The Speech Brown Should Have Made to the Knesset

The Palestine Chronicle, July 22, 2008

'Britain has an uncanny knack of producing one silly leader after another'

By Stuart Littlewood - London I and my dog Mortimer apologise most sincerely to the world, and especially to Arab friends, for our prime minister's crass speech to the Knesset. Britain, like the US, has an uncanny knack of producing one silly leader after another from a limitless supply that thrust themselves on an unsuspecting public in order to perpetuate the Great Betrayal and the Nakba. Brown is the latest high-flier from our political swamp. Judging by his performance so far, we Brits are destined to live our lives in a state of perpetual and excruciating embarrassment. Let it be known that this prime minister doesn't speak for me or anyone I know when he says: "Britain will always stand firmly by Israel's side." And nobody of my acquaintance, or their dog, would ever sign up to "an unbreakable partnership based on shared values of liberty, democracy and justice" with Israel. It is quite obvious that none of our values of liberty, democracy and justice is practised by that regime. However, it was faintly amusing to hear Brown say that "we will do more than oppose what is wrong. We will show those who would give licence to terror the way home to what is right too - showing them that the path to a better future runs not through violence, not by murder, and never with the killing of civilians but by liberty's torch, through justice's mighty stream, and across tolerance's foundation of equality." That should have had Knesset members squirming in their seats, but the irony was obviously lost on them, and on Brown himself. "I think of David Ben Gurion," he blurted, "who from humble beginnings in Poland built up the Jewish National Institutions and in 1948 said it was not enough for the Jewish state simply to be Jewish, it had to be fully democratic offering equal citizenship to all residents: a democracy not just of one people but of all your peoples..." Mentioning Ben Gurion in the same breath as democracy and equality is not a good idea. This is the same guy who said: "I support compulsory transfer [i.e. ethnic cleansing]. I don't see anything immoral in it." On another occasion he admitted: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel… We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.” Brown even praised Menachem Begin but was careful not to mention the Irgun. It was Begin's terror gang, the Irgun, that declared war on the British mandate government while Britain was still fighting Nazi Germany. And our prime minister must have forgotten that in 1946 the Irgun under Begin's leadership blew up British headquarters in Jerusalem's King David Hotel, killing 91. Continued . . .