Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine

Remember universal jurisdiction? Before the last election, both Tories and Labour were falling over backwards in their pledges to Israel that, if elected, they would change the law so that Tzipi Livni, the Israeli leader of the opposition, could visit Britain without fear of arrest for alleged war crimes. She, it may be recalled, was Israeli minister of foreign affairs at the time of Operation Cast lead. She was the one who said she hoped the Israeli army would “go wild” in Gaza . Charming. The Israeli army duly did go wild.  According to B’Tselem, 1,385 Palestinians were killed in the conflict, of whom 716 did not take part in it and 318 were minors under the age of 18.

When she finally did make it here the other day – for official meetings with the government – an application was made for her arrest on war crimes charges. Now the law had been changed, she could come here with confidence that the arrest warrant would not be issued. Or could she?

It seemed last Autumn that the Liberal Democrats had caved in to Israeli pressure and joined the Tories and Labour. All three parties united to push the change to the law through Parliament in what has become Section 153 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act.  Yet, when an arrest warrant application was made for Livni, the District Judge examining the application suddenly had to stop work. An unprecedented and retroactive certificate that she was here on a “special mission” had been issued by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and he found his hands were tied.

We understand that the legality of the certificate may well be tested in the courts. Watch this space. But what actually happened?

It seems a little known compromise on the change to the law was reached between Nick Clegg and David Cameron. If the Tories (or Labour) had had an overall majority, the law would have been changed to require the consent of the Attorney General before an arrest warrant could be issued. The AG is a politician as well as a lawyer, and sits in the Cabinet. In reality, the consent would never have been given. But Nick made a difference – he insisted the consent should come from the Director of Public Prosecutions, not the AG.

Now, the DPP has to act independently – although he is under the “superintendence” of the AG and reports to him at least once a week. Hmm. A grey area if ever there was one.  How would it pan out when tested? Well, we now know some interesting things. When the application to arrest Livni reached the DPP, he did consult with the AG. We don’t know what they said to each other, but their conversation took place before the certificate was issued. This can only suggest that there was a risk that an arrest warrant would have been issued for Livni, despite the change in legislation, and that the Government needed to resort to very unusual steps to prevent it.

Will a similar certificate be issued next time an Israeli general, a colonel, or a bomber pilot against whom there are credible allegations decides to come here? If such an individual is prosecuted at the Old Bailey one day, and his victims get justice, they will owe it in part to Nick Clegg’s agreement with David Cameron. And what if Livni comes back for a lecture tour – perhaps to address the Zionist Federation or the Jewish National Fund? If she came here in such circumstances, would the Foreign Office still give her a certificate? I hope not.

Image: Creative Commons image from World Economic Forum.

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The untried face of nineteen year old Gilad Shalit stares out from the front pages:  a face as yet unmarked by violence or hatred.  Shalit, the Israeli Defence Force soldier kidnapped in a border raid by Hamas, has been held prisoner for the last five years as a bargaining chip for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. It was Shalit’s bad luck to be kidnapped, but his considerably worse luck that the former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon was no longer in power in June 2006.  Sharon may have been a butcher who liked blood (motto: ‘’always escalate’’ ) but he  knew the score on negotiation. He would have released the requisite number of prisoners, acknowledging that such swaps are the stuff of warfare.  Instead the jumpy Olmert, as feeble in his lack of military experience as our own UK government, refused to deal.

Gilad Shalit French identification papers by 'Gisors' used under Creative Commons licence

But now Shalit and 1,000 plus Palestinian prisoners, including women and minors, are returning home to their rejoicing families.  Never mind how the deal was done or why now.   Let’s hear the conventional pieties from the pro-Israeli media and Friends.  The terms of Shalit’s imprisonment ‘contravened international law’. Oh dear.

True, Shalit was held without visits from his family or the Red Cross. However, it is likely that any hint of his whereabouts would have led to a rescue attempt which would almost certainly have resulted in his death.

Shalit was valuable. It is unlikely he will have experienced the brutality of the some 700 Palestinian children who are arrested every year and prosecuted in Israeli courts. They too are kidnapped, seized in the middle of the night, with no reason given for their arrest. Most are blindfolded, painfully shackled, and physically assaulted until they sign confessions, frequently putting their name  to a Hebrew text they cannot read. They are not allowed access to lawyers.  Families are not told where their children are taken and cannot visit them.  Children as young as twelve appear in court wearing leg irons, a fact the Jerusalem Post refused to believe until they saw the evidence.

