’Israel is a rogue state!’ Ex-government minister slams Western complicity in Gaza

Support our work from £3 a month Norman Baker was a Home Office minister under David Cameron. He tells Declassified: “Israel is behaving as a rogue state, a pariah state, in a way that we’ve not seen before. The idea that it should withhold food and medicine from starving people in the Gaza Strip, that the settlers on the West Bank are completely out of control and annexing land that belonged to Palestinians for centuries, that the country is able to go and bomb the Gaza Strip, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and almost anywhere it wants to. It’s out of control this state, ’re shooting at UN peacekeepers. I mean, this is just beyond anything which we’ve seen before.“ On the influence of Israel’s far-right on Netanyahu: “He can only be prime minister as long as he gives in to the maniacs, the religious maniacs on the far right, the extreme right, who take their inspiration from the Old Testament and believe in Judea and Samaria and all that sort of stuff. And he has to keep them happy in order to stay in power, because otherwise he loses a majority in the Knesset.” “I’m afraid that there’s a lot of racism. I think that he and his government regard Palestinians and Arabs generally as some sort of untermensch [subhuman]. And I use that word advisedly. The Israeli government above all of us really ought to be aware that treating some people as second class citizens and somehow inferior to themselves is a lesson from history from the 1930s that perhaps they, above all, ought to learn to be able to resist.” On the Israel lobby and Keir Starmer: “The Israeli government has been very busy trying to infiltrate each of the political parties to make sure that they are identifying friends in those parties who will then stand up for Israel or the Israeli government and stymie any opposition which is there. We saw people who criticise Israel in parliament being criticised heavily in return by their party leadership, sometimes expelled from their party. “If you’re an MP [who] can’t stand up and say what he thinks or she thinks in the House of Commons, what kind of democracy is that? We need to be more tolerant of people in political parties. “What’s happened with Starmer and the Labour Party is - it’s kind of Stalinist. Anyone who goes out of line basically has the whip withdrawn, particularly on these sorts of areas. So the Israeli government have been very, very effective, kind of corralling the political parties to shut up people who might be saying something that they don’t like.” On October 7th: “The events of October 7th last year were outrageous in their own right and disgraceful and unjustifiable because innocent Israeli citizens were killed and others were taken hostage and still are being held hostage “But it doesn’t give them carte blanche to bomb everything in sight, to reduce the Gaza Strip to rubble and to kill tens of thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with this particular incident”. On Netanyahu’s approach to hostages in Gaza: “I don’t think that he’s interested in releasing hostages particularly, I don’t think it’s high on his list of priorities. If it had been, they’d have been released by now. He’d have come to a deal, a ceasefire or some sort of arrangement.“ On criticism of Israel: “Netanyahu and his government have been very effective at brandishing the weapon, to say that anyone who criticizes Israeli government is [an] anti-Semite or anti-Israel. We’re not. I mean, I criticise the British government quite a lot, I’m not anti-British. I criticise the American government, I’m not anti-American. I’m criticising the Israeli government, I’m not anti-Israel. So, you know, we shouldn’t be bludgeoned into being quiet because of the allegation, that false allegation, from Netanyahu, which equates criticism of his government with some sort of anti-Jewish position. It’s not the same thing at all.“ On arms embargoes: “How far does Israel go before the UK and US actually say enough is enough? What we’ve had is a lot of wrist slapping from President Biden to say, you mustn’t do that. And Netanyahu just carried on, does what he wants anyway. And the US, well, it says you must look after the citizens of the West Bank and you must look after those in the Gaza Strip. In the meantime, they’re supplying them with huge amounts of armaments”. “They ought to be cutting all arms supplies to Israel at the moment until the Israeli government changes and behaves in a more responsible and humane way.” On the impact of 5 independent pro-Gaza MPs: “At the last election, the Labour Party did very well, but it lost support quite seriously in areas where there was a Muslim population. And we’ve now got an independent bloc of MPs in Parliament which have taken seats from Labour. So [Labour is] looking over their shoulder at their own vote base and I think that’s why they’ve responded in that particular way [by suspending 30 arms export licences to Israel]”