Category Archives: Palestine

How the Church of England profits from the arms trade

Posted on by symonhill

Pope Francis last week attacked the “duplicity” of those who profit from the arms trade but “call themselves Christian”. Meanwhile, St Paul’s Cathedral in London has adopted a policy of refusing to host events sponsored by arms companies. Guildford Cathedral took up a similar policy some time ago, cancelling a booking at short notice when they realised that it was for an arms industry event.

It seems that none of this has made any impact on Church House, the administrative headquarters of the Church of England, which is next to Westminster Abbey. This week it will again host a conference sponsored by arms companies – and profit from their business.

The ‘Land Warfare Conference‘ will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday (30 June and 1 July). Its sponsors include Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s biggest arms companies. Lockheed arms one some of the world’s most oppressive regimes, including Bahrain and Egypt. The company makes Trident missiles for the US (and loaned by the UK government). Lockheed also provides the Israeli government with F-16 aircraft and Hellfire missiles, used in attacks on civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

For the last two and a half years, Church House has been dismissing objections to its arms industry conferences, despite protests from within the Church of England and beyond.

Their first line of defence was to claim that the Church House Conference Centre was separate from Church House. Along with other campaigners, I have looked into this claim in some detail. It turns out that the Conference Centre is a wholly owned subsidiary business of the Church House Corporation, whose directors include the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. The separation is a legal technicality.

Church House are now trying to rely on the argument that the booking for the conference is not made by an arms company but by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a military thinktank. This is disingenuous. RUSI’s website makes clear that these conferences are sponsored by arms companies. Alongside Lockheed Martin, sponsors of this week’s event include MBDA Missile Systems (whose weapons were used on all sides in the Libyan civil war) and L3, owners of MPRI a “private military and security company” (or mercenaries, as they’re usually known).

Chris Palmer, secretary of the Church House Corporation recently claimed that:

“The conferences held at Church House by the Royal United Services Institute, an academic body respected throughout the world for its consideration and debate of defence and security issues, are perfectly legitimate and certainly do not breach any ethical stance taken by the Church of England.”

Whether or not RUSI is respected, it is certainly not unbiased. It lobbies for high military spending and promotes the arms industry. If you want to glimpse of the reality of RUSI, have a glance at the front page of the RUSI website, currently featuring a picture of them giving an award to the war criminal Henry Kissinger. Another picture features a celebration of the Duke of Wellington, who backed the use of troops to crush peaceful demonstrations.

But whatever we think of RUSI, Chris Palmer clearly finds it easier to focus on RUSI than on arms companies themselves. His comment deliberately ignores the fact that the conference is sponsored by arms dealers, whoever it is who made the booking.

In contrast, St Paul’s Cathedral has the wisdom to rule out “bookings, or sponsorship of bookings” from any company making more than ten percent of its money from the arms trade.

This is in line with the Church of England’s own ethical investment policy. The Church of England would not buy shares in Lockheed Martin, so why will it profit from it in other ways?

Chris Palmer said that the body that manages the Church’s investments has no connection to Church House and that therefore, “I cannot comment on its ethical stance”. He cannot, it seems, comment on why it has a higher ethical stance than Church House.

Chris Palmer’s comments were made in a letter to Richard Bickle, chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR), who had written to him to raise objections to hosting arms dealers’ conferences. FoR is a long-standing Christian pacifist network. It is not only pacifists who object to these events at Church House. Others oppose them because they do not want to support companies that arm dictators and they do not want the Church to be making profit from the business of such companies.

As Christians, we do not hate arms dealers. We seek to love and forgive them. I for one know that I am just as sinful as an arms dealer, and that I need God’s forgiveness. I do not object to an arms dealer entering a church building. I would not have a problem with Church House hosting a debate on the arms trade (as long as it was not sponsored by arms companies), in which arms dealers were challenged and allowed to challenge others.

But this is not what is happening at Church House this week. This is about making money from the arms trade and giving it moral legitimacy.

FoR has been joined by groups including the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), Pax Christi and Christians for Economic Justice to call on Church House to adopt an ethical lettings policy and throw out the arms industry. Hundreds if not thousands of Christians, including Church of England clergy, have written to Church House to raise their objections.

