Would Baroness Warsi resign over an Islamic Israel and a Jewish Gaza?
Baroness Warsi explained her resignation from the UK Government yesterday, on 5 August 2014, by saying that she found the Government's policy regarding the Israeli military action in Gaza to be "morally indefensible". One must wonder what Baroness Warsi would expect to change in the situation in order for it to become "morally defensible". Presumably she would like Israel to stop the military action in Gaza that, although the Israelis are doing all they can to avoid civilian deaths, is still leading to the injuries and deaths of Gazan non-combatants, largely due to fascist Hamas using Gazans as human shields and forcing them to stay where they are when they receive forewarning from Israel of a possible attack in their neighbourhood to kill Hamas militia and destroy Hamas military hardware.
If Israel were to allow the Gazan policy of using human shields to be successful, it would have to continue to suffer Hamas missile attacks against its citizens with impunity, at least 10% of which penetrate the Iron Dome. And this, for as long as Hamas decide to continue with them. The Israeli people have clearly had enough of being terrorised with Hamas missiles, given that 90% of their population, which includes the bulk of their left wing, support the current Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that 90% of our own population would not feel the same if we were in similar circumstances. Would Baroness Warsi seriously expect the UK to exercise similar long-suffering restraint in the face of missile attacks by a genocidal fascist enemy government against our citizens? Would we be voting for politicians who failed to protect us from that? Would we have been able to fight against Hitler on that basis?
Imagining the reversal of cultural religious polarity in the Israel/ Hamas conflict might be instructive. Imagine that Israel was a Muslim state and that Gaza was densely populated by Jews. Imagine that Jewish Gaza had elected an extremist religious administration whose charter called for the genocide of all Muslims worldwide and the annihilation of Islamic Israel. Imagine that this Jewish Gazan administration was firing thousands of missiles into Islamic Israel with the purpose of killing Islamic Israeli citizens, and refused to desist from doing so, even though it was the key to stopping the Islamic Israeli military action; that the Jewish Gazan administration was concealing weapons in synagogues, schools and hospitals, and launching them from densely-populated areas; that they were forcing Gazans to stay where they were to act as human shields after receiving warnings from Islamic Israel that their neighbourhood would be targeted. Imagine the Jewish Gazan administration was using international aid to build tunnels into Islamic Israel in order to kill citizens and kidnap soldiers: tunnels that had claimed the lives of many Gazan children building them and that civilians were not allowed to use as shelters.
Where would international sympathies lie then? Would any Islamic state, surrounded by countries that wanted its complete annihilation, be expected to suffer missile attacks in perpetuity from a neighbouring genocidal regime with impunity? If Baroness Warsi would also have seen fit to resign in such a scenario, where the pictures on our TV screens were of Jewish human shield casualties caused by the weapons of an Islamic state trying to stop terrorist missile and tunnel attacks, then her decision to resign from the Government, although still misguided in my view, would not have discriminated on the basis of religious cultural background. It is, of course, the intentions and actions of the conflicting parties involved that are of relevance here, and not whether they identify themselves as culturally "Jewish" or culturally "Muslim". Any state has a duty to stop a neighbouring genocidal regime trying to kill its citizens with missiles and other terrorist activities. Tragically, there are no just wars against genocidal oppressors without civilian casualties, as Britain itself experienced in World War Two. A state defending itself against a genocidal aggressor does not merit being singled out for condemnation in the international community simply because it identifies as Jewish.
(Based on my comment post in The Times in response to, "The Wrong Resignation: Baroness Warsi’s attack on the government’s Middle East policy was misguided," 6.8.14.)
