By Hans Stehling
Global Research
For all the long years of her reign, Queen Elizabeth II of England refused to visit Israel because of its unacceptable abuse of human rights – during all of which period she visited every other country of the free world, many, many times as an icon of freedom, trust and human dignity.
According to the Jerusalem Post:
In her 70 years on the throne, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth traveled widely and visited many countries – nearly all the countries of the Commonwealth – Canada in particular. She visited Canada as many as 27 times, and after turning 50, she visited 43 different countries for the first time.
She visited Jordan, Egypt and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa – but never Israel.
Following her visit to Jordan in 1984, the queen raised some alarm among British Jews according to a report in The New York Times. Sympathetic comments she had made about the plight of the Palestinians and her seeming disapproval of Israeli actions caused more than a mere flutter among British Jews. (JP, September 9, 2022)
Six Questions for Israel:
- As a now undeclared, nuclear weapon state, after the Holocaust of WW2 in which 6 million Jews were murdered, why do you support a government that has deliberately dispossessed and disenfranchised five million indigenous, mainly Muslim Arabs whose families have lived on and worked the land of Palestine for over a millennium?
- How can Israelis drink coffee in the bars of Tel Aviv when just kilometres down the road, the indigenous peoples of Gaza, and of the West Bank, starve under a shocking, inhuman, 16-year blockade of essential goods imposed by your government, together with an illegal government-imposed settlement policy that violates the Geneva Conventions on Human Rights?
- How do you manage to brainwash your citizens to join the IDF and to harass, bully, humiliate and kill the indigenous people of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and how do you sleep at night knowing that you have been trained to treat ordinary Palestinians as Untermenschen, to be killed and humiliated, at will?
- How do you manage to be a major supplier of arms and espionage systems to regimes around the world then claim to be innocent bystanders who merely want to defend your own state? How many more family homes in the West Bank do you want to demolish so that you can obtain yet more land for your illegal settlements?
- How does a Jewish demographic constituting less than 2% of the American people, manage to wield such extraordinary influence in the US Congress and how does your AIPAC lobby succeed in persuading 335 million Americans to send billions of tax dollars every year to the state of Israel in order to continue the illegal occupation of Palestinian land – an occupation condemned by UNSCR 2334?
- Do you think any of the above facts contribute to the now frightening increase in antisemitism on university campuses in the US, the U.K. and around the world; in schools, offices, homes and workplaces? Or is it purely coincidental?