Matthew d'Ancona: Cameron is right not to put Israel on the naughty step

The PM should not yield to pressure over Israel, though some Tories fear it could lose them votes

Final straw: Britain’s relationship with Israel was the likeliest reason for Baroness Warsi’s resignation

6 August 2014

The question occupying senior ministers about Baroness Warsi can be expressed thus: is she Clare Short or Robin Cook? Both resigned from Tony Blair’s Cabinet over Iraq, but only Cook went on (until his tragically early death in 2005) to become a nationally respected figure of dignified dissent who could generate a very long queue at a book festival. Ms Short, in contrast, continued to snipe at Blair and those around him, but with fast-diminishing impact.

My hunch is that Warsi, who resigned yesterday over the British Government’s response to the Gaza crisis, will be more Clare than Robin — and not because of her gender. According to one Cabinet minister: “We have been expecting her resignation sooner or later, although it was never certain what the issue would be.”

Some of her colleagues thought she would go over the Government’s response to “Operation Trojan Horse”, the conspiracy by Islamists to infiltrate and radicalise Birmingham schools. But it had become increasingly clear that Britain’s relationship with Israel was the likeliest reason — or pretext, depending on your cynicism — for her departure.

At a recent meeting of the National Security Council, she had made her feelings on this subject fairly clear. At a Cabinet meeting shortly after the shooting down of the MH17 passenger flight over Ukraine, she declared that if sanctions against Putin were imposed then so too — logically — should sanctions against Israel.

In her four-year ministerial career, Cameron and George Osborne tried hard to keep her inside the tent, sweetening her demotion from the party chairmanship in September 2012 with the confected title of “Senior Minister of State” at the Foreign Office. They are now regretting their decision to keep her on board in the sweeping reshuffle last month.

Though scarcely a model of clarity, her resignation letter — trailed on Twitter, naturally — was an inventory of accusations levelled at Cameron, from which his enemies are taking great comfort. Charge one: “The absence of the experience and expertise of colleagues like Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve has over the last few weeks become very apparent.” To translate: your government is lurching to the Right. Charge two: “William Hague was probably one of the finest Foreign Secretaries this country has seen… There is however great unease across the Foreign Office.” To decode: Philip Hammond, Hague’s successor, won’t listen to the FCO on the need to confront (and single out) Israel in this terrible conflict. Charge three: “The potential for the crisis in Gaza and our response to it becoming a basis for radicalisation could have consequences for us for years to come.” Which really means: you reap what you sow, Dave.

Well, the baroness never did need a GPS system to find the moral high ground. But the decoding is necessary because the ordinary citizen might be puzzled by Warsi’s fury. Hasn’t the Prime Minister publicly urged Israel to “exercise restraint”? Hasn’t he called for “an immediate, comprehensive humanitarian ceasefire”? At the time of writing, a 72-hour pause in the violence is indeed ticking away, as negotiators gathered in Cairo to face the unenviable task of laying the basis for a lasting truce.

And what about Philip Hammond? The Foreign Secretary’s Tory colleagues like to joke that when asked about his position on the Middle East, he replies: “All too expensive.” But he is not the bloodless technocrat that he sometimes seems. At the weekend, Hammond spoke with unvarnished urgency to the Sunday Telegraph about the “simply intolerable” crisis by which the British public was “deeply disturbed”.

What Warsi and others want is for Cameron, Hammond et al to single out Israel for blame. They want the PM to say that its response to Hamas’s rocket bombardment that began on July 7 has been “disproportionate” — the diplomatic word that ascribes culpability in conflict. And, lest you imagine that such distinctions scarcely matter, remember that Tony Blair lost his job over the “d- word”. Though many forces accumulated to drive him from office, the proximate cause was his refusal to describe as “disproportionate” Israel’s acts of self-defence against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.

On Channel 4 News last night, Warsi dismissively described Osborne as “a good friend of the Israeli government”. The more subtle truth is that Osborne, along with a handful of other senior politicians, is prepared to step back historically and geographically, and to remember that the state of Israel was founded by a people that had heard the approaching silence of absolute extinction, and resolved never again to face that void.

Israel is bigger than Gaza and the West Bank, but it is smaller than almost everywhere else. Less than a century old, it is a democracy surrounded by hostile nations and under permanent attack by terrorists who wish to see it wiped from the surface of the Earth. What is a “proportionate” response to a hydra-like enemy who sees the Final Solution as work in progress? All terrorism aimed at Israel is genocidal in spirit. What would a “proportionate” response to that ambition look like?

Ever the pragmatist, Cameron has long grasped that precisely nothing is achieved by acceding to those who would put Israel on its own special naughty step. The way ahead is what it has been for decades: a long enough truce to renew meaningful talks with a two-state solution as its goal. As Shimon Peres has put it: “There is a light at the end of the tunnel; there’s just no tunnel.”

Those Tories who are echoing Warsi’s points in private — “not just the usual pro-Arab lot, either”, according to one senior source — are not all doing so from a position of principle. They are fearful that the PM’s refusal to single out Israel for blame will cost his party many thousands of British Muslim votes in the general election. It is much to Cameron’s credit that he has — thus far — shown no sign of yielding to that tactical pressure. He would do the cause of true peace no good at all were he to buckle now.

Matthew d'Ancona: Cameron is right not to put Israel on the naughty step

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