I gave up taking Yasmin “some of my best friends are Jews” Alibhai-Brown seriously many years ago. Unfortunately she regularly pens poisonous pieces against Israel and the situation in Gaza has allowed her to unleash more bile.
In her latest piece in The Independent, YAB demonstrates her historical ignorance:
It is exactly 95 years since Lord Balfour, the then Foreign Secretary, informed Baron Rothschild that Britain would back a new Jewish state on Palestinian territory as demanded by Zionists, some of them terrorists who had attacked British targets.
A bizarre claim considering that there were no Zionist attacks on British targets in 1917. In fact, it was only after the end of World War Two that Jewish groups in Mandate Palestine started targeting the British military. And what does YAB mean by “Palestinian territory”? After all, there had never been any sovereign Palestinian state throughout history.
The historical revisionism doesn’t end there:
Britain had no legal right to the land it breezily handed over and has never apologised for its disastrous decision.
While the Balfour Declaration is an important landmark in the history of Zionism and the State of Israel, YAB has conveniently forgotten some key facts:
Britain was legally administering the territory under a League of Nations Mandate and it certainly did not “breezily hand over” the land, which was to be partitioned under a United Nations plan in 1947 – a plan accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs.
Once YAB has moved beyond her warped view of history, the real attack on Israel begins:
But I would put this question to Israeli apologists too: why can’t they muster human sympathy for dead Palestinian babies and their howling parents? Don’t they feel anything for these innocents? This time, Palestinians have paid tenfold for those three Israeli lives. Israel’s uncontrolled, unmonitored, unaccountable power can overwhelm any resistors or enemies, or people unlucky enough to be born Palestinian.
To suggest that Israelis don’t care for the lives of innocent Palestinian babies is utterly disgusting. There is only one side in this conflict that goes out of its way to avoid civilian casualties while Hamas would celebrate were they to score a direct hit on an Israeli kindergarten, killing Israeli children.
YAB also implies that Palestinian deaths are an act of Israeli vengeance for the deaths of three Israelis in Kiryat Malachi. Once again her history is defective. Israel’s operation is not based on revenge but on preventing rocket attacks on her citizens that have been ongoing for many years.
While Yasmin Alibhai-Brown pays lip service to criticizing Arab regimes and Iran, it cannot hide her prejudice when it comes to Israel.
