one. We want them to govern themselves. We want them to have complete self-determination.

Israel is desperate to snuff out Palestine’s fledgling democracy and destroy the remnants of its government. For decades Israel has dismissed the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

The big picture approach is this: You must isolate Hamas as:

– A critical cause of the delay in achieving a two-state solution
– The biggest source of harm to the Palestinian people, and
– The reason why Israel must defend its people from living in terror.

Read from the Hamas Charter. Now, here’s how to attack Hamas: indict them with their own indoctrination materials. Yes, people know Hamas is a terrorist organization – but they don’t know just how terrifying Hamas can be. The absolute best way to heighten their awareness is to read from the Hamas Charter itself. Don’t just “quote” from it. Read it. Out loud. Again and again. Hand it out to everyone.

At last Israel makes a good point. After 3 years of ‘government’ Hamas must be mad to persist with its ill-advised charter. They have been severely tested. They have matured. They have earned credibility in many eyes. Israel’s behaviour makes Hamas look good. But all that will count for nothing if they don’t re-write their charter as a matter of urgency.

Regev’s pearls of wisdom. But how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes?

It’s not just Israel who refuses to speak to Hamas. It’s the whole international community… Most of the democratic world refuses to have a relationship with Hamas because Hamas has refused to meet the most minimal benchmarks of international behavior.

Isn’t that a little cheeky, Mr Regev, coming from a regime widely condemned for war crimes, piracy and mega-lawlessness.

It was the former U.N. secretary general Kofi Anan that put four benchmarks on the table. And he said, speaking for the international community … That if Hamas reforms itself … If Hamas recognizes my country’s right to live in freedom … If Hamas renounces terrorism against innocent civilians … If Hamas supports international agreements that are being signed and agreed to concerning the peace process … then the door is open. But unfortunately – tragically – Hamas has failed to meet even one of those four benchmarks. And that’s why today Hamas is isolated internationally. Even the United Nations refuses to speak to Hamas.

Which of those benchmarks has Israel met, Mr Regev?

Israel is very concerned about the Iranian nuclear program. And for good reason. Iran’s President openly talks about wiping Israel off the map. We see them racing ahead on nuclear enrichment so they can have enough fissile material to build a bomb. We see them working on their ballistic missiles. We only saw, last week, shooting a rocket to launch a so-called satellite into outer space and so forth. The Iranian nuclear program is a threat, not just to my country, but to the entire region. And it’s incumbent upon us all to do what needs to be done to keep from proliferating.

Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Mr Regev? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Would you also like to comment on why Israel hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why it has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention? What proof do you have of Iran’s nuclear weapons plans?

And why do you persist in misquoting Mr Ahmadjinadad?

The Holy City is not up for grabs

The toughest issue to communicate will be the final resolution of Jerusalem. Americans overwhelmingly want Israel to be in charge of the religious holy sites and are frankly afraid of the consequences should Israel turn over control to the Palestinians. Consider:

• 71% of Americans trust Israel most to protect the holy sites in Jerusalem, compared to 6.1% who trust the Palestinian authority most. 8.5% percent trust neither.

• 54% of Americans believe that “Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty” while just 23.9% believe that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into Israeli controlled and Palestinian controlled areas’.

Given the choice between the two, Americans of all political and demographic stripes trust Israel to protect and have sovereignty over Jerusalem.

Israel is in control right now and prevents Muslims and Christians from outside the City visiting the holy places. No way can Israel be trusted. The UN’s partition plan decreed that Jerusalem should become a ‘corpus separatum’ under international management. It is unlikely that the UN would wish to see its resolutions torn up or international law re-written for Israel’s sole benefit, regardless of America’s misinformed opinion.

Get the name-calling right

I’ll close with the following extract….

Many on the left see an “Israel v. Palestinian” crisis where Israel is Goliath and the Palestinians are David. It is critical that they understand that this is an Arab-Israeli crisis and that the force undermining peace is Iran and their proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You must not call Hamas just Hamas. Call them what they are: Iran-backed Hamas. Indeed, when they know that Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah, they are much more supportive of Israel.

By the same token we must call the racist regime what it is – US-backed Israel.

Iran’s support for Hamas is difficult to quantify and probably less than we think. It is likely that more funding has come from Sunni Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In any case it is peanuts compared to America’s support for Israel.

Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhhod and was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada. Hezbollah came into being in 1982 in response to US-backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So the territorial ambitions of US-backed Israel provoked the rise of both. Israel’s problem is entirely self-inflicted and shouldn’t concern the rest of us.

It’s no surprise that Hamas’s election manifesto in 2006 called for maintaining the armed struggle against US-backed Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

Our obligation to respect and promote human rights

The Israel Project describes itself as “devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel while promoting security, freedom and peace”. It provides journalists, leaders and opinion-formers with “accurate information about Israel”.

However its propaganda manual, which runs to 116 pages, is an unpleasant piece of work which recycles many of the discredited techniques used by the advertising industry before standards of honesty, decency and truthfulness were brought in to protect the public.

And it serves to undermine with clever words the inalienable rights pledged by the UN and the world’s civilized nations to all peoples, including the Palestinians.

When you have to stoop this low you simply don’t have a case.

Everyone should bear in mind the following, written nearly 61 years ago:

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

It would seem that Israel has not read or understood the principles enshrined in the Universal Declaration, which all nations signed up to. There can be no excuse. Attempts to wipe out the rights of people who happen to be in the way of the bulldozing Zionist vision of a ‘Greater Israel’ deserve no support whatever.

Meanwhile the Palestinian side needs to de-bunk this Zionist handbook and re-frame the Holy Land situation in the language of truth. If the PA and the PLO won’t do it, who will?

Maybe it’s a job for the churches and mosques.

Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband — or rather, a henchman on his behalf — has written to me about the government’s response to Israel’s hijacking of the mercy ship Spirit of Humanity on the high seas and the outrageous treatment of six peace-loving British citizens (including the skipper), en route to Gaza not Israel, who had their gear stolen or damaged and were thrown into Israeli jails. The letter contains the usual wet and meaningless expressions like deplore and press and raise the issue, which are the familiar hallmark of Foreign Office mentality.

And I’m told it is “reckless” to travel in international waters. It should, of course, be safe – and would be if the high and mighty Western allies, always talking big against terror, were to enforce maritime law and rid the Eastern Mediterranean of marauding Israeli pirates.

Miliband’s spokesman says: “The Israeli Navy took control of the Spirit of Humanity on 30 June, diverting it to Ashdod port in Israel. All those on board, including six British nationals, were handed over to Israeli immigration officials. British consular officials had good access to the British detainees and established that they were treated well. The Israeli authorities deported the detainees on 6 July.”

Treated well? That’s not what the peaceful seafarers say. They were assaulted, put in fear of their lives and deprived of their liberty for fully a week — a long time in a stinking Israeli jail.

Miliband’s spokesman: “The Foreign Secretary said in the House of Commons on 30 June that it was ‘vital that all states respect international law, including the law of the sea. It is also important to say that we deplore the interference by the Israeli navy in the activities of Gazan fishermen’.”

Such fine words. Where is the action to back them up? Gaza’s fishermen suffer increasingly unjust restrictions and are still fired on.