Shalit was in uniform and part of an illegal occupying force. Since the beginning of Israel’s occupation in 1967, 20 per cent of the total Palestinian population has been imprisoned. Illegal administrative detention has been widespread. At least 202 prisoners have died in Israeli jails due to torture, deprivation of health treatment and deliberate killing. Israel’s response to an election result they did not like in Gaza, was to kidnap and imprison 64 cabinet members and Parliamentarians from the Hamas political wing.

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Tomorrow, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, is expected to ask the United Nations Security Council for the world body to recognise Palestinian statehood. At least 130 of the 193 members of the General Assembly have already indicated that they will be voting ‘Yes’ if the issue goes there, which it could, if the US vetoes the move in the Security Council.. Britain is at present among the undecided, but the Coalition Government should prove its commitment to justice and back the Palestinians’ aspirations.

There are at least two compelling reasons for this.  First, there is the historical responsibility. In persuading the Arabs to join the Allied effort in the First World War in the fight against the Ottoman Turks and their German Allies, the British gave a clear signal to Sherif Hussein of Mecca that an independent Arab state would emerge from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, a vast Arab land to be ruled by his Hashemite dynasty. This was, as it turned out, a pipe-dream – worse than that, a con-trick.

Two obstacles stood in the way of that Arab Awakening, as it was so properly described by the great Arab historical writer George Antonius, in his 1938 book bearing that title. First, there was the so-called Balfour Declaration, based on a letter sent in November 1917 by the then British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to a leading member of the UK’s Jewish community, Lord Rothschild, declaring that the British government looked favourably on the idea of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, providing the rights of the resident non-Jewish population were safeguarded.

The second obstacle was the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which proposed – with no reference to the populations concerned – how the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire should be divided up after the War. This is more or less what happened after 1918. France got hold of what is now Syria and Lebanon, while Britain had a mandate over Transjordan (now Jordan) and Palestine. The UK was still nominally in charge of Palestine when the foundations of the modern state of Israel were laid, leading to the unilateral declaration of independence by the Jewish State in 1948.

Though Britain was not the first country to recognise Israel, it did so relatively quickly, believing that the Jews who had suffered the unparalleled horrors of the Holocaust deserved a state of their own. Unfortunately, the process of creating Israel led to the expulsion – by force or through fear — of a large proportion of the resident Arab population, many of whom still live as refugees scattered around the Middle East and beyond.

Fast-forward six decades to the current situation, and what do we find? Israel has turned itself into a prosperous little state, through a mixture of hard work and massive public and private assistance from the United States. But for the past 44 years it has been occupying the West Bank – formerly part of Jordan – as well as the Golan Heights of Syria. Put aside the Golan for the moment, as it is the West Bank and its smaller ‘brother’, the Gaza Strip, which are meant to form the basis of a putative independent Palestinian state. Even the US President Barack Obama has recognised that the pre-1967 borders should be the basis for territorial agreement, though there will need to be some land swaps.

East Jerusalem is a critical issue, as it contains not only the third most holy sites for Muslims (after Mecca and Medina) but also it is seen by the Palestinians as the logical capital for a Palestinian state. Alas, the government of Binyamin Netanyahu – urged on by his hawkish Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman – is overseeing the judification of East Jerusalem, as more and more Muslims and Christians are squeezed out and new settlements for Jews are built. This is little short of ethnic cleansing.

Which brings me to the second reason why Britain should recognise Palestine when it comes to a vote in New York. This question is not just a matter of historical legacy but also of the current imperative for Britain to put itself clearly on the side of justice – to give the Palestinians not only the statehood but also the dignity that they have been denied, not just since 1967 or even 1948, but ever since the British government conned them into believing an end to Ottoman rule would mean freedom and self-government.

The UK’s Coalition government rightly threw its weight behind intervention in Libya, on the grounds that there was an international Responsibility to Protect the Libyan people. The time has now come to recognise the Responsibility to Protect the Palestinian people as well, not by military intervention but by backing the statehood claim and getting Israel to cease its heavy-handed and illegal occupation. Of course, not all Britain’s EU partners will agree. The EU High Representative, Catherine Ashton, who has been visiting Israel and Palestine on several occasions in recent months, knows she has an impossible task to put together a united EU front on the issue. Israel’s traditional supporters , including guilt-ridden Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, to name but three, are likely to vote ‘No’ or at best abstain. The United States is very likely to use its veto (not for the first time), but that is no reason for Britain to take other than the moral high-ground. If Israel justly claims the right to exist, so can Palestine.

