Britain should license the sale of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weapons to the Palestinians, so that they can defend themselves against attacks by Israel and have less need to deploy suicide bombers. Is our government unwilling to do this because Israel is the ally of the USA, and we are afraid to antagonise the dominant military power in the world, with bases in 100 (including Britain) of the 180-odd member states of the UN?
US-supplied helicopter gunships have pounded virtually defenceless Palestinian towns and refugee camps. Bush blames the victims for retaliating against occupation, expropriation and humiliation. Colin Powell takes what has been aptly described as the scenic route to Israel, so that Bushs ally Israel and his current cop on the block, Ariel Sharon, can finish murdering Palestinians before he arrives. Britain and the EU wring their hands in hypocritical horror (but wont even slap an embargo on imports of Jaffa oranges, still less send in a force to separate the combatants).
Israeli troops are also reported to be wrecking the Palestinians' water supplies and sewage systems, presumably in pursuance of the Zionist dream of their own Entlösung: the final solution of the problem of inconvenient Palestinians, for whom daily life is to be made even more utterly intolerable in the hope that they will finally depart from the region.
Britain has a special responsibility for Palestine, because of the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate. Britain is discharging that responsibility rather as British governments discharged their responsibility to the nationalist population of the north of Ireland - by giving the Unionist hegemony a free hand, until the rise of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the resurgence of the IRA made ignoring oppression and discrimination no longer an option. In other words, for decades we have allowed the problem of Palestine to fester, and effectively colluded with successive Israeli governments which (again the parallel with Hitler is inescapable, and bitterly paradoxical) talked about peace while changing the facts on the ground with their settlements and the forward movement of their somehow always undefined borders.
Sir Isaiah Berlin declared that successive governments of Israel had done their country great harm, culturally, morally, politically and materially. The founders of the state of Israel consciously adopted a policy of using the utmost violence to achieve their aims, and they currently have a worthy successor in Ariel Sharon, the butcher of Chatilah, Sabha and now the West Bank.
The Palestinians need defensive weapons. If your town is being attacked by tanks and helicopter gunships, your anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft rockets are defensive weapons. (Of course, all our British weapons, including anti-tank missiles, are strictly defensive: thats why we have a Ministry of Defence, not a Ministry of War.)
Why doesn't the Arab League supply defensive weapons? you might ask. Because the Arab League it is made up of two kinds of states: those run by client regimes put in place and supported by the West only for so long as they collude in securing our oil supplies, and the rest which are (not unnaturally) intimidated by the kinds of military threats currently emanating from Bush (and Blair), which are backed up by the most powerful arsenal of weapons the world has ever seen. So, no serious supplying of defensive arms to Palestinians can be expected from either kind, and the fact that Arab states have enough money to send gold-plated tanks to Arafat is utterly irrelevant.
As regards Colin Powell's mission it would be naïve to expect more than a temporary firefighting job, requiring the Israelis withdraw their tanks from West Bank towns and bring their illegal occupation of the West Bank back to normal levels of humiliation and brutality, covered by further playacting over negotiating a lasting peace, so that his master can get on with the USs major unfinished business in the region, attacking Saddam Hussein. It would also be naïve not to expect the huge anger this current wave of killing is generating to produce further suicide bombings, which Sharon will use as a pretext for making further attacks on Palestinian towns and refugee camps, further killings to bring his Entlösung just a little closer.
So I come back to my point about defensive arms. They will be needed by the Palestinians when the next assault on them occurs. International law allows a people which is attacked the right to armed self-defence. The USA has used this principle to legitimate its attack on Afghanistan. How can it be argued that this right does not extend to the Palestinians, and that they alone cannot expect to acquire the means to mounting effective self-defence? If Britain were in their position, would we not seek to defend ourselves? And in view of our responsibilities, should we not help the Palestinians to acquire the arms which the defence of a helpless, tormented people requires?