Church House’s leadership, however, are not even engaging with the issues. As we can see from Chris Palmer’s quote above, they talk of the formal booking and ignore the issue of sponsorship. They have dismissed polite letters, ignored criticism in the media and refused to acknowledge that there is anything to talk about. Last year, security staff at Westminster Abbey tried to stop us from peacefully singing hymns as we held a vigil outside one of Church House’s arms dealers’ conferences. I cannot believe that everyone working for Church House shares these high-handed attitudes, but our polite appeals to reason are being met with rudeness and arrogance.

At 8am tomorrow (Tuesday 30 June), Christians and others will gather outside Church House for a nonviolent vigil and act of worship. A Church of England priest will lead us in Holy Communion. This is entirely appropriate. Communion is a memorial and a celebration of Jesus, who was tortured to death by the oppressive Roman Empire after his nonviolent activism. As a Christian, I have faith that Jesus rose again, heralding the eventual defeat of the unjust powers of this world.

Perhaps the Church House authorities expect our campaign to fade out, or to continue only as a minor irritant. If they do think this, they won’t be thinking it for long.

Terror threat: Let’s not fall for it again

Posted on by symonhill

Do they expect us to believe it all again? With weary familiarity, I have been reading the government’s claims that we face a heightened “terror threat”. UK governments have been making this claim every so often since 2001. It is usually followed by a fresh restriction of civil liberties or the departure of British troops to yet another war zone.

Despite Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destructions, despite the killing of the entirely innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, despite the absurdity of tanks sent to Heathrow in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, despite the widespread distrust of politicians, we are for some reason expected to fall for it this time.

When the “terror threat level” was raised a few days ago, I predicated a new assault on civil liberties. I’d barely typed the prediction on Twitter before Cameron and Clegg began to fulfil it. We can apparently expect some sort of announcement from them on Monday about new measures to tackle the “threat”. Cameron has spoken of filling the “gaps in our armoury”.

Ed Miliband has loyally weighed in with his own suggestions for reducing our freedom. In his article in today’s Independent, he makes some good points about tackling the root causes of support for IS and working multilaterally. He then ruins it with a call for the return of control orders and a “mandatory programme of deradicalisation for anyone who is drawn into the fringes of extremism”. I’m not sure what this phrase is supposed to mean, but it seems to imply that people should be punished for their beliefs rather than their actions.

The odd thing is that the “terror threat” claim might be true. It could be the case that we face a greater than usual threat of terror attacks on British soil. But we’ve got no idea, because the claim has been used so often to mislead and manipulate us that a true claim would not stand out.

Certainly, the announcement is convenient ahead of the NATO summit in south Wales next week. The front page of today’s Independent shows residents of Cardiff passing through metal detection barriers in order to be allowed to walk around their own city. Restrictions on peaceful anti-NATO protests, and the arrest of protesters, will no doubt be justified on the grounds of the threat of terrorism.

The concept of protecting NATO from terrorism would be funny if it were not so sickening. Unlike Iraq, several NATO members actually do own weapons of mass destruction (the US, UK and French governments own nuclear arms). NATO’s explicit policy is to encourage high military spending among its members, inevitably reducing spending in socially useful areas such as healthcare and education. NATO’s attitude to Ukraine is every bit as aggressive and imperialist as the Russian government’s.

In short, the leaders of NATO have at least as much blood on their hands as anyone that they want “protecting” from.

I’m not denying that there is a chance, perhaps a strong chance, of terror attacks in Britain. The British government’s killing of innocent people around the world makes it likely that some will wish to respond by killing innocent people here. I am not for a moment suggesting that this makes such killing justified. To identify someone’s motivation is not to condone it. Nor will I pretend that the UK government is in a better moral position than those it condemns.

Cameron’s government sells weapons to the vicious regimes of Bahrain, Israel and Saudi Arabia. British drone pilots have been killing civilians in Afghanistan for years. George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith have snatched away the livelihoods of some of Britain’s poorest people, who may well feel more under threat from their own government than from terrorists in Iraq.

Whatever the “terror threat”, I cannot support efforts by Cameron and Clegg to defeat it. I detest “Islamic State” as it now calls itself. It is a gang of mass murderers and no decent-minded person of any religion will offer them the slightest measure of support. Nor do I support the terrorism carried out by the US and UK governments. I oppose NATO as much as I oppose Putin, and the IDF as much as Hamas.