Miliband’s spokesman: “When the Foreign Secretary spoke to the Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on 1 July he raised the issue with him and asked for clarification about whether or not the Spirit of Humanity had been intercepted in international waters. We will continue to press the Israeli authorities for clarification.”

It’s well over a week and Lieberman hasn’t clarified anything. There’s a surprise! Was the Israeli ambassador in London summoned and given a dressing down? Has London demanded compensation for the Britishers’ losses and damage? Has the boat and its cargo been returned? Have arrangements been made for the aid to be delivered? Our Zionist-leaning government apparently takes pleasure in Britain’s repeated humiliation. Not long ago the British consul-general in Tel Aviv (a woman) was strip-searched by Israeli security perverts.

Miliband’s spokesman: “We regularly remind the Israeli government of its obligations under international law on a variety of issues, including with respect to humanitarian access to Gaza as well as Israel’s control of Gazan waters and the effect this has on Gaza’s fishing industry.”

Ever get the feeling they’ve switched off their collective hearing aid? What is the point of obligations if they never have to be met? Miliband and the rest should hang their heads in shame, particularly over the Gaza fishing scandal.

Miliband’s spokesman: “As I said on the phone, our Travel Advice makes clear that we advise against all travel to Gaza, including its offshore waters; that it is reckless to travel to Gaza at this time; and that medical and other essential specialist staff needing to travel to Gaza should coordinate their entry to Gaza with the major international humanitarian organisations already on the ground.”

Why does London perpetuate the blockade of Gaza by colluding in Israel’s unlawful conduct? Where are the consequences and penalties for breaching international law and all codes of human decency?

On the other point, Gaza’s Ministry of Health is surely best placed to know what’s needed.

Miliband’s spokesman: “Our Embassy in Tel Aviv and our Consulate General in Jerusalem have also similarly advised those wishing to deliver humanitarian assistance to Gaza to do so through existing humanitarian organisations which can advise, particularly with regards to medicines, [and] which items if any are currently required.”

Private suppliers should be free to deliver aid through whatever channels they wish.

Miliband’s spokesman: “The UK has been unequivocal in its calls for Israel to lessen restrictions at the Gaza crossings, allowing the legitimate flow of humanitarian aid, trade and reconstruction goods and the movement of people. This is essential not only for the people of Gaza, but also for the wider stability of the region.”

“Unequivocal”? “Essential”? More splendid but empty words. The needs of the crushed and devastated and half-starved people of Gaza have been urgent for 3 years, ever since Britain ganged up with the Zionist axis to bring Gaza to its knees.

Miliband’s spokesman: “Recent events in Gaza are a tragic reminder of the importance of progress on the peace process.”

No kidding… They are also a tragic reminder of the West’s perverse failure in its duty to enforce compliance with international law, human rights and UN resolutions.

Miliband’s spokesman: “The UK, with the support of our international allies, will continue to pursue vigorously a comprehensive peace based on a two-state solution, involving a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state.”

But never vigorously enough. The world is still waiting after sixty-one years. And let’s change those worn-out words around. How does a secure Palestine alongside a viable Israel sound?

Britain and its allies need to try a new tack… like first establishing the rule of international law and forcibly breaking the siege. It’s so blindingly obvious.

Meanwhile, doesn’t the gut-churning, cowardly shambles that is Gaza make you proud to be British? Or American? Or European?

Israel’s murderous 22-day offensive last December/January left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties, 200 schools, 39 mosques and two churches damaged or destroyed. The International Committee of the Red Cross says the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair”, unable to rebuild their lives because Israel, having wantonly wrecked their civil society and infrastructure, is blocking efforts to bring in the necessary repair materials. Those on board the Spirit of Humanity were acting in accord with donors’ pledges of $4.5 billion for reconstruction and rehabilitation and US President Obama’s request to Israel to let those supplies pass.

The mercy ship sailed from Larnaca, Cyprus, with a crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. In the early hours of Tuesday morning Israeli warships surrounded it and threatened to open fire if the crew didn’t turn back. When they refused to be intimidated, the Israelis jammed their instrumentation and blocked their GPS, radar, and navigation systems, putting all lives at risk.

The ship had been searched and given security clearance by the Port Authorities in Cyprus before sailing, and posed no threat.

Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights, says the seizing of the Spirit of Humanity is unlawful and the continuing blockade of Gaza a crime against humanity. Yes, yes, Mr Falk. But the question as always is, what is your paralytic, useless organization doing about it? Or is hand-wringing all it’s good for?

Many here, including myself, immediately wrote to David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, about the outrage. Two days later I called the Palestine desk at the Foreign Office in London. The person I spoke to sounded uncomfortable having to trot out the same old gobbledigook about “working hard to resolve the problem” and “doing all we can”. He said the six Brits were in Israeli custody and nobody was sure where exactly the incident took place. However, the vessel was fitted with a SPOT GPS tracker, so the system should have a record of their position when attacked.

The real problem, as I suggested, is that Israel dares to kidnap Brits on the high seas and doesn’t fear the consequences – no doubt confident there won’t be any. I was reminded that Israel had issued warnings (and so had the Foreign Office) not to travel in that area. What area? Mustn’t one travel in international waters?

The spokesman assured me that progress was being made. There was “movement” on getting humanitarian supplies into Gaza, but I pointed out that nobody had seen any evidence of Israel conforming with international law and Geneva Conventions. He claimed there was also “movement” on halting settlements on occupied territory, although I observed that the Israelis had just OK’d more illegal building.

I also reminded him about the ramming of the MV Dignity on a similar mission by an Israeli gunboat on 30 December, 53 miles from shore, and how people here were still hopping mad that nothing had been done about it. The vessel, with 16 on board, was badly damaged and had to limp to a safe Lebanese port. As far as I know, there was never an offer of compensation and no demand from London. As usual, somebody else had to pick up the tab for Israel’s unbridled destruction.

The Dignity had a cargo of 3.5 tonnes of medical supplies, the majority donated by the Cyprus government, and a British skipper and a Greek mate. It carried fourteen passengers, one of whom was Cynthia McKinney. There were also two surgeons and a Palestinian physician. A friend of mine was among them and wrote this chilling account of the attack…

At 04.55 hrs EMT on 30 December, searchlights appeared astern. There were two Israeli gunboats. They came abreast, circled and stayed with us. These boats can do over 45 knots, carry ten tonnes of fuel and have sophisticated weapon systems including Hellfire missiles. Tracer bullets were fired skywards, forming ellipses, and flares put up. At 05.30 hrs approximately, one gunboat was playing its searchlight on the port side of ‘Dignity’. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash at the bow, and then another almost simultaneously, and another on the port beam… The bow dipped and it seemed the boat was breaking up. It was dark, the wind force was 4 to 5 and there was a 10ft sea. The master shouted ‘we have been rammed’. It was feared the boat would sink. He broadcast a Mayday distress signal; there was no response.

Cynthia McKinney and Caoimhe Butterly could not swim; the life jackets were rapidly deployed to all. The hull was taking water but bilge pumps were working. The first words from a commander of one of the gun boats came over the radio. First there was the accusation that the ship’s company was involved with terrorists and that it was subversive. Then there came the threat to shoot. The master was forbidden from making for Gaza or further south to El Arish in Egypt. He was ordered to return to Larnaca – about 160 miles, even though the boat was badly damaged and the Israeli did not know whether there was sufficient fuel, which there was not. He set a northerly course and the boat stayed buoyant in a moderating sea. A crew member arranged with the Lebanese authorities for a safe harbour in Sour (Tyre) where jubilant crowds thronged the quays. A UNIFIL ship came out to escort us and the Israeli gunboats, which were following, fell back.

