MPACUK Comment:

Labour Party Vice Chairman - Stephen Ladyman wrote an article in the Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog today. He sides with the Israelis and decries the situation in Sderot. He also objects to former US president Jimmy Carter engaging in dialogue with Hamas in a bid to find a political solution.

So is Mr Ladyman a fool or Knave? Neither. He is a fully paid up member of the Zionist lobby. He is a member of Labour Friends of Israel – the secretive lobby group that has influenced British foreign policy for far too long. He visits Israel at the expense of the lobby. He therefore talks about a situation without any context. He blames the oppressed and sides with the oppressor ignoring the depravity of the Israelis and their apartheid state. His empathy extends only to Israeli children and not Palestinian ones who suffer even more. Read his article below.

What I learned in Sderot

President Carter is in the Middle East, hoping to visit Gaza and determined to "engage" with Hamas unconditionally. At least he has, on the way, paid a visit to Sderot.

Sderot is a town in the western Negev, in the southern district of Israel. It has shops and schools and all the normal trappings of civilisation. On a sunny day in April, it feels like the sort of pleasant town where families can build a life and children can grow happy and strong.

But look a little closer. A builder sits and smokes at a table in the yard of a house that looks as though it is being demolished, but who demolishes a house by removing just half the roof and then gutting the inside of the living areas? Why are the bus shelters made of concrete and without windows? And why do the children in the infant school play inside the building even on a sunny day, and why are there massive blocks of concrete blocking the sunshine from their classrooms?

The town's police station provides the answer. There you'll find racks, four deep and built around the edge of the car park, of spent missile cases, each painted to proudly display the colours of the organisation that fired it. They look like an anti-war installation put on display at Tate Modern, except these are no entry for the Turner prize; they are the remains of missiles and mortars fired at Sderot.

But it is when you visit one of the local schools that you really begin to appreciate the tragedy being played out here. The children play indoors because when the air raid siren sounds, an explosion is only 15 seconds away. They are wise to do so, the school wall is splattered with saucer-sized holes made by shrapnel from a missile that only just missed the main building.

The concrete blocks that shut out the light from the classrooms can provide them with protection from missiles armed with several kilograms of high explosive, and the children feel safer in school than they do in their own homes. That may now be a false sense of security as the latest missiles aimed at them include some with more than enough power to breach these concrete reinforcements.

Of course, they have to spend the night at home where they have a much lower level of protection and the missiles are fired throughout the night for maximum psychological effect. They also have to get from home to school and back again in the evening, and it is while the children are out in the open they are most at risk, so the hour of the school run is also the peak time for missile attack.

This town of Sderot, which Ivan Lewis, the MP for Bury South, and myself visited last week, is a town of ordinary working people, a town within the 1967 Israeli borders without military or strategic significance, a town where women, children and men try to build their normal lives. But it is also a town that is every day, day in and day out, targeted by missile attack from Gaza.

Two years ago, it had a population of about 20,000, but today the population is around a quarter smaller and those who remain do so out of stubborn heroism, because they and their families have lived there for three generations or because they cannot afford to move, as very few people would be willing to buy their home.

Those of us who live in Britain, perhaps especially those of us who are on the left of politics, are sometimes tempted to excuse the actions of people who we perceive to be fighting for a cause we support - and most of us do support a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. And in the case of Gaza and Sderot, maybe we can be forgiven for not having screamed as loudly as we should in protest at the actions of Hamas, as the media in the UK - with a few honourable exceptions - seem to have almost no interest in telling the story of what is going on from an Israeli viewpoint.

In the absence of facts, it is all too easy to fill the vacuum that results with the romance of struggle. But what is happening to Sderot demands our unanimous and unambiguous revulsion. What Hamas and its allies, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyr Brigade, are doing from Gaza cannot be excused, and it cannot be dignified as freedom fighting. What they are doing is inhuman, brutal and repressive and brings shame on the Palestinian cause and anyone, even someone as well-intentioned as President Carter, who tries to engage with them, needs to understand the depth of their depravity.

Hamas must stop these attacks now. If they do not, then sooner or later, the Israelis, who have shown far more restraint than we would tolerate from our own government if missiles were falling on a British town, will have no choice but to respond.

The paintings that the school children display on their school room wall say it all. They are not the pictures of dogs or family that British children paint. They are pictures of missiles falling from the sky, expressions of torment such as daubs of red and black scribbles obliterating the whole page; and they are pleas, in Hebrew, for mercy. "We have had enough, our blood is not second class," reads one. The governments and citizens of the world, and especially those of us who profess to believe in peace, should hear that child's plea.

Article Source : The Guardian

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