Tzipi Livni Fiasco Proves Britain Is Soft

George Walden, The Times December 17, 2009

As a piece of legal grotesquerie, the attempted arrest of the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has its funny side. The biggest joke lies in the role of the UN. It was the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the report by the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone on the Gaza conflict, in which Israel as well as Hamas was accused of war crimes.

The fun lies in the membership of this august body, and guardian of all our rights. Currently those empowered to sit in judgment on the Israeli democracy include Cuba, China, Russia, Kirghizstan, Djibouti and Qatar. In a non-democracy, of course, Ms Livni would have had no bother; with no elections to dislodge her she would still be a minister, and so exempt from arrest. There must be a lesson there.

The joke gains resonance when we remember that in 2003 the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Commission elected a Libyan to its chair. It is of course due to Israel being surrounded by similarly backward and corrupt regimes, such as Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as to Israeli recalcitrance, that the Middle East remains in a permanent state of tension and Palestinians suffer.

So the Livni affair is a joke on democracies everywhere, though especially on us, which makes it a sombre matter. The move to get her arrested is part of the climate of creeping anti-Semitism in this country. We do not go in for the hard stuff yet, but whether it is subtly but relentlessly bent TV reporting of the Middle East conflict, or attempts in British universities to deny Israeli academics the freedom of expression notionally protected at the UN by countries such as Cuba or Libya, institutionalised anti-Semitism, assisted now by the law, is gaining ground.

Yet it would be a mistake to take too narrow a view of the business. Something in our culture and mind-set exposes us to asinine legal anomalies of this kind, and not just where Israel is concerned. While Ms Livni is absent from London, known Islamist terrorists are free to walk the streets, or to sit cosily at home filling in claims for benefits, because the law has made it impossible to convict them without endangering our sources of information.

Even if these people are grievously misjudged, being little more than agitators in the cause of mass murder, the same laws mean that more hands-on types can pursue their designs with a degree of impunity from imprisonment or expulsion not available elsewhere.

The literal-mindedness that all this reflects has long been a British failing. The flipside of our relatively sane and just public culture, it can be seen in the slavish implementation of EU directives widely circumvented on the Continent with government assistance — to the fury of my former farming constituents; or in our blundering naivety in seeking to apportion blame and bring order and clean-living in place of the sempiternal hatreds of the Middle East. Maddening enough at home, when we seek to impose its values and assumptions abroad the literal mind becomes positively dangerous.

The upstanding, honest-to-God British magistrate who showed neither fear nor favour towards a former minister is an example of what might be called the Mrs Tiggywinkle style of adjudication in foreign affairs. “Bright and clean, bright and clean, cleaner than it’s ever been,” sang the endlessly busy clear-starcher, scrubbing and ironing away. The British, pretty much alone in the world, solemnly and doggedly seek to execute laws or resolutions voted through by a United Nations that can never be more than the sum of its parts, and of which only a small minority of member states enjoy anything approaching the rule of law.

Not that it troubles their leaders. How well I remember sitting through finger-wagging lecturettes on how to achieve a truly ethical foreign policy, given to our Foreign Secretary in private meetings in the interstices of UN debates by drug-running South American prime ministers or presidents, bribe-grabbing Arab princelings, or the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the twist in whose lips, an English tabloid was disrespectful enough to suggest, had come about through an incurable addiction to lying.

Under our pristine, ultra-democratic system (any politically motivated Joe can apply for an arrest warrant under the International Criminal Court Act, 2001) and indulgent lawyers, Britain is a soft touch for propagandistic exercises like the one we have seen. And whatever the real reason that Tzipi Livni didn’t in the end come, the ruse most certainly succeeded.

Their minds filled with selective TV imagery of the Gaza conflict, the reaction of many a fair-minded Brit to the idea of seizing a former Israeli minister will be: “Why not? They’re trying the Serbs, aren’t they? And it’s the UN, isn’t it?”

Then there is the disruption to Anglo-Israeli relations, and the loss of the contacts and discussion she would have had, at a time when the Israelis are being obdurate over settlements and the Middle East peace process is in the doldrums.

Glad of the distraction, the Iranians will meanwhile gain a few more days or weeks in which to perfect their nuclear triggers, and to polish the speech we must expect a few months hence, announcing with regretful mien that, though they began with a peaceful atomic programme, Israeli threats to Tehran and genocide in Gaza left them with no option but to develop a deterrent ... At which point the international community, with a sideways glance at Tel Aviv, will bow its head in acquiescence.

George Walden is a former diplomat and Conservative MP. His latest book is China: A Wolf in the World?

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