Was there lethal intent? A gunboat came out of the black of night with no lights showing whilst a searchlight from the other gun boat displayed our port hull as its target. It would have approached at about 30 degrees to the Dignity’s port and at speed. The intention to sink the Dignity and thus to drown its company was clear. If the hull had been GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic) it would have shattered and the boat would have sunk like a stone 53 nautical miles off Haifa. Fortunately, the hull was constructed of marine ply with timber ribs and survived…. The ship’s company were repatriated except for a resolute Scot, Theresa McDermott. She was imprisoned in Ramleh gaol. When the British Consulate in Israel was contacted for assistance in finding Teresa, staff refused to help locate her saying they couldn’t provide assistance to a UK citizen unless she personally requested it. Teresa was released after six days, her ‘crime’ probably being a member of the International Solidarity Campaign like Rachel Corrie before her.

My written question to Mr Miliband was simply this: “Why isn’t Her Majesty’s Government providing the mercy ship ‘Spirit of Humanity’ with an escort to protect against the unlawful, piratical interference and threat to life by the Israeli navy? There have been repeated incidents of harassment, damage, theft and armed aggression on the high seas or in Palestinian waters by the Israeli regime against unarmed vessels”.

The British government has loudly pledged Royal Navy help to stop the “smuggling” of arms to the Gaza resistance but won’t protect Gaza’s fishermen from being fired on by Israeli marauders while trying to earn their living. And evidently the government can’t be bothered to protect our own people going about their lawful business.

But, sure enough, they kicked up an almighty fuss when Iran nabbed 15 British sailors two years ago for allegedly straying into Iranian waters.

For our sins we are saddled with a foreign secretary who calls for Israeli tank crewman Gilad Shalit’s release but not the release of 11,000 Palestinian civilians – some of them women and children – rotting in Israeli jails. He even allows the British ambassador to become a dogsbody of the Jewish community in this one-sided campaign. On 25 June Miliband said: ‘Today is the third anniversary of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Both British Ministers and the British Ambassador in Israel have had repeated contact with Gilad’s family and emphasized our support for Gilad’s immediate release. Last September, the Ambassador helped to deliver over 2,000 Jewish New Year cards for Gilad to the ICRC as part of a campaign organized by the UK Jewish community. I repeat the UK’s call to Hamas for his immediate, unconditional, and safe release. We share the Shalit family’s dismay at Hamas’s refusal to allow the ICRC access to Gilad.

It’s shameful that his dismay doesn’t extend to the 11,000 Palestinian families.

British people are waking up to the truth about Israel’s lawlessness. In the absence of firm action from the British government they are taking reprisals of their own, in the form of boycotts, which has driven Mr Miliband to complain that “the Government is dismayed that motions calling for boycotts of Israel are being discussed at trade union congresses and conferences this summer”. He insists that boycotts “obstruct opportunities for co-operation and dialogue and serve only to polarise debate further. Boycotts would only make it harder to achieve the peace that both Palestinians and Israelis deserve and desire”.

Mr Miliband hasn’t learned the lesson of the last 61 years. And our prime minister-in-waiting, David Cameron (a Zionist and, like Brown and Blair, a patron of the Jewish National Fund), is no different. He says: “I think there’s something else we need to do, which is to say to our academics in this country that boycotts of Israel are completely unacceptable, and I think we also need to say that to the trade unions.”

Nowadays you have to carefully to pick your way through a veritable obstacle-course of pro-Zionists, Chosen Ones and Israeli stooges that inhabit every nook and cranny in the corridors of power and dominate Britain’s key defence bodies. These Israeli flag-wavers seem only too happy for the Israelis to piss on us – and on the rest of the world – while rewarding them with more and more trade and scientific co-operation.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m reading how some 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed and over 50 injured in three drone attacks within 12 hours in Lataka, South Waziristan.

The first strike killed several suspected Taliban. Later, a second drone fired three missiles into a crowd of funeral mourners.

One of the wounded commented: “If the Taliban are bombing the mosques and America is bombing the funerals, what is the difference between them? We are stuck between Taliban and US attacks and when we are killed, not only no one cries for us, but also we are dubbed militants.”

Since August 2008, over 40 US drone strikes have killed at least 410 people. US troops in neighboring Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy unmanned drones in the region.

The use of armed drones is a particularly cowardly form of warfare. These lethal “assets” are computer-controlled from the comfort and safety of an armchair a hundred miles away and guided by dodgy “intelligence”. Or, if the truth be known, no intelligence at all. The Israelis use them extensively in Gaza to unleash death and destruction on civilian targets by remote control. Engines for Israeli drones are believed to be supplied by a British manufacturer, although the government here pretends not to know the truth of the matter.

This trend in ’sofa slaughter’ has many variations. For example, during the 40-day siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002 the Israeli Occupation Force set up huge cranes on which were mounted robotic machine guns under video control. Eight defenders, including the bell-ringer, were murdered, some by the robotic guns and some by snipers.

The US and its allies are just as callous in their treatment of civilian prisoners. The British authorities deal with their casual killings by offering £4,500 in compensation, showing how cheaply we value the life of ‘Johnny Foreigner’. And when it comes to prisoner abuse the Israelis, whose every cruel excess the West defends, don’t even spare children, according to various reports.

Something very chilling can take hold of uniformed thugs — I won’t call them soldiers because what many of them do is not proper soldiering — in a war zone; and in the days before high-tech weaponry like drones and robotic machine guns they happily indulged their blood-lust by murdering civilians at close quarters. If you haven’t heard of the My Lai massacre, brace yourself.

In 1968, 150 men of Charlie Company, a US infantry unit, were sent on a ‘search and destroy’ mission into the South Vietnamese village of My Lai. Four hours later more than 500 civilians — unarmed women, children and old men — were dead. Charlie Company hadn’t encountered a single Viet Cong. Nevertheless the unit, led by Lt. William Calley, rounded up villagers and machine-gunned them until the dead lay five-deep.

When Calley spotted a baby crawling away, he grabbed her, threw her back into the ditch, and opened fire again.

Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, flying over the area, was so sickened by what he saw that he landed his machine to shield villagers from the troops and began rescuing survivors. He ordered his gunner to open up on any American soldiers who continued to shoot civilians.

Some of the dead were mutilated by having “C Company” carved into their chests; some were disemboweled.

Official reports said the My Lai operation was a stunning combat victory, and General Westmoreland congratulated the men on their bravery.

The American people didn’t learn the truth until 18 months later . . . and then only because a Vietnam veteran, after hearing about the incident from friends who had served in Charlie Company, wrote a letter to his congressman and other prominent officials, including President Nixon.

An army photographer produced pictures of the carnage. Then freelance reporter Seymour Hersh managed to interview Calley and splashed the story over the front pages of American newspapers.

26 members of C Company were charged with criminal behavior but not convicted. Calley himself was eventually court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving just three days he was moved to a comfortable apartment under house arrest, on Nixon’s orders. He was paroled three years later.

