Britain Blames Israel

Go ahead, make our day. That’s our reaction to Britain’s boast that it is going to prohibit the sale to Israel of all arms that “contribute to the occupation” of the West Bank. The move, coming 87 years after Britain issued its White Paper of 1939 aiming to block European Jewry from escaping to Mandatory Palestine, is a victory for Britons who nurse a hostility to the Jewish state. We look forward to seeing how it will work out in the years ahead.Earlier this year, Israel became, per the Times of Israel, the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter. That now surpasses Britain. Israel is at a point at which it supplies some 8.2 percent of British arms. Israel is also, after America, the number-two arms exporter to Britain. Yet Israel has no such dependence on Britain, which supplies less than one percent of the Jewish state’s arms imports. Might Britain have shot itself in the foot? It opens up what may become a legal war. The Ribicoff Amendment of 1976 now authorizes the president to designate for sanctions a country boycotting Israel. Local jurisdictions, including the Sunshine State, also target Israel boycotters. “Florida is one of Britain’s largest trading partners,” Congressman Randy Fine writes on X. “They should understand that their vanity project in support of Muslim terror could cost them billions of dollars.”Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, announced several counter measures against the Labour government, including closing the British consulate at East Jerusalem and the eviction of British officials from an American-led center monitoring the Gaza ceasefire. Those would deprive London of ties with Arabs that Labourites are trying to assist by recognizing, as did the prior Labour premier, Keir Starmer, a Palestinian Arab “state” in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.Our ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, indicates that America might join Israel in retaliation against Britain, whose act was “like throwing a stone without knowing where it will land.” Asked about the ambassador’s implied threat, Secretary of State Rubio was cautious. He noted that Washington was informed in advance of the British move. He noted what he called an “uptick in tensions in the West Bank at a very tenuous time in the region.”The British campaign, joined by several European countries — France first, of course — and Canada against Israel, is calculated to raise the region’s willingness to revert to the old Arab League boycott of Israeli goods. The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, waxed poetic about his Jewish background and his fond memories of Kibbutz oranges, but he made his move on the eve of high holidays that served as background for attacks on British Jews in the past. We don’t credit Mr. Miliband for one second. The most obnoxious thing he did today was to try to palm off on the Commons the idea that Britain’s quarrel is not with Israel but with Israel’s government. He knows that Israel is the only stable democracy in the Middle East. Britain can’t even protect its own Jewish population, who often fear walking the streets in religious garb and some of whose synagogues need security measures just to get through services.How is Britain going to protect the Jews of the West Bank? London has become “ground zero” for Europe’s leftist Islamist politics, a former White House adviser, Richard Goldberg, tells our Benny Avni. Britain’s bogeyman turns out to be the Jewish state. America is in a unique position to arrest this toxic tide by making clear to London, Paris, and the rest of them that any move on our ally is a move on us. Clint Eastwood had it right.

Britain Blames Israel

Britain Blames Israel

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