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A guest post.

On 22^nd July I was privileged to see one of the two UK performances by some of the young writers and performers of the Gaza Monologues, who had come all the way from the Ashtar Theatre in Gaza/Ramallah to Oxford. The visit was organised by Oxford residents along with the Pegasus Theatre.

The Gaza Monologues is the work of 33 young Gaza residents who experienced the Israeli assault in 2008-2009. The project began by training a group of young people in the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed, where a particular interaction between performers and audience is encouraged, in order to address the social reality of the ‘subject’ of the play. The actual writing only began after 4 months of intensive workshops. Many of the young people had experienced death and injury at close quarters, as well as the general trauma of the conflict, and the project had an explicitly therapeutic aim, as well as an artistic and educational one. A year and a half on, performances of the Monologues have been held in over 60 cities, with 1500 young people participating.

As the title suggests, the structure and staging of the piece is spare. In this performance, the dozen or so young people performed in Arabic, with English translation on a screen behind them. The only props were chairs. Everyone is onstage at all times, but – apart from the opening and closing scenes – each speaks alone. The first monologue is from a boy who watched his brother apparently walk away unharmed from a shell attack – only to be told when he got to school that he was dead. In some scenes, the ‘chorus’ of other performers move to complement the monologue – the boy who still cannot sleep at night is held and comforted in a huge embrace, which breaks up slowly as each performer moves away. One girl talks of her ambitions for the future – perhaps to be a politician! But then she remembers how politicians just turn up and deliver speeches, but nothing changes. The crowd around her claps blankly.

It’s a bleak and in many ways unsurprising insight into the experiences and perceptions of young people in Gaza. But the experience of watching this piece was for me entirely unlike my experience of those days in the winter of 2008-2009. Leaving the theatre, I expected to feel, as I did back then, a distanced and impotent rage, anguish and fear. Then, I knew of the pain, but did not know it – I was frustrated and didn’t know how to help. Here I felt alive, and I felt I was coming to understand the painstaking transformation – still ongoing – of totalising fear and pain into strength, movement and joy. There were some startling ambiguities; one girl, Hiba, talked of how the war had made her grown up, both in good and bad ways. She had to become her older sister, suddenly. And one result of this transformation was that now she was standing on the stage before me, speaking so clearly, her words, her gestures and her truth apparent. It is incredible that they all performed themselves with such grace and insight; testament to a great deal of hard work. And because they performed themselves, it went beyond what we expect from theatre.

The Israeli Army raid on the Freedom Theatre in Jenin this morning (27^th July) reminds us of the perceived danger that the Israeli government thinks that Palestinian cultural institutions and projects pose to it. They are probably right to fear these institutions. But my feeling is that they do not – and cannot – fully understand the threat. To see these witty, charismatic and self-possessed people who are surviving the Gaza war feels like a keen victory – a victory that can’t be measured by walls and borders, body counts and compromises. Violence doesn’t understand that victory.

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Joha’s subject is war, occupation and imprisonment as they affect children. Corpse-like semblances of rag dolls occupy each canvas. The trade- mark single eye peers out from a bandaged head.   The limbs are truncated, and distorted.  The ‘dolls’ hang sometimes against refugee clutter, sometimes in the seeming void of a No Man’s Land or a prison cell,  often bound up in strings, like a fallen parachutist.

Strings for the artist symbolise the condition of children in Palestine and Gaza: ‘’[they] are easy to abuse…….but their minds are also manipulated and invaded by adult ideas ……the strings which manipulate the children are the same strings that…… choke them to death.’’

The exhibition has an increasingly nightmarish quality:  the installation of six rag dolls, misshapen lumps bound and tied might equally represent the aftermath of an Hiroshima. This is not just about lost childhood but lost humanity.

The artist was born in Gaza in 1978. He was first prize winner of the AM Qattan’s Foundation’s 2004 Young Artist of the Year Award. This is his first solo show in the UK.  On until 22 June.  Go and see it.

The Mosaic Rooms

226 Cromwell Road

SW5 0SW

www.mosaicrooms.org

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Dear All,

Well the part of work for EAPPI which takes place here in Israel and Palestine is now done.  I didn’t intend to write anymore articles but a few days ago I met three parents whose stories  deserve to be told. For now I will tell you just one of them; the least shocking. Remember that as you read…

As Israelis and Palestinians mark Independence Day and Nakba (meaning Catastrophe) Day respectively these three people told me quietly of their children’s experiences growing up in East Jerusalem. This is Itidal’s story. She is a mother of three boys and three girls. She and her parents and her children were born in the area of occupied East Jerusalem of Silwan. You may have heard a boy was shot dead in this area last Friday, reportedly by the security guard of an illegal settler. The children of Silwan, in the words of one parent, ‘are not being allowed to live lives like children. We worry about our children and about their future because they don’t have a normal childhood. We know now as adults how a bad childhood can affect a life.’