Hersh said that many in Charlie Company “had given in to an easy pattern of violence” and were totally blind to the humanity of the Vietnamese people. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

My Lai was one of many atrocities committed in Korea and Vietnam. Military training in those days set out to dehumanize not only the enemy but the local civilian population as well. Army culture encouraged its so-called soldiers to think they could treat them like garbage.

Has anything changed? The conduct of the Americans and their close buddies the Israelis is remarkably similar. They are the pacesetters (though not the only practitioners) in savagery and the casual art of killing Johnny Foreigner. It is now done at arm’s length — by remote video control or at the end of a sniper’s scope-sight or by DU tank shell, or from 35,000 feet. No need to personally check the situation on the ground, or look your unarmed victim in the eye, or get your hands dirty. No need to count the bodies afterwards or clear up the shredded and vaporized remains.

Apparently these high-tech killers, their commanders and their political masters have convinced themselves that everyone they don’t like is sub-human.

I’m reminded of a blistering attack by a church minister in Oklahoma after the shock-and-awe onslaught on Iraq, the point at which he discovered that his faith had been hijacked by fundamentalists who claimed to speak for Jesus but whose actions were anything but Christian.

“When you live in a country that has established international rules for waging a just war, build the United Nations on your own soil to enforce them, and then arrogantly break the very rules you set down for the rest of the world, you are doing something immoral,” he said.

”When you claim that Jesus is the Lord of your life, and yet fail to acknowledge that your policies ignore his essential teaching, or turn them on their head, you are doing something immoral.

”When you act as if the lives of Iraqi civilians are not as important as the lives of American soldiers, and refuse to even count them, you are doing something immoral.

”When you claim that our God is bigger than their God, and that our killing is righteous, while theirs is evil, we have begun to resemble the enemy we claim to be fighting, and that is immoral.

“We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.”

Kick away the crutch and they’d finally have to grasp the nettle of justice, something they have always avoided.

Justice is underpinned by law, but the operation of law in the Holy Land is conspicuously absent. The Arabs, I believe, want plain, simple justice. Why is this such a problem to a western alliance that claims to itself sweeping moral authority?

President Obama, speaking the other day in a BBC interview, said he believed the US was “going to be able to get serious negotiations back on track” between Israel and the Palestinians. Asked about Israel’s defiance of his call for a halt to illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Obama urged patience, saying it was early in the conversation. “Diplomacy is always a matter of a long hard slog. It’s never a matter of quick results.”

Diplomacy hasn’t produced a result in 61 years, and he made no mention of implementing international law and enforcing UN resolutions. Like others, he much prefers the soft and fluffy option of negotiations that go nowhere and a “process” that is doomed to fail, enabling Israel to pursue its evil designs indefinitely. In their minds, and for some unexplained reason, Israel is exempt from laws, conventions, codes of conduct and respect for human rights that other nations of the civilised world are expected to observe. It is allowed to act the brutal aggressor with impunity

“Negotiations” without law are immoral

There are, of course, several objections to the idea of “negotiations” in the Israel-Palestine context. In particular, it is immoral to put a weak party and a strong party together and expect a fair outcome when the strong party is in permanent occupation and has its military boot on the other’s throat.

It is immoral to expect a weak party to negotiate with a strong party that’s daily in breach of international law, commits war crimes and acts of piracy and continues to steal land and dispossess the weak party’s citizens in order to unlawfully expand its borders.

It is immoral for the sponsors of the negotiations to be partisan and vilify the democratically elected representatives of the weak party, and to refuse to acknowledge the weak party’s right to political self-determination and territorial integrity.

It is immoral to force negotiations without first establishing a level playing field in terms of compliance with international law and UN resolutions. The international community has shirked this responsibility for decades – not because the peoples of the member nations are reluctant but because their leaders are corrupt.

Mr Obama says there needs to be “a good deal of truth-telling” if the rift between America and the Muslim world is to be healed. Which of the many painful truths will he tell? As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, remarked: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.”

Truth-telling: what is Obama’s version of the truth?

The whole rotten 90 years of lies and betrayal needs to be ventilated and understood in the West… the chicanery leading up to the 1947 United Nations partition of Palestine that gave the Jews 57 percent when they accounted for only 30 percent of the population, and how the plan designated Jerusalem, with its major religious sites, an internationally administered city.

How the Jews apparently accepted the plan, declared statehood in May 1948 but wanted more. How the new Israel immediately proceeded to uproot 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes and lands, obliterated nearly 400 Arab villages and towns, and allegedly committed some 34 massacres in pursuit of its territorial ambitions.

How Israel demolished 125,000 Palestinian homes, and after 1967 destroyed 18,000 more. How house demolition is still used today as a deliberate strategic tool to break the Palestinians’ will, achieve ethnic transfer and help make Israel’s control of Occupied Palestine permanent.

And how, in the process, Israel has flagrantly breached of every rule, convention and declaration governing civilised conduct.

UN Resolution 194, re-passed many times since 1948, requires Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and compensate those choosing not to. Israel has refused to comply. Meanwhile any Jew from anywhere in the world, who has never before lived in Israel and whose ancestors have never lived in Israel, can go and live in Israel while Palestinians who can prove title to their former homes may not.

In 1967, under the pretext of the Six Day War, Israel seized what remained of Palestine – the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Resolution 242 ordered Israel to withdraw its armed forces, but again it defied the international community and international law. As a result Palestinians today comprise the largest refugee population in the world and have endured the longest, most brutal occupation in modern times.

Obama should remind himself of the countless other UN resolutions that Israel has defied.

Israel says it “withdrew completely” from Gaza in 2005. It didn’t. It still occupies Gaza’s airspace, airwaves and coastal waters, and the military invade with tanks, bulldozers and aircraft to shoot the place up whenever they please. Israel still controls all the border crossings except the one with Egypt, which it is allowed to ‘monitor’.

Gaza’s 3,000 licensed fishermen are unable to put to sea and earn their living for fear of being fired on by Israel patrol boats.

We in the West are asked to believe the siege of Gaza is about rockets “raining down” on Sderot, an Israeli township built on stolen Palestinian land. Stop the Gaza rockets and things will be OK, says Israel. But Palestinians in the West Bank don’t fire rockets and the Israelis are still in occupation after 41 years. They have seized Palestinian agricultural land and water resources for their own use. While Israelis fill their swimming pools and wash their cars, Palestinians have to survive on as little as 10 to 15 litres a day. More than 38% of their territory is now off-limits to them. In the Gaza Strip the UN reports that a border “exclusion zone” imposed by Israel bites as much as a mile into the narrow enclave and renders 30 percent of Gaza’s farmland unusable.

Gaza overflows with unpalatable truths. Hamas have invited Obama to visit and see the evidence for himself. He could demonstrate his good intentions by accepting.

The ‘roadmap’ endorsed by the UN Security Council puts Israel under an obligation to immediately dismantle outposts erected since 2001, freeze all squatter activity and do nothing to undermine trust, including confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property. Israel rides roughshod over these obligations.