In short, I will not unite with one group of killers against another. The people of Britain, of Iraq, of Ukraine, of Palestine, of Israel, of Russia and of the US share a common identity and future as human beings. We have too much in common with each other to give in to those who kill in our name.

Don’t bomb Iraq (again)

Posted on by symonhill

The stories from Iraq are getting worse. There is news of massacres and threatened massacres, reported deaths and abductions, the sufferings of Yazidis, Christians and the many Muslims who reject the message of ISIS. It makes me sad and angry in equal measure.

In 2003, the peace movement predicted that the US-led invasion of Iraq would lead to sectarian violence and possibly civil war. I take no delight in seeing our predictions fulfilled, and on an even worse scale than most of us expected.

But some of the militarists who spoke of “liberating” Iraq eleven years ago seem to have little self-awareness and no shame. The likes of Liam Fox are now popping up in the media to argue that UK forces should join US forces in bombing Iraq, supposedly out of humanitarian concern for the victims of ISIS.

These people were warned in 2003 that their actions would lead to disaster. The disaster has come, and they respond by advocating the very same thing that triggered the disaster in the first place. They want to go to war in Iraq again.

However many times the are proved wrong, the most naïve kind of militarists always believe that the solution to any problem is to drop bombs on somebody.

As usual, it is not clear who they would be bombing. We could debate whether it is ethical to secure one person’s freedom by taking the life of an aggressor. But this is not what is happening in Iraq. The US bombs will kill civilians just as surely as they will kill ISIS fighters. Warfare has never been about killing aggressors. At most it involves killing people who are the same nationality, the same religion or simply in the same place as an aggressor.

Every civilian killed by a US bomb will give ISIS another argument with which to appeal to potential supporters. The very existence of US bombing will help this vicious gang of fundamentalists to present themselves as the true defenders of the Iraqi people. ISIS can be defeated only if its support is undermined, yet Obama and his allies are acting in a way that can only increase its popularity.

I respect the fact that many supporters of the bombing are motivated by a genuine horror at the ISIS butchery and an urge to do anything to stop it. As some have said to me on Twitter, “We must do something”. But responding to this feeling by bombing Iraq again would be like seeing a house on fire and pouring petrol on the flames – on the grounds that you had to do something.

While I respect the humanitarian motivations of some supporters of bombing, I find it difficult to take such claims seriously when they come from politicians and commentators who would never apply the same principles in other areas. The behaviour of ISIS is horrific, but it is sadly not unique. The vicious fighting between Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic has rarely made headlines in the UK, despite the atrocities committed by both sides. The kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria went from being a global outrage to forgotten news in a matter of days, with the girls no more free when they disappeared from the headlines than they were when they disappeared from their classrooms.

The Israeli government and its army have massacred hundreds of innocent civilians in Gaza. The Tory MPs and columnists who want to save the Yazidi from the terrorists of IS are quite happy for the UK to continue to license weapons sales to the terrorists of the Israeli government – and to the regime of Saudi Arabia, whose ideology is hardly a million miles from the views of IS.

Indeed, the UK government sold weapons to Saddam, then helped the US government to remove him and sold weapons to the regime they put in his place. As ISIS have captured weapons belonging to the Iraqi government, there is a good chance they are using some British-made weapons. British ministers now look set to sell weapons to Kurdish troops so that they can use them against the British weapons held by ISIS troops, who have taken them from a government supplied with arms by the UK after the US and UK went to war with the regime that they had previously armed. In this context, it is difficult to regard any supply of weapons as a moral and humanitarian act.

Imagine if the Iranian government were to bomb Israel, saying it was doing so to save the innocent people of Gaza from being massacred. This is substantially the same argument as the US government makes when it justifies bombing Iraq with talk of saving innocent Iraqi Christians. If the two arguments seem different, it is only because we are used to seeing actions by the US and UK governments as inherently liberal and humanitarian. This is not how they are seen in much of the world.

I do not have any easy answers to the dangers of ISIS in Iraq. I do not have solutions to offer with a promise that I can save the enemies of ISIS from being massacred. The cheap answers and supposed solutions are provided by militarists who believe that violence can save us from violence. Their promises are empty, although no amount of evidence will stop them repeating them.

It is odd that pacifists are so often accused of being naïve, when it is militarists who repeatedly offer the same response, no matter how many times it fails. Someone asked me a few days ago if the situation in Iraq means that pacifism is no longer credible. On the contrary, the situation in Iraq means – sadly – that the warnings of pacifists have been proved right. It is not pacifism that has been discredited, but militarism.

