OPINION:
Last week, Britain’s Labor government moved to ban the import of all Israeli products from the so-called West Bank.
Eleven other countries, including Canada and France, soon hopped onto the bandwagon.
The 12 are also sanctioning all companies and people supporting or profiting from Israelis living and building communities in that land, a 79-mile-long area east of Jerusalem that leftists the world over call “disputed,” “occupied” or “Palestinian.”
Most Israelis call it by its rightful name: Judea and Samaria.
“I do not believe that the British people want us supporting the occupation by accepting products from settlements in our shops and supermarkets,” Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband declared in a speech to the House of Commons on Sept. 8. “So … we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories.”
In an op-ed for The Guardian on the same day, Mr. Miliband’s boss, Prime Minister Andy Burnham, wrote: “The measures we are taking are about targeting illegal settlements and increasing the pressure on the Israeli government to change course.”
Who is Britain, Canada, France or any other government to tell Israel where its people may and may not build and live?
A brief modern history lesson is in order.
On May 15, 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, five Arab armies attacked the new state. Miraculously, a literal skeleton army (most of the new emigrants to the land were Holocaust survivors) defeated the militaries of Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Transjordan.
Egypt retained control of the Gaza Strip; Transjordan retained control of Judea and Samaria.
In 1967, Egypt effectively declared war on the Jewish state a second time when it closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Thus began the Six-Day War, when Israel again defeated much larger Arab armies and decisively won Gaza and Judea and Samaria, as well as Sinai, the Golan Heights and east Jerusalem.
So Judea and Samaria, where Jews have dwelt for thousands of years, is no less a part of Israel than the states in the former Confederacy are part of America or the Alsace-Lorraine region is part of France.
Another thing: This boycott will hurt the very people the Burnham government says it wants to help.
From May to June of this year, some 17,600 Arabs living in Judea and Samaria were working in an Israeli “settlement,” according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. The unemployment rate of Arabs in the area: nearly 28%.
So the boycott will put tens of thousands of people out of work in a labor market where more than a quarter of the population is jobless.
Even if one believes Judea and Samaria “belongs” to Arabs, why may Jews not live there too? Is banning a people from dwelling in an area not the very definition of apartheid, a charge lobbed constantly at Israel?
More than 2 million Arabs live freely in Israel today. Arab politicians have served in office since the first Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in 1949. Israel even has several Arab political parties.
Just guess how many Jewish or Israeli parties and politicians there are in the “government” of the Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to be running parts of Judea and Samaria.
This latest boycott announcement is nothing more than an attempt by the Muslim-beset Continent (and the Great White North) to pander to its invaders, much the way a dog lies on its back in submission when a more dominant canine approaches.
Here is hoping the other dog does not eat you anyway, Europe and Canada.
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