As an Ecumenical Accompanier, we listen to the stories of people who have little chance to tell them to anyone else. We met this mother in the garden of her home in Silwan. Incidentally, her home has a demolition order on it; the Israeli authorities want to destroy her family home to make way for the City of David tourist park. Her garden was akin to one we might sit in back in the UK- a garden swing, children’s bikes, pot plants, washing hanging on the line, a car parked; ‘normality.’

And then she told us this story. It’s not a short one, but please stick with it.

‘Do you remember what happened last year?’ we asked. ‘ I will never forget’ Itidal answered.

‘Last December, my son Khalil was only 11. It was 3 o’clock in the morning. We were woken by loud banging on the door, and my eldest son went to see who it was. It was the Israeli police, who shouted at us to open the door. My son came to get us, and we went to the door- “I told the children stay in bed, don’t get up, stay in your beds.” My husband went to the door. He opened it after they threatened to break it down. I saw at least 6 police jeeps parked outside. This means that there were a minimum of 24 policemen at our door, all heavily armed.

The police asked for the ID of my husband, but they didn’t say why they were at our home; I was wondering if it was the house, was it time for the bulldozer, was it the older children…?

They were reading the names of the children on the ID card of my husband  and at Khalil they stopped. I took a sharp breath. I said “What could you want with him? He is a child.” It was the last thing on my mind that was possible. How could they all [the Israeli police outside her house] be coming for a child?

They said they wanted to arrest him. I asked them [the police] to tell us why. I told Khalil to say in bed, I didn’t want him to see the guns, to hear the threats. They wouldn’t tell me what he had done. I said “Khalil is sick, there is no way are you taking him”. Eventually after arguing for a long time they said we must bring him to the police station the next morning at 8 o’clock. I told them “No, he has school tomorrow.” They insisted that they either they took him now, or we took him in the morning.  So at 12.30 the next day after school his dad left work and took him to the police station. They were there for six hours. Those hours, my blood  burnt and boiled, I was so stressed. I felt like my son had been snatched away, I felt I was losing him, I didn’t want to let him go that day, but I had no choice.

Khalil was questioned for five hours by three different interrogators. They took it in turns to question him. During this time they behaved in a way no one should ever behave to a child. They lit cigarettes, smoked them, and blew the cigarette smoke in his face. They chewed gum and blew bubbles and popped them in his face. They asked him to stand on a stool by the door; every time anyone went in or out of the room Khalil would fall off this stool onto the floor. Khalil’s father was made to wait in the cold outside and CCTV footage of him waiting in the freezing cold was played into Room 4, the child interrogation room, to Khalil. When he saw how cold and upset his Dad was at seeing the treatment of his son, Khalil cried.

“Why are you crying?” the interrogators asked him. Khalil replied “I am not crying because of you, I’m crying about my dad, how can you leave him outside in the cold?”

They kept asking him about a specific day on 18^th November, asking him where he was repeatedly. Khalil is eleven years old, he couldn’t remember! I remembered that on that day all of the children were on the roof of our house watching a house being demolished by the Israeli army and bulldozers. Khalil was with me, watching.

I was worried they would beat him up. It’s happened to many other children. [It has also happened to the other two children of the parents I met last week; one was beaten so badly he spent three days in hospital, with a fractured skull and permanent eyeseight damage. He was 11 years old too.] We don’t use violence at home, we don’t beat our children, I was worried he would be treated in a very bad way. Before he left on that day I told him “don’t let them beat you, don’t let them hurt you. If they do, tell them you will go to court.”

The interrogators told Khalil that his friends had told them he threw stones at the police. Boys in Silwan do throw stones, but Khalil doesn’t. They tried to trap him, and to make him doubt his friends. This went on and on, always he said that he was innocent. Eventually, Khalil’s father was called in and told to sign a piece of paper to say his son had come and been questioned, and pay 5000 NIS (approximately £100). Finally they left.

All the time I was calling my husband to see what was happening and all the time he just said “Lisa, lisa, lisa” which means not yet not yet not yet.

