An open letter to David Cameron

An open letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron, following his speech at Annual dinner of United Jewish Israel Appeal

By Anne Candlin

Dear Mr Cameron, How self-interested and partisan was your speech last week to the Jewish Israel Appeal. Carefully pre-scripted, it said everything the Jewish Zionists in your audience wished to hear. Your final quips about settlement- building and house- demolitions were moral soundbites for the Media, to give the appearance of being fairminded and caring about the Law. Your audience knew full well, as indeed you do, that the government has not the slightest intention of lifting a finger to help the displaced victims of settlement-building and house demolitions.

The takeover of the Khurds' house is far from an isolated incident.
 Settlers are quietly grabbing homes from Palestinians in key
neighbourhoods around the Old City of Jerusalem

I happened to be in E.Jerusalem when the Al Khurd family were dragged out of their home by Jewish settlers and thrown, with all their belongings and children, onto the streets. The father of the family, who was disabled and in a wheelchair, died soon after this event. The family were left to live in a tent on a patch of land in front of their former home, able to see the comings and goings of the two young Jewish families who now inhabited their house. I'm puzzled by your allusion to a Jewish philanthropic spirit when I see such things. 

I was shocked to see the IDF, "the most moral army in the world" beating up a young Palestinian Christian farmer in Al Khadre near Bethlehem, whose land had been illegally annexed for the building of a military terminal. Shocked to see them breaking his arm by stamping on it and then trying to prevent the ambulance from taking him to hospital. Shocked to see them beating up courageous Israeli Jewish activists who had come to support the farmer. Shocked to learn that Palestinian women gave birth at checkpoints and sometimes lost their babies because the Jewish soldiers would not let them go through to reach the Maternity Hospital. Your audience must be flattered and bemused by the rosy view you have of such people. We, each of us, must individually choose to embrace a humane way of living and stand or fall by our own actions. It is not enough to lazily shelter under the supposed morality of any given inherited tradition.


May I remind you that you have Muslim and Christian citizens in this country. There are Moslems,Christians, Jews and Secular people both here and in Palestine who do not necessarily share your rosy view of Israel or of it's Jewish or non-Jewish supporters. Many of us remember that when the UK helped bring Iraq to it's knees through sanctions, a million innocent little children died as a result. Was the celebrated Jewish sense of justice offended by that? clearly your own conscience was not moved. Sanctions produced nothing good for the Iraqi people and did not prevent war. Quite the contrary: sanctions were, and continue to be, a hypocritical and cruel devise used by western powers to conceal their already well-laid plans for the invasion, destruction and de-development of Muslim oil-rich countries.

Not satisfied with so many deaths in Iraq, Israel and it's economic cohorts eagerly await the death of thousands more innocent people in Iran, another oil-rich Muslim country. Sanctions first to soften the people through impoverishment and death, to alienate their leaders, then, on the eve of invasion you will wring your hands in front of the worlds media and say "look, we tried peaceful measures first, didn't we..." But starving a population, reducing them to poverty, is as violent and genocidal as other acts of war. It is particularly deplorable that you revelled in the implementation of plans to starve thousands of others while you were feasting and dining to your heart's content in London. One is reminded of the rich man Dives, who, while feasting at his own table, refused Lazarus a crumb of bread. As an admirer of the Jewish tradition you will know the particular Jew who told that story, but you have not yet perceived that it's message is applicable to the powerful and the rich of the UK,EU,USA,UN especially in their dealings with Israel.

•  Who has been the prime aggressor in the Middle East, invading Lebanon, Syria, Sinai, Gaza?
• who has defied more UN Resolutions than any other country in the world?
•  who threatens daily the existence of Palestinians?
• who assassinates Palestine's spiritual and political leaders?
• who has imprisoned the Palestinian population behind walls?
• who illegally imprisons and frequently tortures 7,000 Palestinian children annually?
• who has made a Palestinian state impossible through it's theft of land and refusal to acknowledge the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their legal lands?
• who has dozens of discriminatory laws against it's minority Arab population?

You know the answer yet you are proud to have such friends.

 You threaten invasion against a country for even thinking about developing a nuclear weapon, but befriend Israel which has more nuclear weapons than France and the UK together. What possible rationale can you have for such uneven-handedness apart from self-interested economic and financial advantage? Will you ever publicly or privately ask the Jewish community to face Israel's iniquities? So you believe that the interests of thieves, child-abductors, torturers, criminals, racists and warmongers are written into the DNA of the Conservative Party. What a disquieting boast. But please do not presume to confer on all the British people such a questionable genetic makeup. I am British, Caucasian, educated, middle class, a pensioner. Boringly mainstream, hardly a candidate for "Muslim extremism". I neither share Israel's "cultural DNA" nor embrace such an unscientific and foolish notion. Anne Candlin