All over Europe, and not least in Britain, there is a widening gap between public opinion on the Palestine-Israel conflict and government policy on the issue. It is a gap which two British pressure groups, the Council for Arab-British Understanding and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, are struggling to close in the face of a media which seldom bothers to publicize their activities — let alone to offer them any encouragement.
Last Wednesday afternoon, amid talk of a fresh window of opportunity in the Middle East, members of both groups went to the House of Commons to lobby British politicians over four specific objectives: The implementation of the ruling by the International Court on Israel’s separation wall; the suspension of the EU-Israel trade agreement; the ending of arms sales to Israel and the subjection of the country to economic sanctions. As it happens, over 200 British MPs have already signed parliamentary “early day motions” protesting at the separation wall’s encroachment on Palestinian territory.
Following the lobby, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign held a House of Commons meeting at which numerous speakers, including several pro-Palestinian MPs, discussed the prospects for peace in the aftermath of the death of Yasser Arafat. The meeting was chaired by the unswerving British champion of Palestinian rights, Liberal MP Jenny Tonge (who earlier this year was dismissed from the Liberal Party’s front bench after confessing that she could understand how a Palestinian youth with no future might become a suicide bomber). Tonge invited those present to join her in honoring the memory of the late Palestinian leader with a minute’s silence. It was an invitation that the audience — with the possible exception of the representative of Israel Radio who unceremoniously plonked a microphone down in front of her — had no hesitation in accepting.
MP John Austin began the meeting by deploring the stance adopted in Israel last week by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw with his insistence on the need for an end — not to Israel’s occupation — but to Palestinian violence as the precondition for negotiations. As long as the occupation continued, declared Austin, resistance to it was bound to persist: Only when Israel acknowledged its essential illegality would there be any chance of bringing the conflict to an end.
If the proceedings had a keynote, it was heavily qualified optimism. Speakers recalled the many previous “moments of opportunity” in the Middle East that had come to nothing — while also underlining their contempt for the view that Yasser Arafat had been the chief obstacle to peace in the past. MP Richard Burden was particularly vehement in his dismissal of the Israeli claim that things would have been very different had not the Palestinian leader willfully squandered the chance to achieve a lasting settlement on his people’s behalf. It was important to set the record straight and expose the falsehood that the latest intifada was rooted in Arafat’s rejection of the offer of a viable Palestinian state. “I was there”, exclaimed the impassioned MP, “and I can tell you that no such offer was ever made”. He went on to describe the total disconnection between the media version of events and what he had witnessed in Israel four years ago with his own eyes: Blatant Israeli land confiscations and appropriations of water supplies.
Another MP, Crispin Blunt, focused on the issue of the US-Israel relationship, maintaining that the Israeli lobby was bigger in Washington than in Israel itself and that the US was more concerned with the outcome than the form of the prospective Palestinian leadership election. His comments were reinforced by the powerful contribution of the Israeli peace activist, Jeff Halper, who runs the organization, The Israeli Committee against House Demolitions. Observing that Israel was indifferent to the opinion of every country bar the US and that the Israeli public had opted to sit things out, Halper stressed that a “very critical juncture in the conflict” had been reached. In many respects, he contended, the current situation represented the culmination of Ariel Sharon’s long-term goal of rendering the occupation irreversible, and he pointed to a development that has been widely overlooked: The recent endorsement by the US Congress of the proposition that Israel need no longer acknowledge any obligation to return to its pre-1967 borders. What Israel and the US were now looking for, he claimed, was a Palestinian leader who would “sign off” on Israel’s 30-year program of expansionism.
Well-briefed and unillusioned, the veteran campaigner nevertheless sees grounds for hope. Nowadays he is much less apt than five years ago to find himself preaching to the unconverted and having to explain the basis of his position. Terrorism and defense, he said, no longer provide the framework of every discussion of the Palestine-Israel conflict and Israel’s illegal occupation is widely acknowledged to be the central issue. Yet Halper’s message was as somber as it was unequivocal: That it behooves everybody involved in the pursuit of justice for the Palestinians to be vigilant in the extreme.
An especially warm reception was accorded to the penultimate speaker, the representative of the Palestinian General Delegation, Husam Zomlot. Commemorating Yasser Arafat as the father of his nation, as a great man whose death has left Palestinians feeling orphaned, Zomlot vowed that the Palestinian people would never be defeated. His sentiments were echoed by last speaker of the evening, MP Jeremy Corbyn, who expressed disgust at the way the Western media began burying Arafat before he actually died. As she closed the meeting, Jenny Tonge took the opportunity to repudiate the slur that critics of the Israeli government are anti-Semitic.
To general approbation, she asserted that if anybody could be properly described as anti-Semitic, it was the current sponsor-in-chief of Israel’s “brutal and evil” occupation: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