“Because Israel does not recognize Ottoman or British-era deeds, 72% of the West Bank is considered Israeli ‘state lands’. More than 200 settlements have been constructed in the Occupied Territories, and 450,000 Israelis have migrated across the 1967 boundaries,” says the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. The main aim of the squatter project, together with the exclusive Jewish claim to the entire country, is to prevent the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. “The settlements, the infrastructure serving them and the security system necessary to protect them have carved the Occupied Territories into dozens of isolated, impoverished enclaves. Palestinians are forbidden to travel between these enclaves without military permission, thus turning their own towns and villages into prisons.”

Nevertheless Israel’s allies continue preaching a two-state solution to safeguard the ‘purity’ of the racist regime, knowing that it involves the remnants of Occupied Palestine becoming a permanently ghettoized sub-state, subservient to Israel and never capable of prospering.

In 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled that the route of the Separation Wall, where it intrudes deeply into Palestinian territory, is illegal and should be dismantled. Far from complying, Israel is still building it.

In the wake of Israel’s 22-day devastation of Gaza and wholesale murder of its civilians at the New Year, the Zionist regime is not only blocking humanitarian and reconstruction aid but also denying access to teams investigating allegations of war crimes.

And let’s not forget that 10,000 Palestinians, including women and children abducted from their homes, are rotting in Israeli jails, many without charge or trial. 30+ democratically elected Palestinian parliamentarians are also imprisoned.

Here’s something else for us all – not just Muslims – to worry about. The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission says that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal possibly larger than the British stockpile. Israel is the only state in the region that is not a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. It has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. It has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Nevertheless the US government pours aid into Israel at a rate of around $3 billion annually. The money helps pay for Israel’s illegal occupation, its helicopter gun-ships, tanks and high-tech weaponry, Caterpillar bulldozers, and all the other paraphernalia of military oppression. Israel usually gets another $2 to 3 billion in indirect aid – military support, loan write-offs and special grants. So the US taxpayer is generously funding Israel’s destruction of Palestinian infrastructure (often paid for by British, EU and US taxpayers) and livelihoods, and its ethnic cleansing programme.

And what does the President think about the racist overtones in the manifesto of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party? It says: “The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state… Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel… The government firmly rejects attempts of various sources in the world, some anti-Semitic in origin, to question Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital.”

Rivals Kadima aim for a solid Jewish majority and claim the Jewish people have a national and historic right to the Land of Israel “in its entirety”. They seem determined to grab all of it.

The last official word on the question of Jerusalem, I believe, was the UN’s declaration at the time of the 1947 Partition that it should be a ‘corpus separatum’ – an international city. So a good starting point for Mr Obama and the international community would be to knock these nonsensical Zionist claims of exclusive ownership on the head and properly implement at least this part of the UN plan, in order to take some of the heat out of the situation.

There are many more truths that ought to be aired. But enough are mentioned here to send a simple and obvious message to Mr Obama. End the occupation. Apply the law. Deliver justice. Stop helping to sustain Israeli oppression. It would not be tolerated anywhere else.

I was lying in a hospital bed in England, thinking how many Palestinians suffer a similar illness but are cruelly denied treatment.

Not because there aren’t the surgical skills – Gaza’s health professionals are very talented, I hear – but because the Zionist thugs whom our sick-minded political leaders call friends and allies have systematically blockaded medical supplies and equipment, especially these last 2 years, wiping out proper healthcare in the Strip and sentencing innocent men, women and children to death. Those they can’t vaporize or blow to bits with high explosives and phosphor they destroy slowly by starvation and untreated disease.

The news this week that three British medics are on hunger strike in Egypt makes the cruelty point clear enough to those who have so far been blind and deaf to it. They are protesting against being refused entry into Gaza for a humanitarian mission to set up a cardiac surgery unit at the al-Shifa hospital and help train medical students and junior doctors there. But the team have been denied access through Rafah by Egypt since 4 May. “We are on hunger strike until they let us through,” says Omar Mangoush, a cardiac surgeon from London. “There are loads of people with heart disease in Gaza. They can’t get out to Egypt and they can’t get out through Israel.”

He took a month’s holiday from work to go on this charity-based mission.

So who are the mental retards responsible for this outrage? This time it’s the Eqyptians, whose strings are pulled by the Israelis and their equally sadistic buddies in the American administration. The do-nothing whimps in the British foreign office, apparently, were told by the Egyptian foreign ministry that the medics’ request for access to Gaza had been “postponed”.

While in my hospital bed I also had to endure TV footage and press reports of the Pope’s visit to the Holy Land.

From the very start Vatican chiefs committed public relations suicide by meekly bowing to the criminal regime’s instruction not to visit Gaza. Here was an opportunity for the Pope to wait at the gates of the Erez crossing, under the glare of the international media, until allowed through – or until a full-scale international incident was provoked.

Alternatively he could have sailed with a flotilla of boats and landed peacefully on Gaza’s beach… Israel’s choice whether or not to make an unseemly issue of it.

Then he was banned from making a speech with the world’s news cameras showing Israel’s apartheid wall in the background. The Aida camp near Bethlehem wanted to welcome the Pope on a specially built stage in front of the ugly and offensive barrier with which the ugly and offensive state of Israel has surrounded and imprisoned the birthplace of Christ. The Israeli authorities ordered work on the stage stopped. Couldn’t the Vatican have responded by saying something like: “If you Israelis don’t want the world to see your wretched Wall why don’t you remove it, as required by the International Court of Justice?”

The Vatican then put up another ‘black’ by arranging for the Pope to visit the family of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Such concern for one Israeli soldier while 11,000 Palestinians lie rotting in Israeli jails calls for the global sick-bag to be handed round.

And while this overdressed “representative of God on Earth” was diligently sticking to illegal occupier rules, the said occupier continued to withhold cement and other necessary materials for Gaza’s reconstruction and humanitarian revival.

What is the point of a pope who’s not prepared to stick his neck out to help liberate the Holy Land from long and brutal occupation by a breed of racist fanatics who hold to the ludicrous belief that they are inheritors of all the real estate in the Holy Land and beyond, and are superior to the rest of the human race? Indeed, this latest papal tour has illustrated, if it hadn’t been obvious before, that a pope needs to be a hard-nosed politician of special calibre as well as a holy man.

His Holiness said Palestinians should have a homeland so that “both peoples may live in peace in a homeland of their own, within secure and internationally recognised borders”.

He should get out more. The Palestinians already have a homeland. It was occupied in 1948 in a move that launched the Zionists’ master-plan to steal the entire territory and expel the Arabs, Christians included. And there are already internationally recognised borders. The Vatican and the rest of the international community choose to forget.

At the Yad Vashem memorial the Pope’s address (as reported on the Vatican website) included the following passage: “One can rob a neighbour of possessions, opportunity or freedom. One can weave an insidious web of lies to convince others that certain groups are undeserving of respect. Yet, try as one might, one can never take away the name of a fellow human being.” I applaud the words. Presumably they were intended to refer to the Jews killed in the Shoah; but the irony is that they equally apply to the slaughter and suffering of the Palestinians on the receiving end of Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing.

The Pope’s visit, whatever the truth behind the scenes, had the appearance of a cack-handed conspiracy designed to make Israel look good by providing an abundance of PR images of the pontiff glad-handing the regime’s leading gangsters and thus legitimizing humanity’s dark side. Getting him to pass by the Gazans (Christians as well as Muslims) “on the other side of the road” was a propaganda master-stroke.

