A spiteful and fatuous blacklist

The UK is marching in lockstep with America’s disastrous Middle East policy

By MELANIE PHILLIPS

The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said last week that America will impose travel bans on “extremist [Israeli] settlers who have committed violent attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank”.

He went on:

As President Biden has repeatedly said, those attacks are unacceptable. Last week in Israel, I made clear that the United States is ready to take action using our own authorities. Today, the State Department is implementing a new visa restriction policy targeting individuals believed to have been involved in undermining peace, security or stability in the West Bank, including through committing acts of violence or taking other actions that unduly restrict civilians’ access to essential services and basic necessities.

Who will these blacklisted “settlers” be? Apparently no names will be published. The Times of Israel has reported:

The announcement will likely only include the number of settlers being banned from the US, rather than their names, the Israeli official said, explaining that the US hopes that the anonymity will serve as a deterrent against those considering targeting Palestinians who won’t know whether they’ve been blacklisted or not.

How will the US authorities identify these violent “settlers”?  Will they be people who have been convicted by the Israelis? How will the Americans obtain those names and details? Or will they perhaps just pluck a number at random without even knowing any details?

In subsequent briefings, the State Department seemed to suggest that Palestinians who had committed violent attacks on Israelis would also be blacklisted. Blinken didn’t spell this out, merely saying:

We will continue to seek accountability for all acts of violence against civilians in the West Bank, regardless of the perpetrator or the victim

but added:

We will also continue to engage the Palestinian Authority to make clear it must do more to curb Palestinian attacks against Israelis.

Really? What exactly has the State Department been doing up till now to get the PA to curb attacks on Israelis? Does “continue to engage the PA” to this end include the funding that the Biden administration continues to pay the PA, regardless of its refusal to stop paying rewards to terrorists and their families — funding that contravenes the Taylor Force Act that restricts such funds unless the PA ends such stipends? Surely such rewards for terrorism are actions that “undermine peace, security or stability in the West Bank”?

Will the Americans perhaps be blacklisting those terrorists the PA has rewarded with American money? Will they indeed blacklist the PA’s leader Mahmoud Abbas for glorifying, funding and inciting terrorism? Or does Blinken think the murder of Israelis isn’t as bad as Israeli “settler” hooliganism?

The law professor Eugene Kontorovich has identified a further potentially sinister dimension to this fatuous act of spite. The “violent settler” ban, he has said, is in fact not about settlers or even violence. He wrote in the New York Post:

It is instead a vastly vague prohibition that gives the administration discretion to exclude Israelis whose mere beliefs, place of residence or religious practices don’t comport with the Bidenites’ foreign-policy views.

The administration can ban anyone “involved in undermining of peace, security or stability in the West Bank”. The restrictions are not limited to criminal or violent acts. Team Biden considers Jews living in the West Bank — especially building or buying homes there — an “obstacle to peace,” despite the US position that such communities are not illegal. The administration has even called visits of Jews to their holy sites “provocative”.

By such standards, a Jew merely building a house or engaging in prayer at holy sites in Judea and Samaria could be “undermining peace” and subject to banning. Indeed, a memo from President Biden before the ban was issued described it as partly targeted at those who “disrupt or prevent efforts to achieve a two-state solution,” which could make disagreement with the Democratic Party grounds for visa denial.

The policy says nothing about how such alleged peace-underminers will be identified nor what kind of evidence can be used. The State Department draws its allegations on “settler violence” unquestioningly from reports by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a United Nations agency known for its hostility to Israel, which in turn appears to adopt uncritically allegations by foreign-government-funded anti-Israel groups and Palestinian activists.

In short, the State Department may be outsourcing US border policy to anti-Israel organisations just two months after the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

The policy will put many Israelis in fear of being barred from America simply because of their nonviolent, noncriminal conduct. Others may be banned for using force in self-defence, which also shows up as “settler violence” in UN reports. By contrast, the administration this year lifted visa restrictions on those who provide material support to terrorism “indirectly”.

Soon after the US announced this policy, the UK followed suit and said Israeli “settlers” responsible for violence against Palestinians would be barred from the UK. On Twitter the Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, accused “extreme settlers” of “undermining security and stability for both Israelis and Palestinians”. He added:

We are banning those responsible for settler violence from entering the UK to make sure our country cannot be a home for people who commit these intimidating acts. Israel must take stronger action to stop settler violence and hold the perpetrators accountable.

He didn’t bother even to emulate the token American disapproval of  Palestinian violence towards Israelis.

This blacklisting accompanies a general hardening of hostile rhetoric towards Israel by both the US and UK, with their principal message being that too many Palestinian civilians have died in Gaza.

Cameron has become particularly hostile, viciously presenting the Palestinian Arabs as innocent civilian victims of wanton Israeli aggression both in Gaza and the disputed “West Bank” territories of Judea and Samaria.

In an article in The Times (£) of London, Cameron and his German counterpart, Annalena Baerbock, wrote:

First, like any other country in the world, Israel has the right to defend itself but, in doing so, it must abide by international humanitarian law. Israel will not win this war if its operations destroy the prospect of peaceful coexistence with Palestinians. They have a right to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas. But too many civilians have been killed. The Israeli government should do more to discriminate sufficiently between terrorists and civilians, ensuring its campaign targets Hamas leaders and operatives.

A two-state solution requires both sides to feel safe living side by side. Extremist settlers in the West Bank are seeking to sabotage any such efforts, violently forcing Palestinians from their homes. We strongly condemn these hateful acts.

This is jaw-droppingly ignorant, one-sided and warped. What do Cameron and Baerbock mean, “too many civilians have been killed”?  How do they know how many Gazan civilians have been killed?

