The Brakes Come Off in British Parliaments Vote on Palestinian Statehood ...there was an audible snap in Britain on Monday night. Freed of the burden of saying what Israel and its lobby demanded to hear, politicians of right and left said what they felt. Sir Richard Ottaway, the Tory chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, one who, in his own words had stood by Israel through thick and thin said that such was his anger at the Israeli governments annexation of 950 acres of the West Bank, that he would abstain. Sir Alan Duncan, the former Tory minister for international development compared the settlements in the West Bank to the apartheid system of South Africa and said they represented a wicked cocktail of occupation. In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute, the chief think tank of the British defense establishment, on Tuesday Duncan said: Anyone who supports illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian land is an extremist who puts themselves outside the boundaries of democratic standards. They are not fit to stand for election or sit in a democratic parliament. That judgement applies to most of the Israeli cabinet and certainly to its prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, who said on July 11: There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan. Netanyahu went on to say that if Israel relinquished Judea and Samaria, the biblical vocabulary every Israeli politician uses for what Duncan described as stolen land, they would create another 20 Gazas. Netanyahu has created major problems for anyone trying to sell the line that a vote for Palestinian statehood was a vote against attempts to restart negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, because unilateral recognition prejudiced the outcome. Simply, that line has few takers according to the vote that was carried overwhelmingly. Whatever Israel claims are its intentions, facts on the ground now speak louder than words. 600,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, with their network of separate motorways, roads, walls, electricity, water, says all anyone wants to know about Israels intention of handing back the West Bank. It will not. It can not. No Israeli leader is strong enough to do it. huffingtonpost/david-hearst/the-brake-come-off-in-the_b_5984930.html
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 08:14:43 +0000
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