No genuine “God on Earth” would have fallen for that.

But take heart, all you right-minded people out there. In Britain, the parliamentary worm has suddenly turned and decided it will tolerate no longer the greedy and the self-serving in its own ranks. Sleaze has been uncovered by the bucket-full and the shamed Speaker of the House of Commons has been forced from office for the first time in 300 years thanks to the courage of a few good men. Many tried to block the truth but ultimately failed, and we are seeing the start of a new era of zero tolerance when it comes to greed, lies and corruption.

The public are the key. They know what is right and wrong even if their politicians don’t, and they are venting their extreme displeasure at ministers and MPs who are having a laugh at public expense. Ordinary people would happily see the culprits dangling from the lamp-posts of Whitehall or their heads on pikes decorating London Bridge.

So when will world leaders show zero tolerance against the cruel racists who foul and vandalise the Holy Land? What place do they and their sympathisers have in a civilized community of nations?

All it takes – maybe – is a few good men, and the general public…

What will you say about the subjugation of Palestine’s people and Israel’s defilement of this once-lovely place? How will you answer charges that your county, the USofA, is godfather, bankroller, arms supplier and good buddy to the racist thieves and colonizers that have turned it into a powder-keg?

Mr Mitchell, the people you are talking to in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem are, in the words of a respected British Jewish MP, “a gang of amoral thugs”. The stench of ethnic cleansing is everywhere.

Can we hope that you’ll give them some straight talk about…

• the way they have oppressed and dispossessed the Palestinian people for 61 years?
• the way they continue to occupy, humiliate, abduct and murder their neighbours – Muslim and Christian?
• the way their military occupation of Palestine is illegal under international law and breaches countless UN resolutions?
• the fact that Israel is no western-style democracy but a hatefully ethnocracy that offends the rest of the world?
• how 8 Palestinians die for every Israeli; and when it comes to children the kill-rate is 11 to 1?
• how Israel’s flag-wavers kick up a fuss about one captured Israeli soldier while 11,000 Palestinians, including women and children, rot in Israeli jails?

You have to confront them with all this and much more before even mentioning ‘peace’.

What will you say to them about the Likud Party’s mission statement that “the Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state”, and that “Jerusalem is the eternal, united capital of the State of Israel and only of Israel”?

And will you hold your tongue about the Kadima Party’s claim to a national and historic right to the Land of Israel “in its entirety” and its pledge to keep Jerusalem and the settlements?

Your boss, President Obama, told the vultures of AIPAC that it’s OK for Israel to grab the hallowed City of Jerusalem and turn it into the permanent headquarters of the Zionist regime. Jerusalem “will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided”. Realising his gaffe he tried to wriggle out: “Well, obviously, it’s going to be up to the parties to negotiate a range of these issues. And Jerusalem will be part of those negotiations… And I think that it is smart for us to work through a system in which everybody has access to the extraordinary religious sites in Old Jerusalem, but that Israel has a legitimate claim on that city.”

A legitimate claim? Who briefs the President? The UN decided long ago that the Old City, which currently belongs to Palestinian East Jerusalem, was to become an international city. And how can it be right for weak, unarmed and impoverished Palestinians to have to negotiate with a brutal, lawless, state-of-the-art military regime for their universal rights and freedoms, which are supposed to be guaranteed by the international community?

UN Resolution 181 of 1947, dealing with the Partition that Israel accepted, declares that “the City of Jerusalem shall be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations”, to include surrounding villages and towns such as Abu Dis and Bethlehem.

Resolution 242 (1967) by the Security Council and therefore fully binding…

1. Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles:

(i) withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

(ii) termination of all claims or states of belligerency, and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force;

2. Affirms further the necessity

(a) for guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area;

(b) for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem;

(c) for guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area, through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones.

Israel quibbles over interpretation of the wording but it’s clear to everyone else.

Security Council Resolution 338 (1973) calls on the parties concerned to start immediate implementation of Security Council Resolution 242.

Security Council Resolution 446 (1979) “determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East… Calls once more upon Israel, as the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to rescind its previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories.”

So there you have it, Mr Mitchell. The UN has set it out. The world is waiting for the will of the UN to be implemented. The longer the delay the uglier the unrest can become.

If United Nations resolutions aren’t enough then consider the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, an important set of undertakings to which Israel and 136 other States are signed up.

Article 1 states:

1. All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. (The West should remember this when refusing to meet Hamas.)

2. All peoples may, for their own ends, freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources… In no case may a people be deprived of its own means of subsistence. (This of course includes fishing and Gaza’s off-shore gas resources and the West Bank’s water.)

3. The States that are party to the Covenant… shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations. (Quartet, are you listening?)

Article 2 requires States to guarantee that the rights enshrined in the Covenant will be exercised without discrimination of any kind as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. (Quartet, please note.)

Article 6 says that the States recognize the right to work, which includes the right of everyone to the opportunity to gain his living by work which he freely chooses or accepts, and will take appropriate steps to safeguard this right. (Impossible until the siege is lifted and free, unfettered access to the outside world restored, wouldn’t you agree Quartet?)

Article 12 recognizes the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, and requires the States to take the necessary steps to provide for the healthy development of the child… (So get a grip, Quartet. More than 700 patients, including war wounded, are prevented by border closures from traveling abroad for medical attention, and 320 more have died. Gaza’s children suffer starvation, stunted growth and psychological problems.)

For those who accept the basic concept of human rights it boils down to common decency. But the horrendous, dragged-out torment in Gaza and the West Bank suggests that Israel and the Western powers either haven’t understood the Covenant or aren’t imbued with decency.

Then there’s the threat Israel poses to the rest of the world. According to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission Israel has a nuclear arsenal numbering in the hundreds, possibly larger than the Britain’s. Israel is the only state in the region not to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has not signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention.

What will you say to them about that, Mr Mitchell?

Now we hear that Israel is “very unlikely” to co-operate in the UN war crimes probe into the blitzkrieg on Gaza, which slaughtered 1400, wounded and maimed countless others, and comprehensively destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure much of which was funded by British and EU taxpayers. How disgraceful is that?

Meanwhile it is reported that the US will boycott the upcoming World Conference against Racism (Durban2) next week in Geneva because it would mean ratifying the concluding document of the previous conference (Durban1), which includes harsh condemnation of Israel.

Well frankly, Mr Mitchell, if honest-to-goodness criticism of Israel’s vile conduct is still verboten in your country, I doubt if you’ll achieve a goddam thing in the Holy Land… except buy Israel even more time for consolidating ‘facts on the ground’ to make their occupation permanent. But please prove me wrong.

Meeting the students is a continual source of inspiration, as so many apply themselves to their studies with cheerful determination in spite of difficult family circumstances and almost insurmountable obstacles put in their way by the Occupation. So I enjoy the newsletters the Brothers regularly send me.

Their latest includes the heart-rending story of a young girl, Merna, an honors student in her final year majoring in English. For most people studying for a degree is tough enough, but this youngster also has to battle against armed intruders who invade her home and have systematically destroyed her family life.

Merna is described by the Brothers as “a joyful and engaging person, full of life and love”. The tragedy is that Israeli soldiers frequently rampage through her refugee camp in the middle of the night and have taken away her loved ones, one by one. From childhood Merna remembers the constant night raids and soldiers randomly searching Palestinian homes, ransacking their contents and arbitrarily arresting residents. She remembers, too, her home being bombarded with missiles fired from Gilo, an illegal Israeli settlement outside Bethlehem.

