JERUSALEM — Relations between England and Israel might not be as warm as one might think:
One of Britain’s most eminent historians has assailed the country’s policy towards Israel, questioning why Queen Elizabeth II has visited a host of despotic regimes but has never made an official visit to the Holy Land.
Speaking at the Anglo-Israel Association dinner in central London last week, Andrew Roberts suggested that the Foreign Office had a de facto ban on royal visits to Israel.
“The true reason of course, is that the FO [Foreign Office] has a ban on official royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged,” he said. “As an act of delegitimization of Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the FO Arabists.”
Roberts, whose work includes biographies of Churchill and Chamberlain, as well as Hitler and Roosevelt and a look at the relationship between Napoleon and Wellington, said that Britain had been at best “a fair-weather friend” to Israel.
I am not entirely surprised that foreign ministries — including the U.S. State Department in most administrations — tend to be more Arabist than sympathetic to Israel. International relations is like a chess game, only perhaps three-dimensional and with hundreds of sides. It is realpolitik in its most-pure form. With the number of Arab and Muslim countries outnumbering Israel by dozens to one and since many of them have oil — a resource that can bring the West to its knees — the bias is at least an understandable reality. (Conversely, defense ministries are generally more supportive of Israel, for obvious reasons.)
Moreover, the United Kingdom has a mixed history with Israel in the recent past. After World War I, Britain gained control of a large part of the Middle East including the region known as Palestine. Over the next several decades, the country had to deal with Zionists pursuing independence — and some extreme factions did things like bomb the King David Hotel — as well as an Arab population that became increasingly unruly and prone to rioting. Eventually, the United Kingdom essentially threw up its hands and said the diplomatic equivalent of, “Thank you, that’s enough, we’re sick of this. We’re going home.” (Remember, the country was also dealing with Mahatma Ghandi-led turmoil in India at the time, and the post-World War II cost of empire was becoming too high.) After the British left, the Arabs in Palestine rejected a U.N. offer to partition the land, the Jews declared an independent State of Israel, and the neighboring, Arab countries invaded. The rest is modern, Middle East history.
If present trends continue, it is likely that relations between England and Israel will only become worse. Anti-Semitism in Britain and elsewhere is increasing. (See here for a documentary by Channel 4 in England.) A U.K. court has issued an arrest warrant for former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for Israel’s actions during the war with Gaza last year. The number of extremist Muslims in Britain is increasing. The trends present in a country’s population usually filter upwards towards the government over time.
On a related issue, the author mentioned in the article also reportedly made other comments that will hopefully not fall on deaf ears:
Roberts, whose current book The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War reached No. 2 on the Sunday Times best-seller list, also attacked those who accuse Israel of responding “disproportionately” to provocation.
“William Hague [a Conservative MP] called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists,” he said.
“In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans – 12 times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?”
He then questioned how Britain would respond to similar provocations faced by Israel.
“Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would do placed in the same position?
“The population of the UK is 63 million – nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at random, Hizbullah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed eight patrolmen and kidnapped two others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians.
“Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and capturing a further 18?
“I put it to you that there is absolutely no lengths to which our government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right, too. So why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?”
Roberts is absolutely correct. But I will go a step further: the phrase “proportionate response” in military terms does not mean what most people and journalists think. (Dwight Eisenhower, as Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, was ultimately responsible for the firebombing of the German city of Dresden during World War II that killed many civilians. Should he have been tried later for war crimes?) Moreover, Israel’s intentions in the war against Hamas were morally sound while those of the terrorist group were not.
Elsewhere: Isi Leibler writes that Europe has forsaken Israel.
Samuel J. Scott 