Oh, come on, all ye faithful

Posted on by symonhill

My article on the appalling theology of many Christmas carols appeared in the December issue of Reform, a Christian magazine published by the United Reformed Church. I’ve copied the article below. Please click here for more details of Reform magazine.

December is the only month of the year in which you can hear the same songs in supermarkets that you’re singing in church. It’s an odd feeling, as if God and Mammon have reached a temporary truce for the duration of the season.

There are plenty of secular songs playing in shops too. You’ve almost certainly heard the one about an omniscient tyrant who punishes people for crying (Santa Claus is Coming to Town). When I was very young, Santa Claus and God became slightly confused in my mind. Both seemed to be powerful beings handing out rewards and punishments.

Sadly, many people think that Christians really believe in this simplistic, abusive idea of God. Christmas, when people who rarely enter a church often pay their annual visit, could be a time to challenge this perception. Unfortunately, we seem to respond to their arrival by singing some of the most badly written, incomprehensible and theological dubious songs ever produced.

I am not saying all Christmas carols are bad. There are some good ones, but I would be happy to see most of them never sung in church again.

Some are so badly written that I’m amazed anyone wants to sing them. Presumably We Three Kings of Orient Are is supposed to mean “We are three kings of Orient”. I realise that grammatical flexibility is needed to make words rhyme, but this doesn’t justify moving the verb to the end of the sentence in a way that never happens in English unless you’re Yoda (I annoyed by this syntax am).

In the Bleak Midwinter imposes a north European landscape on Palestine, before saying a shepherd would respond to the nativity by choosing to “bring a lamb”. What would a newborn baby do with a lamb?. Even this isn’t as baffling as The Holly and the Ivy, which draws extremely tenuous connections between plants and the birth of Jesus.

I’m not condemning writers for their imperfections. I have at least as many as they do. But why are Christians so keen to sing such songs so often? What message are we giving out? Take the old favourite Once in Royal David’s City:

“And through all his wondrous childhood
He would honour and obey,
Love and watch the lowly maiden,
In whose gentle arms he lay..”

Would he? Mary may not have thought him very obedient after he hung around in the Temple debating theology while his parents frantically searched for him. But it gets worse:

“Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as he”.

It seems the claims about Jesus’ childhood are only a prelude to telling children to conform.

There are much better carols that can be brought down by the context in which they’re sung. How can we sing enthusiastically about Bethlehem without recognising the oppression taking place there today? I’m happy to sing O Little Town of Bethlehem, but let’s acknowledge that we’re singing about a real place. Ironically, the lyrics say little about Bethlehem and it has much deeper theology than most carols, asking Christ to “be born in us today” and “cast out our sin”.

That leaves Away In A Manger, a song so full of bad theology that it’s difficult to know where to start. Christian theology proclaims a fully human, as well as fully divine, messiah. Yet this human baby apparently doesn’t cry. Even that isn’t as bad as “I love thee, Lord Jesus; look down from the sky”.

Jesus is not in the sky! Jesus is here, in our midst, wherever two or three are gathered in his name. He is calling us to him today, not waiting for us on a cloud. Yet, with more people in church than we’re likely to see for another year, we decide to reinforce the misconception that Christians worship a God “up there” and are unconcerned with people’s lives down here.

We have something exciting to proclaim at Christmas. Let’s sing of a baby born amidst scandal to an unknown girl in an obscure corner of a brutal empire. Let’s tell of how that baby frightened rulers, challenged the powerful and set out to change the world with a gang of confused fishermen and prostitutes. How he lived so freely and faithfully that he was killed by a vicious government with the collusion of religious leaders. And how he has risen from the dead to meet us, heal us, free us and save us.

A song by John Bell and Graham Maule reminds us that “A saviour without safety, a tradesman without tools, has come to tip the balance with fishermen and fools”.

Happy Christmas.

New war, old story

Posted on by symonhill

There are people who could be very confused by the UK government’s support for human rights in Syria.

People in Bahrain have been banned from protesting by a government that has killed countless numbers of peaceful demonstrators. Far from supporting the protesters’ peaceful struggle, UK ministers are continuing to sell arms to the Bahraini regime that is killing them.