Khalil came home and since that day he became more aggressive. The way he was treated, he practices it; he sits with his feet up on the tables like they did with him, he stares at his brothers and sisters the way they stared at him. He does what they did to him to younger people in our family.

Every day he is afraid, when there are problems in Silwan he comes home, he is afraid. He says to us “Oh my God I have a feeling they might come and get me tonight Mama, let me sleep at my grandparents, or at my aunts, please don’t make me sleep here.”  He sleeps very little, has nightmares, and is very tired and worried all the time. He can’t concentrate at school and is always aggravated. Every day when he goes to the school now Khalil is very cautious; he’ll change is route if he even sees soldiers or police.

Khalil was not, as others have been, snatched from the street on the way to school, or photographed in the night by policemen before being dragged to the station without their parents. But all these children, 10, 11, 12, 13 year olds, are at risk of this, simply by virtue of living in Silwan. There was no warrant to enter Itidal’s house, no warrant for her son’s arrest, no evidence shown, no proof offered, no explanation given. Yet he was still subjected to this treatment, and his family still made to pay 5000 NIS for his release, despite there being no trial, no hearing, nothing.

Is this how a justice system works? Can this be right? Whatever the political context, can treating a child in this way ever be justified? Clearly, it is against international law, human rights law, and breaches the UN convention on the Rights of the Child in numerous ways.

Examples of these breaches include Israel’s failure to  ‘ensure protection and care of children who are affected by an armed conflict’, Israeli’s failure to ‘recognize the right of every child alleged as, accused of, or recognized as having infringed the penal law to be treated in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child’s sense of dignity and worth, which takes into account the child’s age’, as well as the lack of legal representation afforded to children arrested from East Jerusalem, the failure to inform them of the charges against them, and of course, the intimidating, cruel and degrading nature of the interrogation faced by these children. [Source: UN Convention on the Rights of the Child].

As Itidal says, ‘Children are the target, the object. How will there ever be peace when children are treated like this?’

It’s a very good question.

——-

The author is a member of LDFP. Currently, she is working for EAAPI, although she is writing here in a personal capacity. Her photoblog may be found here. For feedback please email info@ldfp.eu.

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Politics cannot be far absent from a father and son meeting in a military cemetery in Israel.  But those who go to Doug Watkinson’s new play ‘The Wall’, at the New End Theatre, expecting only Middle East politics, may be disappointed.

The central issue of this often moving play is the father – son relationship, and its absence, caused  by death in war.

David, a middle aged man coming to Jerusalem for a veterinary conference, decides to visit his father’s grave:  killed in British Mandate Palestine in 1947 by members of the Stern Gang.  On finding the grave, he breaks down in sobs: enter his father, Ralph, a young and chirpy soldier.  Middle-aged son gets over the surprise apparition and attempts to fill in the missing years.

Parallel to this runs the story of Israeli land expansion: the war cemetery is beautifully tended by Palestinian Mahmoud, an old man now in his eighties, but whose life is made increasingly impossible by the Separation Wall.  Ralph begs his son to campaign to have the Wall taken down.  Initially reluctant, David then experiences for himself the checkpoints, delays and ritual humiliation Mahmoud must endure and comes up with a good activist plan.

If the storyline is somewhat uneasy, the dialogue is swift, often humorous and mostly convincing.  The wars of Iraq and Afghanistan hover in the background:  the muddle made by untimely death, the  difficulties of living with a missing generation  (‘’I had no-one to follow’’ ) the myths of heroism  are all examined.

But there is a second dynamic which every visitor to Palestine will recognise.  David at first is uneasy with his father’s anger.  But when he visits Mahmoud’s  home,  and experiences for himself  the  realities of occupation,   he changes  instantly. Challenged by his father in the first scene to feel ‘outrage,’ in the second scene he boils with fury, and is with difficulty prevented from assaulting a female Israeli soldier. (The play follows the useful Greek convention of all violence being reported rather than seen)

The resolution and much of the interest lies in David’s personal journey:  the play arose from the author’s same experience of being overcome with grief in the Commonwealth War Cemetery in Ramleh .   The political issues are raised, but wisely left unanswered.

Good performances from Eric Carte as David, and Duncan- Clyde Watkinson as Ralph, and an imaginative set design.  The tree stumps which represent the gravestones, both recall the Homeric imagery of young heroes cut down, and will remind anyone familiar with the Holy Land of amputated olive trees.

Worth seeing, and you can get an excellent pre-theatre supper down the road at the Old White Bear.

