Alan Duncan MP, 2nd from right, in the British Embassy in the UAE recently.
Is this Conservative government turning into one of the most anti-Israel in recent memory?
Alan Duncan MP, the Minister in charge of Britain’s international aid budget, recently visited the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, as the Department for International Development, calls them.
He has produced this video of his visit which ranks alongside David Cameron’s “Gaza is a prison” camp jibe. Feel free to watch with sick-bag in hand:
He calls the wall a “land grab” and complains that:
“It hasn’t just gone along the lines of the proper Israeli boundary, it has taken in land which properly belongs to Palestine. So that’s not a security wall, that’s a perimeter wall trying to annex land that doesn’t belong to Israel.”
He delivers these lines with all the spite of a seasoned British anti-Israel activist, not a considered government minister.
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the settlements, if the wall was situated on the “proper Israeli boundary”, as Duncan calls it, the settlers would be immediately exposed to the risk of having their sloats slit by the likes of Hakim Awad who murdered Udi and Ruthie Fogel and their three young children in their beds.
Does Mr Duncan really believe that all Israeli settlers should be dead men walking, for that is how he treats them?
Meanwhile, the distance of the wall from the “Israeli boundary” reduces the opportunities for suicide bombers to blow up Israeli restaurants, buses and discos and for Palestinian terrorists to snipe at Israeli civilians.
This also reduces the need for retaliatory attacks on Palestinian terrorist targets and, therefore, war.
As JFK said, “A wall is a hell of a lot better than a war”.
And as I understand it Israel’s eastern border is not a “proper Israeli boundary”, but merely an armistice line from 1949. Nothing has been agreed so, as it stands, Israel is not in breach of any law by positioning the fence where it has, subject to the decisions of Israel’s Supreme Court on its route.
As the short video progresses we see Duncan complain about the long queues of Palestinians waiting to go through security checks before going into Israel to work. Does he really expect Israel to let them through without stringent security checks?
He continues to express his hatred for the settlers when he accuses them of stealing water from the Palestinians. Finally, we come to the scene with which no anti-Israel video would be complete; that of a Palestinian baby.
Here Duncan talks of a “financial crisis”, but Page 23 of the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2011 shows that the Palestinians received the second most amount of aid for any country between 2000 to 2009 at US$7.2bn, which is second only to Sudan at US$8.9bn.
While, ElderofZiyon shows that, on a per capita basis, this figure far outstips any other country, including Sudan, by a mile.
Duncan should ask why there is still a “financial crisis” when the Palestinians receive such huge amounts of financial assistance. Where has all the money gone?
Duncan’s pre-Parliamentary career was as an oil trader where he made millions.
And his website states describes him thus:
“A respected voice on the Middle East within the party, Alan continues to travel extensively in the region.”
Considering he doesn’t know the difference between an armistice line and a border and doesn’t seem to have too much of a problem with settlers having their throats slit, “respected” is not a word I word use to decribe our Minister of State for International Development.
And being the Arabist he is, one should question whether he should be in charge of an international department in the first place.
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