Comment: Restore Common Sense to Common Law

While fears of swine-flu have swept the nation, a virus of abuse towards Israel and Israelis has spread far quicker throughout British public life.
By Ron Prosor, Israel's Ambassador to the Court of St James's
Published: 7:00AM GMT 21 Dec 2009

In British NGOs, trade unions and universities an obsession to delegitimise and demonise the Jewish state has come to characterise the daily routine. This month, a Westminster magistrate was persuaded to issue an arrest warrant for one of Israel's leading international figures, the head of the opposition and former foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. When this obsession leaps from campus soapboxes to British courtrooms, the British public can no longer ignore the alarm bells, which risk drowning out the chimes of neighbouring Big Ben.


At a time when both Israel and Britain find themselves confronted by terrorist foes, their sympathisers are cynically abusing Britain’s legal system which is being exploited to target Britain’s democratic friend and strategic ally in the Middle East.

The scandalous treatment of Mrs Livni is another example of "lawfare", waged for the sole purpose of delegitimising the State of Israel and its leaders.

Those who pursue these propaganda point-scoring exercises through the courts insult and damage the real pursuit of human rights in the world. Several human rights organisations have already been hijacked from their vital purpose and into the service of an anti-Israel, anti-Western and anti-democratic agenda. It would be a crime if British justice became tarnished in the same way.

The fanatics who specialise in hounding Israelis are the first to defend the worst abusers of human rights and decency.

The human rights of over 400,000 murdered, raped and starved Darfuri victims of Omar Al-Bashir's Sudanese regime barely raise an eyebrow. The Syrian Arab Republic's links to the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, are ignored. The complicity of the Islamic Republic of Iran's former Ambassador to Argentina, in the 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires which murdered 29, remains unpunished and unpublicised.

As ever, where attacks on Israel are concerned, double-standards, hypocrisy and irony are never far away. In the Middle East it is unusual to have an official opposition, let alone one headed by a woman who has campaigned tirelessly for peace. In most countries in the region, opposition leaders are far more likely to be arrested and mistreated at their own airport, long before touching down at Heathrow. Middle Eastern opposition leaders are more likely to be allocated offices in a prison cell than their national parliament.

Livni faces an absurd campaign of harassment in the UK. At the same time, a brutal, advocate of genocidal mass murder, such as Abu Qatada has received relative protection from the British system, which understands all too well the brand of justice he would face if deported back to the Arab world.

These ironies are irrelevant to the extremists who abuse the freedoms of the world's oldest democratic legal system to mount poisonous attacks on democracy. Israel is first in the firing line but British forces, British leaders and the leaders of every democratic state which confronts terror on both sides of the Atlantic will be caught in the not-so-friendly fire.

Foreign Secretary Miliband and Prime Minister Brown have expressed their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, and invited Tzipi Livni to London. Their actions, and not their words, will determine whether she is received in the Palace of Westminster or Westminster Magistrates Court. It is high time to restore common sense to common law.