VT Foreign Policy
Mass marches, chanting and banner waving are essential to the campaign to save Palestine but it’s also important to challenge UK Government policy and actions through all channels, democratic and non-democratic, especially now that Lord Walney, the Government’s independent adviser on political violence and disruption, recommends that political leaders ban their MPs from engaging with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and other solidarity groups. Milord Walney, aka John Zak Woodcock, is a former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, so not independent after all.
Knowing Israel’s overriding, stop-at-nothing ambition to control all of Palestine “from the river to the sea” and seize Gaza’s offshore oil and gas; and considering its contempt for law and human decency; and noting UKGov’s lamentable habit of distorting international law to sanitise Israel’s crimes against humanity; the Palestine solidarity movement’s continuing reliance on calls for a ceasefire after 5 months of genocide clearly isn’t enough.
Meanwhile, UKGov (Department for Business and Trade) have dismissed a petition calling for all licences for arms to Israel to be revoked. Their excuse is that “we rigorously assess every application on a case-by-case basis against strict assessment criteria, the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria (the SELC) …. The SELC provide a thorough risk assessment framework for export licence applications and require us to think hard about the impact of providing equipment and its capabilities. We will not license the export of equipment where to do so would be inconsistent with the SELC.”
So, everything’s just fine, yes?
No. They don’t bother to explain how Israel manages to satisfy those “strict” criteria and survive such a “rigorous” process. We’re supposed to take it on trust. Serious campaign groups, though, would check out the SELC and provide their activists with an expert briefing.
There are 8 criteria and, on reading them, you might well conclude that Israel fails to satisfy at least 5. MPs and ministers pretending otherwise mislead Parliament and insult the public. And I’ve always understood that to be a serious matter and punishable.
CRITERION 6 requires “commitment to non-proliferation and other areas of arm’s control and disarmament”, but how safe is anyone under the threat of Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nukes? Israel is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (vtforeignpolicy.com)
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