I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen,
there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to
help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.
I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I
can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them
fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them.
The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to
him, which he presented to me.
I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the found-
ing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal
Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in
the 1948 war of independence.
My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families
were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was
ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier
shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering
Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly
and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter
of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.
The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palest-
inians do not count.
On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Lei-
bovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestini-
ans ----- the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that "500 of them
were militants." That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews figh-
ting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as mili-
tants.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will
have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni's
father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai
Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem,
in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.
Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two Brit-
ish sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the
terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of
Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would
be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the
Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could
have negotiated with Fatah's previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a fri-
end of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I
visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat's death, Hamas
won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation,
but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The
boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error,
from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for
peace on many platforms, said: "You make peace by talking to your enemies."
However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve
this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fight-
ing ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 mill-
ion more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with
hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish
settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now,
when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.
It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that
their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban
on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest
which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to achi-
eve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.
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Gerald Bernard Kaufman is a British Labour Member of Parliament. Sir Kaufman
made the statement above during the 15 January 2009 House of Commons deba-
te on Gaza in the United Kingdom.
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