Marxist Multimillionaire Ed Milliband and His Anti-Israel Animus

Ed Miliband is the UK’s foreign secretary. He is a Marxist and a multimillionaire, the child of Jewish refugees, a hater of Israel and a defender of the cause of “Palestine.” A few days ago he denounced the Jewish state for supposedly denying medicine to “Palestinians.” He has, you see, heard “stories” about this cruel practice from “Palestinians” who, as we all know, always tell the truth. Apparently he is unaware that the Israelis have facilitated the transfer into Gaza of 182,000 tons of humanitarian aid, including food and medicine. He has paid no heed to the Israeli insistence that it has “never” denied medicine to Gazans, and has offered no proof of his charge other than that he heard these “stories” from “Palestinians,” and that should be all the proof anyone needs.

But now he has an even more impressive way to demonstrate his malevolence. He has just announced, on September 8, that the UK will ban the import of all products coming from what he calls “the occupied West Bank.” And why is that? Because in Miliband’s view, Israel has no legitimate claim to that territory. Furthermore, it’s important to punish those terrible “settlers” that get so much media attention for behaving badly toward the “Palestinians.” He appears not to have noticed that there are more than 750,000 Israelis living in Judea, Samaria, and east Jerusalem, and that the “hilltop youth” who have tried to scare “Palestinians” into leaving their farms — farms which in some cases were built illegally on state land — amount to no more than 150 teenagers. Miliband wants to punish 750,000 Israelis for the acts of some 150 — at most — young men, whose actions the 749,850 other Israelis living in Judea, Samaria, and east Jerusalem do not support. Ed Miliband has no objection to this grotesque attribution of collective guilt. Can he be unaware that the Israeli government itself is investigating those “hilltop youth” who have terrorized “Palestinians” and has promised that if they are found guilty, they will be punished?

But worse than his attempt to cause economic harm to Israelis living in Judea and Samaria is Ed Miliband’s belief that Israeli “settlers” are violating international law. It is strange that the foreign secretary of the UK appears not to know the history of what has been called since 1950 “the West Bank,” in the government of Jordan’s obvious attempt to efface the Jewish connection to the land by replacing the toponyms Judea and Samaria, which had been in continuous use for more than 3,000 years. Between 1920 and 1922 the League of Nations created a system of mandates to cover large areas of the Middle East that had been formerly part of the now-dismembered Ottoman Empire. The task of the holders of those mandates was to lead their peoples ultimately to independence. There was a mandate for Iraq, entrusted to Great Britain, and another for Lebanon/Syria, entrusted to France.

And there was a mandate for Palestine, which was intended in time to become the Jewish National Home and then the state of Israel. The holder of that mandate was Britain, and that is why it is so astonishing that Ed Miliband appears unaware of that history. I have never heard him, even once, refer to the Palestine Mandate.

The territory that the League originally contemplated for inclusion in the Mandate for Palestine stretched from the Mediterranean, across the river Jordan, and included all the land east of the Jordan “out to the desert” that later became the Emirate of Transjordan. In 1921, however, the British decided to seal off from Jewish settlement all of the Mandate’s land east of the river. Disappointed Zionists objected, but their objections were dismissed. The reason for this closing off of 78% of the land originally intended for Mandatory Palestine to Jewish settlement was one of realpolitik. The British had just placed the Hashemite Feisal on the throne of Iraq, and his older brother Abdullah, who wanted his own land to rule, looked as if he would invade Syria to lay claim to that land; such an attempt could have led to violence with the resident French forces (France held the Mandate for Lebanon/Syria). As a consolation prize, at the Cairo Conference held in 1921, the British presented Abdullah with the Emirate of Transjordan, created out of the territory east of the Jordan that the League of Nations had initially intended to be included in the Mandate for Palestine. More on this at 4 p.m.