Warsi: safety in numbers?

What utter, ridiculous, self-indulgent twaddle. Baroness Warsi has woken up, smelled the coffee and taken the photo opportunity. What a complete Tory.

Nestled under the newspaper headlines announcing that Baroness Warsi was resigning was another story revealing that over its lifetime this Coalition Government has granted licenses to export arms worth £42 million to Israel to 130 British arms manufacturers. The military equipment which Israel has procured under these licenses include drones, armoured vehicles, parts for naval guns and ammunition.

David Cameron spoke out against Israel bombing the UN school in Rafah a few days ago – on the grounds that international law does not permit civilians to be targeted. His words give us little comfort now that it is clear to us that the Israelis may have been using British equipment or components to do this bombing. The more urgent question is: what did Cameron think the weapons he was permitting to be sold to Israel were going to do? What did he imagine the ammunition was for: a volley for peace?

Similarly, what did Baroness Warsi imagine the arms sales were for? It’s no use hiding behind some nonsense about all countries having the right to defend themselves. If you’re talking about a country which is illegally occupying other countries’ land, which has just built a fortified wall to keep people out and which is patrolling sea and land to make sure that a neighbouring country cannot export or import… can you honestly say that you were selling arms for defensive purposes? Did you really think Israel would keep back its stockpile of British bullets when it was loading its guns before turning them on the Palestinians of Gaza on the basis that these were defensive bullets and it would have to get some other bullets to shoot innocent civilians?

Warsi – and Cameron, for that matter – have only spoken out since Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, but Israel’s been killing women and children (and men) for years: just slowly, in ones and twos, in tens and twenties rather than at the rate of hundreds a month.  Where was Baroness Warsi’s heart when the UK was selling arms to Israel while it enforced a blockade which saw children die slowly in agony for lack of medical supplies or basic foods? Why wait to find your heart is against the killing of children till the whole world is watching the UK Government’s response to the out and out attack?  What a hypocrite.

Cameron is quoted as saying that Hamas stopping rocket attacks on Israel would probably be the quickest way to stop the “conflict” with Israel: clearly not. This newspaper does not condone any violence and we cannot endorse rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas or by others. But if Israel is disturbed by the relatively few, relatively feeble rocket attacks emanating from Gaza, it could try ending its blockade and stopping its oppressive measures include control of water, power, work, free movement and imports and exports. Instead it has attacked Gaza in a way which at other times, between different parties, would have been called ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, apartheid – or, even, a holocaust.

And Baronness Warsi didn’t stop to think this through before? Didn’t she wonder who was killing children in Gaza when they were dying in their tens rather than in their hundreds? Warsi says that she could not live with herself if she supported current government policy. How did she live with herself when she was supporting past government policy, then?

Warsi was previously a Vice Chair of the Tory Party but more recently she has been Senior Minister of State at the Foreign Office (where she would have been well placed to see the kinds of regime Britain was selling arms to and to receive reports on what the Israeli state was doing to the Palestinians). She was also “faith minister” at the Department for Communities and Local Government. This is a woman who has experienced being pelted by eggs (during an appearance in Luton in 2010, when she was Minister for Community Cohesion). She will realise that if she is to have any long term political future she cannot afford to lose the support of fellow Muslims in the UK.

The timing of Warsi’s resignation is also odd. She did not resign when Israel first ratcheted up its killing rate and when the Govenrment first developed its half-hearted response.  She did not resign when Cameron was in the UK to respond immediately to her resignation, but waited till he had gone on a week’s holiday.  The timing of her resignation ensured she was still able to participate in the ceremony to mark the centenary of World War 1, in which she had a prestigious role, having been selected as one of four people who extinguished candles to mark the “lights out” part of the event.

London Mayor and arch-Tory Boris Johnson expressed sadness over Warsi’s resignation and predicted that Warsi would one day return to office. If that is indeed Warsi’s intention, she has handled the Gaza crisis just right.