With the imperial pomposity of an old colonial governor, David Lammy has ‘made clear’ to the Israelis that denying entry to Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang is ‘no way to treat British Parliamentarians’. Bloody natives, getting ideas above their station again. Any more of this nonsense, chaps, and you’ll be summoned to High Commissioner Lammy’s office for a jolly good talking to.
The MPs were travelling to Judea and Samiria – or the West Bank – which is ultimately under Israeli military control, but were denied entry by the Population and Immigration Authority. Mohamed and Yang say they were ‘astounded’, British MPs being unfamiliar with the concept of a country that enforces its borders. The pair were questioned on the purpose of their visit, after which the Israeli authorities determined they had come ‘to document Israeli security forces and spread hateful rhetoric against Israel’, and permission to travel to Judea and Samaria via Israel was denied. The UK Foreign Office says the MPs were on an official parliamentary trip, the Israeli government says they are unaware of any such visit.
Two months ago, Mohamed organised an open letter urging the government to ‘ban the import of all goods into the UK made in whole or in part in Israel’s illegal settlements’. This would include the 132 communities which enjoy legal status under Israeli law and would require Israel to reorganise its economy so that no part of any product for export to the UK is produced in locations which are fully integrated into Israeli supply and manufacturing chains. The call to boycott settlement-produced goods is designed to sound like a reasonable compromise but is a calculated effort to make UK-Israel trade impractical and prohibitively costly. A boycott would be foolhardy. Israel has so much to offer Britain, whether it’s pharmaceuticals, technology, or tips on managing a sectarian democracy.
For her part, Yang used a parliamentary question in January to urge government sanctions against Israeli parliamentarians (and government ministers) Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. I have made plain my views on Ben-Gvir in the Jewish Chronicle and on Smotrich in the Spectator, but if you’re an MP who calls for sanctions against another country’s MPs you run the risk of them pulling an Uno reverse card on you. And while refusing entry to a friendly country might be no way to treat British parliamentarians, it seemingly is the way to treat Israeli politicians. In 2008, Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith sent a letter to Moshe Feiglin, a right-wing Israeli politician, telling him his entry to the UK would ‘not be conducive to the public good’ given his previous comments about Arabs.
At this point, Feiglin was not yet a member of Knesset but he was the chairman of Manhigut Yehudit, the dominant faction on the central committee of the governing Likud party. New Labour was more thorough on border control than you remember: Feiglin was barred despite having no plans to visit Britain. (Don’t feel too sorry for him; he can handle himself. Replying to Smith’s letter, Feiglin wrote: ‘With the direction you are deteriorating to, I believe that if I ever wish to visit England in the future, I would be forced to submit my request in your official language – Arabic.’)
Lammy was in a good position to raise objections with Smith. At the time, he was a fellow minister in Gordon Brown’s government. Labour outriders would say Feiglin holds views repugnant to the average Briton, and I would agree, but Mohamed and Yang’s views are repugnant to an Israeli public that has not forgotten how quickly professions of solidarity in the wake of 7 October turned to condemnations of the military operations against the perpetrators. It doesn’t help that Mohamed and Yang are British MPs. Israelis recall how the slaughter of 1,200 of their compatriots brought thousands onto the streets of London in sympathy with the slaughterers. Israelis are a pretty Anglophile people but many find modern Britain difficult to understand and some regard it as doomed and UK-Israel relations with it.
But the sin here is not really hypocrisy, it’s arrogance. Almost 80 years on from the conclusion of the British Mandate of Palestine, UK politicians continue to think and speak as though Israel were a colonial outpost and not a sovereign, independent state. Emily Thornberry, chair of the foreign affairs select committee, accused Israel of ‘an insult to Britain’ and ‘an insult to parliament’. In a Commons statement on the incident, Middle East minister Hamish Falconer said: ‘We have warned them that actions like this will only damage the image of the Israeli government in the eyes of honourable members across the house.’
Given the lofty moral position British MPs occupy, the Israeli government will be crestfallen at this news. Turning away hostile foreigners or getting good behaviour stars from Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow foreign secretary and Charlie Falconer’s nepo baby. It’s a real dilemma.
The UK political establishment took a proprietary attitude towards Palestine in the 1920s and they still take one today. All that’s changed is that, back then, their mission was the creation of a Jewish state and today it’s the creation of an Arab state. Now as then, there are some who believe sincerely in the justice of their cause, but there are many others inspired by an enlightened supremacism. The Jews and the Arabs can’t seem to resolve their conflict, it’s up to old Blighty to fix the problem, so listen up Isaac and Ishmael.
Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the 1920 charter under whose auspices Britain was assigned custodianship of Palestine, describes the territories to be administered as ‘inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ and declares that ‘the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation’. It’s hard not to get high when that’s your supply, and Britain has remained hooked ever since, even after the Mandate cost 338 British lives, £100 million (roughly £4.5 billion in today’s money), and left the Colonial Office bitterly chiding the Jews and the Arabs to ‘realise the tragic consequences of attempting to conquer Palestine by force’. Great Power hubris has given way to patrician postcolonialism: indigenous peoples must govern themselves and here is how they must do it
There is nothing wrong with British politicians taking an interest in foreign affairs, though it would be grand if some of them could take an interest in domestic affairs, too. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict gets a lot of people worked up, and while Tories tend to be pro-Israel, Labour politicians are increasingly more pro-Palestinian, an inversion of the Labour-kibbutznik, Tory-Arabist dynamic seen until a few generations ago. But while one nation or the other might be our ‘side’, neither of them is our country, and we cannot dictate to them a settlement they are not prepared to accept. Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang are in the dictating business, and so Israel doesn’t want them on its soil. As an independent state, that is its right. It is hard enough trying to convince the Palestinians to take up sovereignty without trying to browbeat Israel into compromising its own.
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