The only numbers are provided by Hamas, who claim that more than 19,000 Gazans have been killed. But ludicrously, there has been no acknowledgement that a single terrorist is among this total. We are only told that “most” of the dead are women and children. Yet the Israelis say they have killed thousands of Hamas and other terrorists. Nor has there been any acknowledgement in the Hamas total of the number of Gazan civilians who have been killed by the terrorists’ own rockets — which are aimed at killing Israeli civilians — falling short into Gaza at a rate the Israelis estimate at roughly one in ten.

The Israelis estimate that the ratio of civilians to terrorists they have killed is roughly two to one. This is a far lower ratio of civilian fatalities than has ever been achieved by American or British forces in their wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A “two-state solution” and “peaceful co-existence” have been sabotaged not by “extremist Israeli settlers” but by the Palestinians’ refusal of a Palestine state which has been repeatedly offered to them over the past century.

As for the “settlers” committing violence against Palestinians, these are the problematic “hilltop youth” mainly aged between 14 and 19 and estimated to number only a few hundred among more than half a million Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria (where, contrary to the UK Foreign Office line, they are legally entitled to live).

All such attacks are wrong and the Israelis should deal with the “hilltop youth” firmly. But the murderous attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Israelis living in these areas vastly exceed in number any attacks by Israelis. There are multiple Palestinian terror attacks every day, which have killed a total of 45 Israelis over the past two years and have tripled in number since the Hamas pogrom on October 7. Yet astonishingly, Cameron and Baerbock made no mention of this Palestinian onslaught at all.

Bad as Cameron’s statements have been, they have been exceeded in incendiary falsehoods in an article for the Telegraph by Britain’s former Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace. Wallace had previously been well-regarded as a pillar of Britain’s defence establishment. Yet having stated that Israel had the right to defend itself, that he wanted it to win against Hamas and that he wasn’t calling for a ceasefire, he came out with one poisonous and ignorant canard after another.

Astonishingly, he tapped into the ancient antisemitic libel that Jews are motivated by revenge when he wrote that Israel was acting from a “killing rage”. What? Israel is trying to destroy Hamas in order to enable Israelis to live without being attacked by rocket barrages or murdered by terrorists emerging from the ground in their communities. Since when was defence against genocidal atrocities a “killing rage”?

His accusation that Israel is committing “indiscriminate” assaults is the opposite of the truth. The IDF is suffering a high casualty rate precisely because it is not attacking indiscriminately but going from house to booby-trapped house (and tunnels) to clear them of terrorist capacity.

Wallace accused Israel of breaking the Geneva Conventions and using disproportionate force, collective punishment and forced movement of civilians. None of these is true, and the last is an especially egregious distortion: the IDF has provided safe passage to Gaza’s civilians wherever possible. And what exactly does Wallace think is a proportionate response to genocidal attack?

He also claimed that Israel’s actions were “radicalising Muslim youth across the globe” and would extinguish “the voice of the moderate Palestinians who do want a two-state solution”.

Does this former defence secretary really not grasp that Muslim youth are already radicalised across the globe by jihadi fanaticism, causing an appalling toll of massacred Christians and other “infidels”? Does he not realise that what galvanises Islamic radicals to commit acts of mass murder is not despair, the loss of their houses and livelihoods or even the likely loss of their lives but exultation at the murder of Jews? Does he really not understand that the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs, who have been taught from the cradle that Jews are a demonic global conspiracy, say repeatedly that they want Israel destroyed?

Wallace’s article came close to blood libels about Israel that wouldn’t have been out of place at a pro-Hamas rally.

Some have pointed out that this is actually no surprise given his history of supporting Iran. The Jewish Chronicle editor, Jake Wallis Simons, tweeted:

Here’s an interesting statement from Wallace in 2015:  “As an MP I have visited Iran more than any other parliamentarian and the last time I went I did so with Jeremy Corbyn.”He has also admitted that, like Corbyn, he is “often accused by some of being too pro-Iran”. Consider the tweet below, also from 2015, when Corbyn was trying to become Labour leader.  Wallace is seen praising Corbyn as “an honest left winger who genuinely likes people”. He adds: “The other candidates should look & learn”.

Others have speculated that Wallace is merely dancing to the tune of the Biden administration with an eye to securing for himself a juicy security establishment post. The British political and security establishment is marching in lockstep with US policy in the Middle East. But this policy has now blown up in America’s face.

The Biden administration thought its appeasement of Iran, bullying of Israel to appease the Palestinian Arabs and delisting of the Yemeni Houthis as a terrorist force would serve its own interests. After the October 7 pogrom, it thought that by sending aircraft carriers and a supply of arms to Israel, but doing virtually nothing to counter Iranian and Hezbollah attacks while pressuring Israel to allow “humanitarian” aid to Gaza despite the fact that this would be stolen by Hamas to replenish its war machine, it could keep both its Iran appeasement strategy and its Palestinian appeasement strategy on course.

The crisis in the Red Sea, with a panicked US now assembling a multinational alliance to protect international shipping against Iran-backed Houthi attacks from Yemen, is testimony to the Americans’ arrogant and ignorant ineptitude. The Yemen crisis is the result of US policy in the Middle East under Biden and before him Obama — as was the Hamas pogrom of October 7.

The way to defeat Hamas and end the attacks by Hezbollah and Syrian groups against northern Israel is to target Iran.

Instead, through their pressure on Israel and clear reluctance to deploy the huge force assembled in the region, the US and UK have strengthened Hamas, further emboldened Hezbollah, Iran and its proxies, and ensured that Jews throughout the world will be increasingly hung out to dry.

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