People in West Papua have for years faced violence and oppression at the hands of the Indonesian authorities that occupy them. Indonesian troops have bombed West Papua with British-made aeroplanes.

People in the West Bank continue to suffer the restrictions and humiliation of Israeli occupation. Israeli troops use aircraft and other equipment sold by UK-based companies with the approval of the UK government.

People in Saudi Arabia, who face imprisonment, torture and death to quietly assert their rights, know that their government has for years been making arms deals with the UK government, which looks the other way whenever the topic of the country’s human rights record is raised.

And, perhaps most shockingly, people in Syria will wonder why companies that supply Assad’s vicious regime look set to be allowed to exhibit their products at the London arms fair next month.

The arms fair, euphemistically called Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEi), will almost certainly include representatives of all the regimes mentioned above. They are invited by the UK government. DSEi happens every two years, subsidised with taxpayers’ money.

David Cameron and his colleagues may be genuinely horrified by what is happening in Syria. Most of us are more inconsistent than we like to think. I don’t claim to be any less hypocritical than David Cameron. However, we cannot be expected to swallow the government’s a humanitarian argument for war in Syria two weeks before some of the world’s nastiest dictatorships are invited to send representatives to London to meet arms dealers.

The march to war is eerily familiar. The government are talking about human rights. The opposition are frightened of disagreeing. The media are contrasting war with “doing nothing” as if these were the only two options, and using the term “intervention” to mean “military intervention” as if they were always the same.

Whatever people in Syria need, they do not need yet more weapons and soldiers in their country. They do not need more war, more lies, more feeble excuses. They do not need to be the victims of profiteering or the pawns in other people’s strategic plans.

Arms dealers will benefit if UK and US troops go to war in Syria. Few others are likely to do so.

———–

The London arms fair takes place from 10-13 September, with the main protest on Sunday 8 September. Click for more information.

“Bongo Bongo Land” controversy: Cut arms, not aid

Posted on by symonhill

Last year, I visited the Judean desert and met with people who used a water pipe
funded by UK aid money. Before the pipe was fitted, the villagers often had to go ten days without a bath. Now they can bathe every three days. They are also better able to water their vegetables and feed their livestock. The aid money has thus made them more independent, not less.

Despite this, the money is not solving their core problems. These once nomadic people are now largely static, prevented from moving about the desert by the Israeli armed forces, who use the area for training exercises. They live on the eastern side of Palestine, near the Jordanian border.

The UK government had helped them by funding a water pipe, but is failing to help them by speaking out firmly against the behaviour of Israel’s government and army, which might do more to change the underlying situation. British ministers are happy to keep selling weapons to Israel.

I’ve been thinking about this complexity today, following the scandal surrounding UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom, who referred to countries that receive UK aid as “Bongo Bongo Land”.

Yesterday, he was said to have “apologised”. Looking at the wording of his statement, I think the word “apology” is stretching it a bit:

“I understand from UKIP party chairman Steve Crowther and leader Nigel Farage that I must not use the terminology in the future, nor will I and sincerely regret any genuine offence which might have been caused or embarrassment to my colleagues.”

So not an apology but a “regret”. And no acceptance that his term is racist, but only a recognition that his party leaders have told him not to use it.

When initially challenged over his “Bongo Bongo Land” comments, Bloom said “It’s sad how anybody can be offended by a reference to a country that doesn’t exist.”

But of course, the countries that receive UK aid do exist and it these countries that Bloom has named “Bongo Bongo Land”. Also, as Zoe Williams points out in an excellent article today, the term has long been used as a derogatory reference to former British colonies.

I am tempted to get sidetracked and focus on Bloom’s other bigoted views (not long after his election, he said that “no self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age”). He is a reminder that UKIP is the latest face of the British far-right. But instead, I would rather challenge his views on UK aid.

His opinions on aid are shared by a number of Tory MPs and newspapers. The front page of today’s Daily Mail trails an article by Stephen Glover declaring that Bloom “spoke for Britain on foreign aid”.

The government’s policy is that aid should amount to 0.7% of public spending. That’s 0.7%. Just to be clear, that’s less than a penny in every pound. That’s seven pence out of a tenner. It is not a large proportion.

There are many things that can be said in defence of aid spending – that we live in an interconnected world, that we have a responsibility to each other, that many of the countries receiving UK aid are still suffering from the effects of the transatlantic slave trade and other injustices handed out by the rulers of the British Empire.

