Jerusalem Post - 21/07/2008

Jerusalem Post,

"Gordon Brown today becomes the first British prime minister to address the Knesset, an honor not even extended to Margaret Thatcher, who in 1986 became the first British head of government to visit the Jewish state. We welcome Prime Minister Brown and trust that his message to Israel's parliament will be worthy of the historic occasion it marks.

There have been other addresses to the Knesset's plenum by leaders of prominent EU states, including Germany and France, in connection with Israel's 60th anniversary. Brown, however, represents the nation whose historic role as the Mandatory power in Palestine played a large part in fomenting many of the crises that continue to haunt the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors.

When Brown steps up to the Knesset podium, what ought to be uppermost in the collective British memory is that Britain was the power which, on the eve of the Holocaust, published its White Paper denying haven to desperate Jewish refugees from Hitler's Europe. The gates of Palestine closed. The gates of hell stayed open.

BY A TWIST of fate, Brown is visiting the region just as a would-be annihilator threatens the state which the Jewish remnant built. The vitriolic rhetoric of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the nuclear weapons his nation seeks to manufacture are potentially as threatening as the Third Reich's Final Solution.

Britain should feel a special responsibility to not - again - turn a blind eye to genocidal intentions. As Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the Court of St. James's, has said: Britain ought "to take a leading role" in generating an effective global response to Iran's undisguised ambitions.

The clock is ticking for the world, while its leaders appear content to let the mullahs win time via protracted talks which - as EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana himself grudgingly admitted - have so far led nowhere.

As Prosor wrote in The Daily Telegraph ahead of Brown's visit, the international community "decided only to be undecided. Churchill used to tell the parable of the appeaser who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. The world must send a message to Teheran that the feeding is over."

We hope Brown will announce British support for a robust sanctions regime, implemented with a sense of urgency, as the only way to avert the devastating impact on regional stability that an Iranian bomb would bring.

BROWN, WHOSE goal is to advance the "peace process," visited Bethlehem on Sunday, where he presented Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with a new aid package worth $60m.

Unfortunately, he parroted conventional EU wisdom, which assumes that the road to progress is paved only with further Israeli concessions and requires condemnation of the life-saving security barrier. Nothing could be more counterproductive."

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