Ed Miliband stood at the despatch box in the House of Commons today and told MPs that "the British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank – perpetrated by settler terrorists." No foreign minister of a G7 government had ever said those words from the front bench.
Britain wrote the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and governed Palestine until 1948. Miliband was describing a state his own country helped make.
He got ahead of the attack. He spoke, he said, "as a proud British Jew, someone with the deepest gratitude to the State of Israel for giving a home to my grandmother." He called 7 October "Hamas's terrorist atrocity" and Hamas "a murderous terrorist organisation." Then he borrowed a phrase from Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister until 2009, who called the settler campaign "a violent and criminal effort to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank." Netanyahu's government, Miliband told the House, "has turned a blind eye to this and, worse, members of it have made statements and taken actions to support the forced displacement of Palestinians."
Israel answered the same day. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar closed the British consulate in East Jerusalem, threw Britain out of the American-led military coordination centre at Kiryat Gat, ended British training of Palestinian Authority security forces in Ramallah, and barred twelve British figures from the country. Sa'ar called the accusations "outrageous lies" and the British move "morally distorted, and constitutes blatant interference in the affairs of a sovereign state and its electoral process." He blamed "a hostile Labour Government."