All of these are true. But although I am a strong supporter of aid spending, and of the 0.7% commitment, I don’t want to respond to Bloom’s comments by making an uncritical defence of the government’s aid plans.

For one thing, certain ministers are happy to look for ways of observing the letter but not the spirit of this commitment. The government has written off unjust debt and then counted this as aid money – even when the debt in question stood no chance of being repaid. David Cameron has even suggested that part of the aid budget could go towards military spending while still being counted as aid.

For aid to be really effective, it needs to work alongside other, more basic measures that will have a longer-lasting effect. Debt jubilees, new structures for international trade and a new financial system will have much more effect than aid alone.

As I saw in the Judean desert last year, aid spending can be helpful while also being undermined by the UK government’s other activities. For all David Cameron’s talk, aid spending is still vastly smaller than military spending. UKIP not only want to cut aid spending, they want to increase military spending (or “defence spending” as it’s euphemistically called) by a wapping 40%.

If we really want to cut the deficit at the same time as building a more just world, it’s arms we need to cut, not aid.

Israelis against the bombing

Posted on by symonhill

I expected to be disappointed by Barrack Obama in his second term. I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. Today, he backed the Israeli government’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza. UK foreign secretary William Hague was not so explicit, but he made clear where his sympathies lie.

Of course, some will try to portray those of us who criticise Netanyahu’s government as apologists for Hamas. The vast majority of us are not. I don’t support Hamas any more than I support Netanyahu. Many people have conveniently forgotton that Hamas was originally built up and encouraged by the Israeli government who saw it as a counterweight to the power of secular Palestinian independence movements.

In reality, the lives of innocent Palestinians and Israelis are being sacrificed by the Israeli government and Hamas on the altars of their long-term ambitions. It is vital that the Israeli government engages in dialogue with Hamas instead of attacking civilians and putting its own population at further risk of attack.

I was therefore very pleased to hear of demonstrations in Tel Aviv by Israelis opposed to the bombing of Gaza. I was also pleased to be sent a copy of the following statement, produced the The Other Voice, a group of Isrealis living near Gaza:

“We, members of the villages and townships in the Gaza-enveloping region call on the Israeli government to stop mucking around with our lives and immediately enter into diplomatic and political contacts with the Hamas Government! We are sick and tired of being sitting ducks who serve political interests.

“Rockets from there and bombardments from here do not protect us. We have played around with those games of the use of force and war for long enough. And both sides have paid, and are continuing to pay, a high price of loss and suffering. The time has to come to endeavour to reach long-term understandings which will enable civilians on both sides of the border to live a normal life.“The Other Voice describe themselvse as a group of residents of Sderot and other places in the Gaza -enveloping region who have maintained a continuous link with residents of the Gaza Strip. The group advances “neighbourly and communicative relationships throughout the South and the entire land”.

A statement expressing similar views has been released by the Da’am Workers’ Party, a left-wing party that includes both Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel. I admit that my knowledge of the party is minimal, but I heartily agree with their statement on this issue. Here it is:
“The military operations in Gaza are a direct result of four years of time-wasting by Netanyahu’s right-wing government, which persistently refused to negotiate an agreement to put an end to the conflict. During this time, this same government continued to build settlements in the occupied territories.

“This latest military operation will not solve the security problems of Israel’s residents in the south. On the contrary, the operation will merely grant legitimacy to the Hamas government and its claims that Israel is not interested in peace. The operation weakens the Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and makes his overtures to Israel the target of mockery and derision among the Palestinians. Israel is also putting Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood leadership in an awkward position, provoking President Mohammed Morsi. “Under cover of the warfare in Gaza, Netanyahu’s government is trying to marginalize demands for social justice and present the security issue as the only legitimate issue for public debate. Poverty, unemployment, the retrenchment of welfare services and of course the austerity programme and budgetary cuts planned by Bibi’s future government are presented as irrelevant.

“Furthermore, we must not ignore Defence Minister Ehud Barak’s manoeuvre in trying to use Gaza to win another term of office, as his prospects currently look poor.

“Two sides will benefit from Israel’s military action: the right-wing government in Israel and the Hamas government in Gaza. The extremism on both sides will continue to thrive while the two peoples, who seek peace and social justice, will pay the heavy price.”