Merna in Azzeh Camp where she lives. The bright smile hides a steely determination.

Merna’s family, like thousands of others, became refugees when their village was attacked by Jewish terrorist forces in 1948. The villagers were forced to flee to a camp in Bethlehem where they remain to this day, unable to return to their old homes.

In 2003 her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while sitting outside her family home during a curfew.

In 2004, the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22 year-old artist who designed posters and banners for university student groups. They accused him of taking part in student political activities, which can mean anything from running for student council to organizing speaking events, and for this he spent 4 years in prison.

In 2007, they came back for Merna’s 18-year-old brother. He is still incarcerated under ‘administrative detention’, which means he hasn’t been charged or sentenced for any crime because the Israeli military claims to have secret evidence, which only a military judge can see. The Israelis use this device to lock up Palestinians — mostly students — for up to 6 months, to be renewed if the mood takes them. Merna’s 19 year-old cousin is also in prison waiting to be charged with a ‘crime’.

Then a few months ago the military came again, this time to take her youngest brother. Merna was in despair. He had only just turned 16. “As he was being taken away, he told us to take care of ourselves,” said Merna, her eyes brimming with tears. “He’s my little brother! He is the one who needs taking care of. What is he doing in an awful prison cell and how are his spirits?”

Israeli military law treats Palestinians as adults as soon as they reach 16 — a flagrant violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Israeli youngsters of course are regarded as children until 18.

Sleepless and tearful, Merna nevertheless went to university next day as usual, determined not to let this latest blow upset her future plans. Even if her brothers had been robbed of an education, Merna would still fight for hers.

A fellow student recalls than when chatting to Merna online in the evenings, she often had to leave the computer because the military had barged into her home. But she always came to school the next day, even if she’d been up all night while Israeli soldiers trashed her house and questioned her family.

“Coming to school is a way of getting away from what is happening in the refugee camp,” says Merna. “It’s like an oasis here for me.” But her thoughts are never far from her cousin and brothers. “I only wish they were allowed this opportunity.”

She is now a senior member of the Bethlehem University Student Ambassadors Programme and an example to fellow classmates, say the Brothers. She hopes to pursue post-graduate studies abroad and return to the University to give back to the community some of the support it has offered her.

To get to Bethlehem University many students have to cross two or more checkpoints, “Sometimes they take our ID cards and they spend ages writing down all the details, just to make us late,” said one. Students are often made to remove shoes, belt and bags. “It’s like an airport. Many times we are kept waiting outside for up to an hour, rain or shine, they don’t care.” But the worst thing is the humiliation. The soldiers attempt to forcibly remove students’ clothes or they swear and shout sexual slurs at female students.

One of the girls, who has attended university for four years, tells how she’s been sexually harassed on the journey, had tear gas thrown at her near checkpoints and been refused crossing. “Sometimes I can’t concentrate in class because I am worried what the Israelis will do on my way home.” According to one of the professors these are the more insidious consequence of the checkpoints. Over the years they have noticed a dramatic decline in student motivation and concentration. “When you are constantly facing this sort of humiliation, your feelings toward yourself change and you feel worthless.”

Israel brags about its “independent” justice system. Here we see it at work. ‘Administrative detention’ is a particularly vile and unjust practice. In any respectable country detainees are charged with a recognizable offence and tried in a suitable court of law in accordance with internationally accepted standards for fair trial. If there’s insufficient evidence they are immediately released.

But Palestinians are dealt with by Israeli military courts, even when it’s a civil matter. These courts ignore international laws and conventions, so there’s no legal protection for individuals under Israeli military occupation. And as detention is based on secret information, which neither the detainee nor his lawyer is allowed to see, it is impossible to mount a proper defence. Besides, the Security Service always finds a bogus excuse to keep detainees locked up “in the greater interest of the security of Israel”.

They are not informed of the reasons for their arrest, even after release. The detention period of 6 months is renewable indefinitely by a military judge. Although detainees have the right to review and appeal, they are unable to challenge the evidence and check facts as all information presented to the Court is classified. The justice process is therefore a mockery.

Now, I hear, the Israeli cabinet has voted to clamp down on ‘political’ prisoner rights and make life even more miserable, even to the extent of denying them the chance to take high school exams or university correspondence courses. This is to put pressure on Hamas to release their captive, the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a trained killer belonging to the tank corps. In the meantime Israel holds some 11,000 Palestinians captive, including a number of women and children, but there is no orchestrated international chorus of voices pleading for their release.

Israel disregards Geneva Conventions with impunity and violates international law and its agreements with the EU, but is never held to account. The regime even resorts to placing legitimately elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council under administrative detention. One can only conclude that world leaders are not committed to defending human rights and the endless words on the subject are no more than hot air.

So young minds like Merna’s must continue to persevere against the odds. Though greatly distracted by the cruel fate of her close family, the ordeal has forged a steely resolve, and the purposeful way she lives her university life, say the Brothers, has given her added strength and confidence. Merna has managed to turn the tables on adversity. Her loss is actually her gain.

What a remarkable young lady.

This House of God had about £2.5m invested in a company that manufactures one of Israel’s weapons of mass misery and destruction. After saying for years that they couldn’t see anything unethical about it, Church bosses finally agreed with the rest of us that Caterpillar’s D-9 bulldozer, which is used in the Holy Land for the ugly purpose of demolishing Palestinian homes, uprooting olive groves and destroying civilian infrastructure, is more like a vicious weapon in Israel’s hands than a civil engineering tool.

Caterpillar simply didn’t look good on the Church’s ethical investments list any more.

The wholesale destruction of Palestinian homes, and Caterpillar’s part in it, has been going on for a very long time. At the Jenin refugee camp in March/April 2002 Israel’s massive, armoured D-9 Caterpillar bulldozers – driven by army reservists – worked non-stop for three days and nights. More than 300 homes in the densely packed camp were flattened. The bulldozer drivers were instant heroes and showered with medals for valour.

One such driver did not get down from the cab of his Caterpillar for 75 hours straight.

For three days I just erased and erased… the entire area. I took down any house from which there was shooting. To take it down, I would take down several more. The soldiers warned with a speaker, that the tenants must leave before I came in, but I did not give anyone a chance. I did not wait… I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding? Anyone who was there, and saw our soldiers in the houses, would understand they were in a death trap… I didn’t give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn’t just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders.

Many people where inside houses we set to demolish. They would come out of the houses we where working on. I didn’t see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn’t see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn’t care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down…

This was the largest single orgy of destruction carried out by the Israeli army, according to Amnesty International. The al-Hawashin quarter was completely destroyed and two further areas of the refugee camp were partially destroyed, leaving more than 800 families, totaling some 4,000 people, homeless.

House demolition has been a central plank in Israel’s solution to the ‘Arab problem’ from the start, and the bulldozers have been highly successful in dislocating Palestinian society and tearing communities apart.

ICAHD reports that between 1948 and the 1960s Israel systematically demolished 418 Palestinian villages inside what has become the State of Israel. Residents who were put to flight could not return and their lands were turned over to the Jewish population.

