The Andy Burnham government might have looked like Continuity Keir with more positive vibes for the first six weeks or so, but on Tuesday a new line was drawn. When Burnham said he felt Labour had not done enough on Palestine and Gaza, he had meant it. His decision to impose trade sanctions on illegal settlements in the West Bank was to be his first break with the past.
Some opponents chose to get their retaliation in early, before Ed Miliband had even stood up to make the announcement in the Commons on Tuesday. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador, declared on Sunday that Ed was guilty of “hating Jews”. Which rather implied he thought Ed hated himself.
Huckabee also wondered when we would get round to sanctioning Russia, China and North Korea. The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, insisted that “the UK would be on the wrong side of history” if the sanctions were imposed. Presumably that means that doing nothing as Israeli settlers, with the explicit endorsement of the Israeli government, seize land, burn homes and kill children is the right side of history.
It’s a strange world we live in. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right security minister, went completely rogue. His take was that this made “Las Malvinas” Argentinian territory.
As though it was the sanctions that were the nail in the coffin for the Falklands. Still, there was some consistency there. The Israel government has never placed much weight on the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
So why should they bother to make an exception for the Falkland islanders? Nor was all the oppo to be found abroad. Kemi Badenoch wrote a piece for the Jewish Chronicle in which she insisted that the government was desperate to win back Islamists and that Jews would no longer be safe in this country.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
