The Wrong Letters At The Wrong Time

The following article was lost in the blogopost for some time due to an error in the sorting office, but now it has eventually been delivered I thought I would post it all the same. Apologies for the slight delay. Luke.

The British press has recently reported extensively on the deaths of Mandate officials and demands for the government to withdraw from Palestine are being made regularly in the House. Mothers of soldiers serving in Palestine have been bombarding the Colonial and Foreign Secretary with letters demanding that their sons be brought home.

I'm disappointed that a large number of thoughtful, generally sensible MPs have been quoting from these letters in order to embarrass the government. Many MPs have recently put their names to a letter telling Clement to change his foreign policy in support of Britain’s Arab allies and to abandon the Palestine Mandate as "unworkable", in the face of the continuing terrorist attacks by Irgun. This is despite pleas from Jewish Minister of Fuel and Power Emmanuel Shinwell MP not to displease Arab oil producers by appearing to endorse the Jewish aspirations for a separate state.

If they want UK foreign policy changed they should argue that on the merits of the policy i.e. whether it is the right thing to do, not on the basis of whether the kind of crazies who want to blow up hundreds of British, Arab, Jewish and other people in hotels and to assassinate Ministers of the Crown might be more likely to do so because of it. Otherwise you are giving the terrorists a veto over the UK's world role.

The letter reinforces the terrorists' world view - i.e. that the Jewish people are victims of a great, organised global injustice, rather than combating that view.

The signatories of the letter should be reminding the Jewish community in the UK that British forces remain in Palestine in order to fulfil the promise of independence for a united Arab country made by T.E. Lawrence and to prevent conflicts with migrating Jewish settlers.

Where will we be if we bow down to such pressure from pressure groups and their parliamentary representatives simply to avoid further casualties, rather than on political principle? I can only imagine a dreadful future in which Ernest hands over Palestine to the UN for unstable partition and the leader of the terrorists goes on eventually to become Prime Minister of the new Jewish state.