“Nick Clegg: we got it wrong on Israel” , screamed the Jewish Chronicle headline, following the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech to the Lib Dem Friends of Israel on 11 November.

But what precisely is Mr Clegg apologising for?

He believes that we have been wrong to speak up for Palestinian justice and not cry ‘equally loudly’ for Israeli justice: that is ‘the right of Israel to defend itself against the threats it continually faces’.

He has thus bought into two central and specious mantras of Israeli propaganda: the first, that this is an equal conflict. The second: that Israeli attacks on Gaza and the West Bank are motivated by Israel’s security needs.

There is nothing equal about this conflict. Not grievances, not armaments, not  crimes, not casualties. Israel is in clear breach of international law and specifically UN Resolution 242 in continuing her 43-year long (and ongoing) occupation of Palestinian land. Israel is not the victim here. In the recent ‘Operation Cast Lead’, Israel’s attack upon Gaza in 2008/2009, Palestinian casualties numbered 1,397 (345 of whom were minors) and Israeli casualties 13, four of whom were the victims of friendly fire, according to the Israel Human Rights organisation B’Tselem. ‘Disproportionate force’, the stated strategy of the Israeli Defence Force, articulated by Major General Eisenkot, during the 2006 assault on south Lebanon, is illegal in itself.

Nor did Mr Clegg explain how targeted missile strikes on the only bread producing factory in Gaza, and the  bulldozing of 100,000 chickens underground in order to destroy a rich source of protein for a starving population,  (Report of the UN Fact Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, paragraphs 939-958) makes Israeli citizens safer.

The Deputy PM repeated also, word for depressing word, the intention of our coalition partners to amend the Geneva Convention legislation on Universal Jurisdiction (UJ) in order to give safe conduct to Israeli ministers visiting this country:

‘Politically motivated arrest warrants … accusations based on poorly justified grounds’

No: arrest warrants are motivated by those for whom international law is the only basis for Middle East peace, and who are sickened by the deliberate assault on a civilian population. The shelling of hospitals, schools and ambulances, the  refusal of medical treatment, which allowed 4-year old Ahmad  al-Samouni to bleed to death while the ambulance and its paramedic staff were strip searched, found clean, then ordered back to Gaza city without him,  puts Israel into a place where ordinary morality has long departed.

It is political motivation which makes these crimes ‘OK’.

And ‘poorly justified grounds’? Judge Richard Goldstone and his team conducted 188 individual interviews, and reviewed more than 300 reports, submissions and other documentation amounting to more than 10,000 pages, over 30 videos and 1,200 photos. Interviews were conducted in Jordan and Geneva and by telephone as well as in Gaza.  Mr Clegg probably knows this as well as anyone else.

He must also know that of the 17 Lib Dem ministers in the coalition government, 16 signed Jeremy Corbyn’s EDM during the last Parliament to keep the law on UJ unaltered.

For the vast majority of party members, international law and human rights are fundamental to Liberal Democrat belief, ‘woven into our DNA’ as Ros Scott a former President of the party expressed it, and not to be given away at the first whiff of power.

Mr Clegg is making new friends: but he will lose old ones. Among them will be the Jewish lobby from Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP) and other Jewish organisations, who refuse to be silenced when they criticize Israeli aggression and call for justice in the Occupied Territories.  He will lose a mass of voters for whom the Lib Dem party was their conscience: the only party not to be bullied into turning a blind eye to human rights violations because the perpetrators happen to be allies.

And he will lose respect, inside and outside the party, that he will probably never recover.

(Creative Commons image by Iain Forbes)

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