The Israeli township of Sderot, which the world is meant to feel sorry for, is built on stolen lands belonging to a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed and erased.

At the start of the Occupation in 1967 demolition was carried across the ‘Green Line’ into the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Since then some 12,000 Palestinian dwellings have been destroyed, many of them the homes of people who had fled from the bulldozers in 1948.

Dozens of ancient homes were destroyed in the Mughrabi Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City to make room for a plaza for the Wailing Wall.

In 1971 Ariel Sharon, then in charge of Southern Command, cleared 2,000 houses in the Gaza refugee camps to facilitate military control. After becoming Prime Minister in 2001 he oversaw the demolition of another 1500 homes in Gaza.

At least 2,000 houses in the Occupied Territories were destroyed in a bid to quell the first Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nearly 1,700 more were demolished by the Civil Administration during the Oslo peace process (1993-2000).

Since the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, the Israeli military has destroyed 4,000 to 5,000 Palestinian homes, including hundreds in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron and other cities of the West Bank, and more than 2,500 in Gaza. Tens of thousands of other homes have been left uninhabitable. Altogether around 50,000 people were left homeless. Hundreds of shops, workshops, factories and public buildings, including Palestinian Authority ministry offices in all the West Bank cities, have been destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

Figures suggest that 60% of the Palestinian homes demolished in the Occupied Territories were bulldozed as part of military “clearing operations,” 25% for being “illegal” (not having permits), and 15% for collective punishment. Amnesty International says that more as than 3,000 hectares of cultivated land were cleared during this time. Wells, water storage pools and water pumps which provided water for drinking, irrigation and other needs for thousands of people, have also been destroyed, along with miles of irrigation networks.

None of this takes account of the wanton and incalculable destruction caused by the relentless blitzing of Gaza last month…

When homes are demolished for ‘military reasons’ or as acts of deterrence and collective punishment, there is no process – no formal demolition order, no warning, no time to remove furniture or personal belongings, and often barely time to escape the building falling down around the victim’s ears.

Demolition orders, when issued, are delivered haphazardly. A building inspector may knock on the door and hand it to anyone who answers, including small children. More often it is slipped into the doorframe or left under a stone near the house. Palestinians frequently complain that they never receive the order before the bulldozers arrive and are thus denied recourse to the courts.

What took the Church of England so long to catch onto the Caterpillar scandal?

There’s an ugly plan afoot in the EU to reward Israel for its abominable and criminal conduct by enhancing the already handsome benefits enjoyed by the neighbourhood bully under the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Most EU citizens have little idea how the EU works or how to hold it to account for blunders like dereliction of duty. That’s no surprise because it is cloaked in incomprehensible complexity and there is no way to hold it accountable. Those in control shamelessly do as they please, it seems.

Take this wretched EU-Israel Association Agreement. Its purpose is to promote (1) peace and security, (2) shared prosperity through, for example, the creation of a free trade zone, and (3) cross-cultural rapprochement. It governs not only EU-Israel relations but Israel’s relations with the EU’s other Mediterranean partners – including the Palestinian National Authority.

Fundamental to the Agreement are undertakings regarding ‘respect for human rights and democratic principles’ set out as a general condition in Article 2, which says:

Relations between the Parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this Agreement.

This clause allows steps to be taken to enforce the contractual requirement regarding human rights and to dissuade partners from policies and practices that disrespect those rights. The Agreement also requires respect for self-determination of peoples and fundamental freedoms for all.

It sounds fine, but the EU-Israel Association Agreement actually achieves none of this. In 2002 the EU Parliament voted to suspend the Agreement on the grounds of Israel’s violations of human rights. The resolution called for an arms embargo against Israel and Palestine, and condemned the “military escalation pursued by the Sharon government” and the “oppression of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli army.” The EU Commission ignored the will of Parliament, and consequently there has been no improvement in Israel’s behaviour.

Britain’s foreign secretary David Miliband last week dismissed a proposal by the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement, saying: “I think that’s a bit naïve since the agreement, the upgrade, was for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis.”

I have written to ask Mr Miliband to explain how Palestinians would benefit. They certainly did not do so under the existing arrangement.

The EU, in its treaties, declares a firm commitment to the Charter of the United Nations and international law. On 30 December a statement was issued about the Gaza carnage, saying:

The European Union, conscious of the suffering and anguish of all civilian populations, puts forward the following proposals to resolve the crisis:

• Immediate and permanent ceasefire: there must be an unconditional halt to rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel and an end to Israeli military action.
• The cessation of fighting should allow lasting and normal opening of all border crossings, as provided for in the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access. The European Union is ready.
• Re-dispatch the EUBAM (Border Assistance Mission) to Rafah to enable its re-opening, in cooperation with Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Israel. It is also willing to examine the possibility of extending its assistance to other crossing points, provided that the issues relating to security have found a satisfactory response.

The nub of the problem – the continuing illegal occupation – isn’t even mentioned. Nor does the statement actually address core provisions of the Charter, which says that all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.

Furthermore the International Court of Justice ruling on the Illegality of the Separation Wall warned all states of their obligation not to recognise, aid or assist the illegal situation resulting from Israel’s actions in occupied Palestinian territory and reminded all parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention that they are bound to ensure Israel’s compliance with this Convention. These obligations apply not only to EU member states that are signatories to the Geneva Conventions, but also to EU institutions charged with ensuring that EU-Israel contractual relations conform to Community and international law.

Honourable men would have enforced Article 2, observed all other codes and not let matters slide. They would have put the squeeze on Israel until the regime complied 100 percent with requirements. Israel relies heavily on exports to Europe so the EU could, at a stroke, end the evil occupation, murder and land theft, and resolve the problem in the Holy Land.

What game are you playing, Gentlemen? And what part of Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement don’t you understand?

Stuart Littllewood

Would they be allowed to exploit and develop their offshore gas field? Would their fishermen be allowed to fish in unpolluted waters? Would their young people be able to come and go and take up places at foreign universities?

Would Israel clear out of Gazan airspace permanently? Would the Israeli navy cease its piracy and stay out of Palestinian territorial waters? Would you and I be able to visit Gaza direct?

Fat chance. None of this would suit Israel. So Gazans would be no better off. Their tormented half-existence would continue.

There are no rockets coming out of the West Bank. Yet the illegal Israeli occupation there continues and so does the ethnic cleansing, the land theft, the illegal settlements, the colonization, the demolition of Palestinian homes, the throttling of the economy, the abduction and ‘administrative detention’ of civilians and the massive interference with freedom of movement. Nothing has changed for West Bank Palestinians who DO NOT fire rockets. There is no sign of an end to their misery.

The bloody assault on Gaza therefore has much more to do with Israel’s ambition to expand racial dominance in the Holy Land than crude and erratic rocket-fire. Hamas and the Palestinians holed up in Gaza are simply in the way of the Grand Plan and have to be removed or totally subdued.

The international community needs to keep their eye on the ball — the big issue — which is the ending of the occupation and Israel’s withdrawal to recognized pre-67 borders as required by international law. In short, they need to stop wringing their hands and start delivering justice, which is long overdue.

Palestinians in Gaza will hardly wish to give up armed resistance until they receive copper-bottomed guarantees of a normal life unmolested by Israel… and see concrete evidence of it.