Britain’s Jericho defence is such an obvious Lie

March 2006

Britain Colluded in Israeli Attack on Palestinians

Governments lie, but none more brazenly than the British. Blair and Lord Levy are revealed as tawdry £14 million hucksters at home, and supporters of Israeli murder and kidnap aborad. All their lies about Iraq have unravelled, and now Straw asks us to believe the preposterous idea that the 15 minutes separating the US/British withdrawal and the Israeli tank and bulldozer attack on the Jericho prison was not coordinated, not an obvious example of collusion. One Israel Minister, Mofaz, said the Israelis had advance warning of the US British departure. The Palestinian people are right: the British government's complicity in Israeli crimes against them is deep and enduring. 

The Israeli assassins of Ahmed Saadat's predecessor, Abu Ali Mustafa, a political leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, are free to travel the world: militants who fight for the national rights of a people under Israeli military occupation, or driven into refugee camps in previous Israeli waves of ethnic cleansing, were cooped up under British-American monitors. Even worse, they were then betrayed by their British guards to the Israeli military. They will be tortured in Israel's gulag, a system designed to crush a nation whose land the Zionists covet.

It should come as no surprise, to anyone with a passing knowledge of Palestinian history, that the prisoners in the Jericho jail were betrayed to the Israelis by their US-British guards. We remember that the US brokered a deal in Lebanon in 1982, under which the Palestinian fighters vacated Beirut and the US promised to protect the Palestinian civilians left behind. Ariel Sharon then organised the massacre of the defenceless civilians of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by his Christian milita allies.

The name of Israel and terrorism ought, of course, to be linked very closely. Many Israeli leaders were graduates of self-proclaimed terrorist groups who butchered civilians. Only recently, British secret archives revealed a plot by Zionist terrorists to kill Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, in 1946, as part of their campaign to establish the state of Israel. The plan was devised by Menachem Begin's Irgun, later a Nobel peace prize winner and Prime Minister of Israel.

The British government supports the occupation of Palestinian lands and opposes recognition of the rights of Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Israel.  When British citizens discover however the truth of what their government supports they refuse to go along.  We need to redouble our efforts to develop a solidarity campaign in Scotland and beyond capable of responding to the call by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel as long as the crimes persist.  

Mick Napier