http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6061590/the-alternative-unive...
And so Miliband – whose tenure at the Foreign Office was marked by a dramatic escalation in British government hostility and malice towards its ostensible ally in the Middle East – energetically took the opportunity to depart altogether from Planet Reality. It was a ‘disaster’ for those killed and injured, he frothed, and for Israel. Whoa! Really? Since when did British politicians conclude that killing Islamic jihadists in self-defence to prevent them from lynching, kidnapping and murdering your own soldiers constitutes a ‘disaster’? Does Miliband think that the killing of thousands of Taleban, not to mention Afghan civilians, is similarly a ‘disaster’ for the Taleban or for British and American forces doing the killing? If not, why the double standard?
The flotilla episode, Miliband went on, was merely the latest in ‘a series of deadly and self-defeating actions’ by successive Israeli governments. Really? Such as Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005? Such as the offer to Abbas last year by former Prime Minister Olmert of virtually all the disputed territories and half of Jerusalem? Ditto by Barak in 2000? Or was he thinking of Israel’s military attempts of last resort to stop the Hamas rockets or Palestinian suicide bombings against Israeli citizens? Because for Miliband, any use of military force by Israel to defend itself against attack is simply not permissible, whatever the circumstances.
Of course Israel should lift the blockade, spluttered Miliband; there could be no peace when Gaza was isolated and unable to obtain the basic commodities of life. And then the final threat, doubtless parroting the thinking of Miliband’s admirer across the pond, Hillary Clinton –that the political process to bring about a Palestinian state now has to be ‘jump-started by outside forces’.
Thus in Miliband’s alternative moral universe, Israel is to be punished for defending itself against attack. Its sovereign ability to protect its own security would be taken away by America, Britain and the EU, who would impose upon it (how?) a set of measures which would hand the final weapon to its would-be destroyers with which they could achieve their exterminatory aim – and worse. For far from Miliband’s claims, the blockade was imposed with western agreement in order to isolate and weaken Hamas, rightly thought to be a threat to the region and therefore to the west, as well as to protect Israel from the smuggling of weapons.