Sally Fitzharris

The Wall: New End Theatre, 27 New End, Hampstead, NW3 1JD, showing until 6 June.

Tuesday – Saturday 8.30 pm  Saturday and Sunday 4.45 pm

Tickets £16 (concs £14)

Telephone: 0870 033 2733

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Got any arts reviews on Palestinian issues? Send them to info@ldfp.eu.

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Feedback: info@ldfp.eu

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It has been a momentous week. Events that one may witness a few times in ones’ own lifetime appear to have converged and compressed into a mere seven days.

A royal wedding. The death of the most wanted man in the world at the hands of a highly trained American SEAL team, and now, reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.

Just as it was unthinkable not so long ago that the Liberal Democrats could form a coalition Government with the Conservative party, so to it was inconceivable that Hamas and Fatah would find a platform through which they could both agree a way forward for the political aspirations of the people they claim to represent.

But come to an agreement they did. And in such startling secrecy. Perhaps it was for the best that the talks were held secretly and apparently without the direct intercession of the US or Israel. Without media coverage and the pressure it produces, Egypt acted honourably as perhaps the most honest broker of them all.

We can only hope the rapprochement between two parties that have appeared at all times to be the most bitter of enemies lasts and is a progressive step on the path to a true Palestinian State.

Egypt this week also announced its intention to open its border with Gaza on a permanent basis. Now that its people have stood up and demanded that their voice be heard it can clearly be discerned that the issue of Palestine is high on the agenda of the Egyptians.

Perhaps it was the insistence of the Egyptian people upon political change in their own country that gave Hamas and Fatah the urgency to put their own houses in order lest they suffer the same fate as Mubarak. As others have noted, this reconciliation may be the Palestinian contribution to the ‘Arab Spring’.

Let us not forget that Hamas participated in – and won – free and fair elections. It is only since Hamas won democratic elections that Israel put in place the ongoing illegal blockade around Gaza – with the complicity of the previous Egyptian Government – in what could be perceived as a move to increase the distance – both physically and politically – between what is recognised internationally as Palestinian land and the people that populate it.

The reaction of Israeli politicians to the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah stands in stark contrast to the positive and non-violent steps being demanded and taken notably by Palestinian youth and Israeli civil society.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Mahmood Abbas cannot “have peace with both Israel and Hamas” and that Abbas should “choose peace with Israel”.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman – who himself lives on a settlement deemed illegal under international law – has urged that the EU is cautious in its approach to the reconciliation, claiming that Hamas may use the agreement to “takeover” the West Bank in a replay of the virtual civil war in Gaza in 2007.

Lieberman conveniently sidesteps the well documented facts that it was the refusal of Fatah to relinquish power that initiated the fighting in Gaza, with the tacit support of the then U.S. President, George W. Bush.

Israeli opposition leader, Tzipi Livni is remarkably frank when framing the context in which Hamas and Fatah have seen fit to overcome their differences. She says that “The Palestinians made their decision because they looked at Israel and saw the unwillingness to cooperate for the sake of peace…”

But Livni goes further still. Her claim that it was a “critical mistake” to “allow” Hamas to take part in the election of 2006 should be met with the contempt it deserves from the liberal community.

It is not possible to hold free and fair elections if one picks and chooses which parties can participate and which cannot. That Livni does not seem to understand this simple principle of democracy perhaps explains why she, in her turn, failed to achieve peace.

The Palestine Papers show that when Livni was in Government rather than achieving a fair , equitable and sustainable peace, she was fixated with asserting the Jewishness of Israel, even if this meant moving Arab Palestinians with Israeli citizenship out of Israel and into a future Palestinian state as part of “inhabitant swaps”.

Returning from a recent visit to Israel, Liberal Democrat MEP Chris Davies re-iterates the distinct credentials of the Liberal Democrats when he states that “the EU must respond to the reform movement across the Middle East by pledging to respect the wishes of Palestinian voters expressed in free elections”.

Chris draws upon the experience of Britain negotiating with the IRA in Northern Ireland. You cannot make peace with your friends, he tells us. Indeed, time with Lord Alderdice at our fringe event in Sheffield which was concerned with “talking to Hamas”, convinced us of the central truth of this fact.

Hamas and Fatah have already recognised and responded to the tectonic shifts in the Middle East. They realise that the status quo will not change if they themselves refuse to change. It seems it still remains for Israeli politicians to reach a similar conclusion.

Creative Commons images by Olivier Pacteau and Trango

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