In 1774, Britain sailed away from the Falkland Islands and left a plaque behind, declaring the place still to be British even in the physical absence of its people; a bit like leaving your beach towel on an empty sun lounger, claim staked, and wandering off for a while. A few decades later, Spain withdrew too and left a marker of its own. For a time, the archipelago was a scatter of rock and tussac grass in the South Atlantic with nobody living on it but the wind, two rain-soaked European notices asserting ownership.
No one had been dispossessed, simply because no one was there. Every human being who has ever lived in the Falklands arrived by boat. As colonization goes, this was as tame as you could ask for in the litany of imperial European crimes.
Two-and-a-half centuries later, those remote islands have suddenly become the most-useful real estate in international politics—for punishing the British. On Monday, Argentina said it would file a criminal complaint against the companies drilling oil north of the islands, among them three arms of the Israeli firm Navitas Petroleum. Within hours, Israel’s national security minister demanded that his own government recognize Argentine sovereignty over them, to bloody the nose of Britons who were about to take action against settlements in the West Bank.
By the afternoon, Britain had moved to ban trade in goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who calls the Falklands "Argentine territory under occupation," is proposing a retaliation against London that would hand a diplomatic prize to the government now trying to prosecute an Israeli company’s multibillion-dollar oil project. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. ambassador to Israel had warned of an American response with a "huge impact on British businesses." GOP Representative Randy Fine suggested that his home state of Florida should cease doing business with British firms over the Israel sanctions. (How they’d like to punish Canada and France, who are doing the same, remains to be seen, though the Trump administration presumably has a few ideas already.) The stars are aligning over the South Atlantic.
Just days earlier, President Donald Trump had floated reviewing America’s position on the Falklands, still angry about British hesitance to join him in the Iran war he opened alongside Israel. Whatever this is, it is not an alliance. Three governments have independently worked out that the Falklands are an extraordinarily cheap way to hurt Britain over grievances with Westminster, whether the islands are involved or not.
And they can do it because the Falklands come pre-loaded with the lexicon of anti-colonialism—one that, on closer inspection, fits this case perhaps worse than almost anywhere on earth. To be clear, the U.S. has not recognized Argentina’s claim. Its longstanding position is neutrality on sovereignty while recognizing British administration.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
