Britain and Israel’s Special Relationship

In 1999 alone, Britain sold Israel £11.5 million worth of arms. In the year 2000 this increased to £12 million and then in 2001 arms sales jumped incredibly to £22.5 million.
This included not just small arms, grenades etc but everything from air cooling units for Merkava tanks, trigger systems for missile guidance systems on US made Apache helicopters to armoured personnel carriers and combat aircraft. While in comparison to the sales and support given by the USA it is still
considered ‘small’, many of these British supplied arms are “critical items of equipment” that allow the Israeli state almost complete domination within it’s military zone of operations (namely the Occupied Territories).
Britain of course is rather shy to admit the extent of this ongoing deal, especially (when like America) it attempts to
portray itself as a paragon of virtue and a champion of human rights. However (again like it’s American friends) one only needs to scratch the surface to see how shallow its commitment to these things truly are. This is why, when pressed about the sale of centurion tanks to Israel which were then converted for use as troop carriers in the Occupied Territories, British minister, Jack Straw, gave the mumbling response that he “did not accept that this was a breach of an assurance given to him by the Israeli Government not to use them in a combat role.” Interestingly enough it has been revealed that the Blair government was busy approving licences for arms
sales at an ever increasing rate throughout the duration of the second Palestinian intifada (297 were granted from January 1999 to November 2000, and 300 from January 2001 until April 2002). This does not cover weaponry that has been made ‘under license’ by other countries at Britain’s behest and then sold onto Israel from its country of manufacture (an example of this would be the sale of Jaguar bombers made in India then shipped to Israel where they were converted to carry tactical nuclear battlefield weapons).
The small but significant press attention on these issues forced the British government to put in place a socalled
embargo. We must refer to this in such a manner because the British still reject a formal arms ban against the
Israeli’s and because rather than preventing arms sales even on a case-by-case review it can simply delay the supply of military equipment until public attention is distracted elsewhere (this happened in a similar fashion with the British arms embargo against Indonesia in 1999 which many refered to as “mythical”).
Something else which may raise a few eyebrows is the fact that arms sales between Britain and Israel are not
entirely one way. Britain’s Police force have bought Israeli made bullets, whilst “the MoD have purchased Israeli
grenades, shells and avionics systems.” However, the complete and total military relationship with Israel may never be entirely known. Much of this would be covered in the
Memorandum of Understanding on Defence Material Cooperation signed between the two countries in 1995, which has never been made public.
The economic is always tied-in irrevocably with the The British Government (along with their supporters in the mainstream media) have consistantly painted the Palestinian people as the primary aggressors in the conflict -
despite the reality being the opposite. Foreign Policy researcher Mark Curtis noted that “in the Jenin massacre in
April 2002, the Israeli army killed around the same number of people (fifty two) as Yugoslav forces did in the Racak massacre in Kosovo three years earlier. The latter elicited the unqualified outrage of British leaders, who used it as sure fire proof of the evil of the Milosevic regime. A few days after the release of a UN report on Racak, NATO began its bombing campaign. After Jenin, however, Britain barely raised an eyebrow.”
Included in the victims of Jenin was a 57 year old wheelchair bound man who was shot and then run over by
Israeli tanks and a 37 year old man who was refused permission by IDF troops to leave his house and was then crushed in the rubble by Israeli army bulldozers.
According to the Israeli Defence Forces themselves the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead was almost 20 to 1 in the
first month of the Intifada. Even in areas where resistance barely went beyond stone throwing the IDF used bulldozers to knock down dwellings, rip up fields and olive groves and basically
destroy “with utter abandon”. To further underline Israeli over-reaction, a military source confirmed a report that, in one incident a single shot fired in the air provoked two solid hours of intense machine gun fire, artillery and tank fire from the Israeli side.
While Britain voiced concern to the Israeli’s about the use of such force, rather than call for strong sanctions or
international intervention it backed away. When a reporter asked Jack Straw whether it was time Israel was brought before the International Criminal Court he replied that “in the case of Israel, being a country that has respect for the rule of law, we would expect it to carry out its own investigations.”
The British Government have constantly failed in any shape or form to pressure Israel to change policies and
desist from actions that time and again violate international law through its occupation. Instead it has acted as an apologist, whilst making lucrative profits through arms sales away from prying public eyes.
On Newsnight some time ago Jeremy Paxman asked Tony Blair if he agreed with George Bush Jr’s comments
that he believed Israeli prime minister (at the time being attributed as saying “the Palestinians need to be hit very
hard…it must be very painful…we must cause them losses, victims”) was “a man of peace”, he replied that he believed he was. One wonders what the reply would have been had similar words come from the mouth of say Saddam Hussein or some other ‘non-western friendly’ bogeyman.
While always concerned about the supposed tyranny of other regimes the British Government is incredibly deaf,
dumb and blind once it comes to using the same comparisons for the Israeli treament of the Palestinians. According to recent statistics 65 per cent of Palestinians live below the poverty line. This is mainly due to the Israeli policy of ‘closures’ which imposes restrictions on freedom of movement. In effect this
means round-the-clock curfews and gives the Palestinian communities something of a ‘prison camp’ feel. When the siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound was well under way and the British public were becoming ever anxious about the Israeli aggression Jack Straw again lept to the defence of the Israeli’s and asked for “greater public sympathy for Israel’s position” pleading for people to “not focus too much on agreeing with their stance…but instead understanding the huge pressures on them.”
In a likeminded statement Tony Blair issued an apology for Israeli assassinations against the Palestinians by stating
that he “understood the pressures that Prime Minister Sharon is under, the pressure that he feels and the position of Israeli people who have seen their citizens killed by terrorist acts.” The comments were so pleasing to the Israeli
Government that the Israeli Embassy in London even saw fit to carry them in their own press release.
No one can seriously think that the Israeli Government are interested in creating a viable Palestinian
state. Instead it wishes to create a patch of land which has no real economic viability, which is carved up into cantons or (to use an apartheid era word) ‘Bantustans’ and which, they hope, will placate the Palestinians from further resistance and give the Israeli state complete political, geographic, economic and military dominance.
One could suggest that anything that the Americans support as a “path to peace and stability” must have bad news
written all over it for whoever is on the receiving end. It’s no wonder that Britain has been in support of ‘US leadership’ regarding their attempts at resolving the conflict. As one can expect this kind of leadership is based predominantly on the fact that the USA gives the green light to whatever aggressions and excesses that the Israeli’s see fit to use.
A conference in Geneva of the High Contracting Parties of the Geneva Conventions was called to review the
situation in the occupied territories in December 2000. In the words of Noam Chomsky “the conference reaffirmed the applicability of the Fourth Geneva convention to the occupied territories, so that many US-Israeli actions there are war crimes under US law. The conference condemned US funded Israeli
settlements and the practice of wilfull killing, torture, unlawful deportation, extensive destruction and appropriation of property… carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”
As High Contracting parties both the US and the other European powers (including Britain) would have been obliged over the years under the wording of the treaty to apprehend and prosecute those responsible for such crimes – including members of their own leaderships. This is perhaps why the USA has shifted its position over the years from endorsing the terms of the treaty, to abstention, to finally attempting to undermine them under the Bush administration.