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Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar has announced counter sanctions following Ed Miliband's decision to ban imports from illegal settlements in the West Bank…
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<br>You say Israel has no right to do what it is doing. I disagree. Israel won the Six-Day War; the Palestinians and the Arab states fighting Israel did not. Israel could have taken a much harsher approach after that victory, but instead there were later withdrawals, agreements and attempts at territorial compromise. What followed over the decades? Terrorist attack after terrorist attack.
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<br>At some point, people are going to say they've had enough. After decades of violence and then the October 7 attack, I can understand Israelis reaching the point of saying: enough—get the terrorists and those responsible for supporting them out.
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<br>And if other countries are so quick to condemn Israel while claiming to stand with the Palestinians, perhaps they should also explain what they are actually prepared to do for Palestinians themselves. Are they prepared to take refugees, provide homes and offer long-term security, rather than simply criticizing Israel from a distance?
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<br>People keep discussing Israel's response while forgetting the events and decades of violence that brought the conflict to this point. You don't have to agree with Israel's actions, but pretending they happened in a historical vacuum is dishonest.
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<br>And Britain isn't the only country that should examine its own history before lecturing others. France still controls territories thousands of miles from mainland France, including French Guiana, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Réunion and Mayotte. Some of these territories have their own sovereignty or decolonization disputes, including the Comoros' claim to Mayotte and the long-running independence question in New Caledonia. If France wants to criticize another country's territorial policies, then it should be prepared to explain why the principles it applies to Israel produce different conclusions when applied to its own territories.
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<br>Canada should also remember its own history. Modern Canada was created through European colonization of lands already inhabited by Indigenous peoples, followed by wars, displacement, treaties and territorial disputes whose consequences have not simply disappeared. That doesn't mean modern Canadians should be expelled or "sent back to Europe." It means Canada, like Britain and France, should recognize how complicated territorial history becomes when conquest, settlement, generations of inhabitants, Indigenous claims and modern borders overlap.
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<br>If these countries want to criticize Israel, they have every right to do so. But they should apply the same standards consistently to themselves and acknowledge their own histories before acting as though territorial disputes, conquest and displacement are problems unique to Israel.
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<br>There's an old expression that fits perfectly here: <b>*clean up your own backyard before criticizing someone else's.*</b>