Right now on BBC Two, Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. Something has to lighten the mood. In the United Nations General Assembly, the shameful abstainers, but abstainers all the same, included Britain, Australia, Canada, India, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, even the Netherlands that had already sent in Marines, and even Ukraine. Much hailed in Rightist circles, the new Government of New Zealand was nevertheless part of the global majority.
The United States and Israel must make do with Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Fiji, Guatemala, Hungary, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, and Tonga. We may be grateful that Keir Starmer was not its Prime Minister, or the United Kingdom would have been on that list, exceeding Anthony Albanese, Justin Trudeau, Narendra Modi, Giorgia Meloni, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Labour will not call for a ceasefire until the United States had done so, a tied hand that Rishi Sunak has not inflicted upon himself.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. On the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament. And that was before Starmer had caused Labour’s Muslim vote to collapse.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
Labour is in a tricky position: mass immigration means it now has to appeal to Muslim constituencies, councillors and members who are fiercely anti Israel and sometimes even pro Hamas. Yet it also needs to appeal to the kind of moderate British voters equally disgusted by the strangling of aid to Gaza and the atrocities of Hamas against innocent Jews.
ReplyDeleteWould that that were Labour's position, compared to what is.
DeleteHe’s tried to walk that delicate tightrope bu calling for a humanitarian pause in the conflict while still saying Israel ultimately has a right to defend itself against Hamas. Peter Hitchens position is purely utopian; he argues Israel should refrain from any response to the slaughter of 1400 of its civilians which no democratically elected government could do (or it wouldn’t stay in office long).
ReplyDeleteWhat, exactly, is "a humanitarian pause"?
DeleteA pause to allow a real flow of aid into Gaza from Egypt and allow the last remaining civilian Gazans in the north to evacuate south, I think.
ReplyDeleteQuite. Who knows?
DeleteIncidentally I agree with many of the criticisms of Israel, while making no excuse for the barbarity of what Hamas did.
ReplyDeleteThe Daily Telegraph and Times of Israel have both carried articles recently arguing Netanyahu deliberately isolated Gaza from the West Bank (pouring aid into the Hamas-run Gaza and humiliating Abbas’s PA) as a divide-and-rule strategy and also reallocated money from Israel’s intelligence and defence budget to Jewish settlers.
Both strategies have spectacularly backfired.
Indeed. I was going to post on that. You are now allowed to say these things. Imagine if you had written them a week ago. Some of us do not have to imagine.
DeleteThe Times of Israel (and Telegraph) did write this over a week ago and Haaretz has routinely said it. Israel’s free press, fiercely critical of its own government, is one of the many great features of Israel like the mass protests against reforms of its judiciary. No such press criticism or public protest would be permitted in any of its Arab neighbours (or indeed under Hamas).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/16/how-benjamin-netanyahu-empowered-hamas/
: "“For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank – bringing Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group”, wrote political correspondent Tal Schneider in the Times of Israel last week. “The idea was to prevent Abbas – or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government – from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state”. It adds: "Although careful in public, in early 2019 Mr Netanyahu was quoted as saying behind closed doors that those who opposed a two-state solution should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because it worked against Palestinian unity, according to the Times of Israel."
Everyone in Israel has always known it. It was not for nothing that half of Israelis loathed Netanyahu even before this. Saying it over here, on the other hand.
DeleteYou can read things like this all the time in the Israeli press. One of the many creditable aspects of Israel is it’s free press as well as its right to free assembly (as recently evidenced when hundreds of thousands turned out on the streets to fight for the independence of its judiciary), features that are not exactly common among its Arab neighbours.
ReplyDeleteOh, the Israeli media have put the British media to shame, all right.
Delete