The Labour Party — Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party –has called for the U.K to impose a total arms embargo on Israel. This would not be the first time the U.K. has imposed such an embargo on Israel. In the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war, at the time of maximum peril to the Jews of Israel, with the nascent state invaded by the armies of five Arab states, Great Britain also imposed such an embargo. It was not alone. The United States also banned sending arms to the belligerents on either side. The most important weapons deliveries, including airplanes, for the Jews in 1947-49 came from Czechoslovakia.
The British, unlike the Americans, did not impose an arms embargo on both sides in 1948. Instead, they continued to supply arms to Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq. More important, the British armed, trained, and provided officers, to the Arab Legion of Jordan. Under the overall command of General John Bagot Glubb, the Arab Legion was the most effective fighting force on the Arab side, and the only one that could claim a clear victory — at Latrun — over the Jews during the 1948 war. Even before the war was declared by the Arab states, the Arab Legion joined forces with local Arabs, who attacked the four Israeli settlements that made up the Etzzion bloc. The Jewish forces consisted of members of the Hagana militia and kibbutzniks. Of the 129 Haganah fighters and Jewish kibbutzniks who died during the defence of the settlement, Martin Gilbert states that fifteen were murdered on surrendering.
Controversy surrounds the responsibility and role of the Arab Legion in the killing of those who surrendered. The official Israeli version maintains that the kibbutz residents and Haganah soldiers were massacred by local Arabs and the Arab Legion of the Jordanian Army as they were surrendering. The Arab Legion version maintains that the Legion arrived too late to prevent the attack on the kibbutz by men from nearby Arab villages. The surrendering Jewish residents and fighters are said to have been assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon; it is said that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed. Israel continues to insist that members of the British-commanded Arab Legion took part in the killing of those who had surrendered.
John Bagot Glubb was one of those old-style British Arabists — some called him a second Lawrence of Arabia — who went native in a big way, even able to converse with the Bedouin in their own dialects. When he was finally discharged by King Hussein in 1956 — Hussein wanted to totally “arabize” the Legion and show other Arabs that he was indeed Jordan’s ruler — Glubb Pasha retired to his home in Great Britain, and wrote a series of books “to dispel Western misconceptions and prejudices about the Arab world and Islam.” Delving deep into the past, he started that series in 1964 with ”The Great Arab Conquests,” a book on seventh-century Arabia where, he wrote, the Bedouins ”established the greatest empire in the world of their day.” A second book, ‘The Lost Centuries,” published in 1966, “traced the destiny of the Moslem empires from the 12th century to the European renaissance in the 15th.” A third book. “The Life and Times of Muhammad” again was an effort to correct cliches he thought had “distorted the image of the founder of Islam and his religion.” Glubb was a great admirer of the Arabs. He adopted two Palestinian Arab children. He also was an apologist for Islam. And the Arab Legion stood for all the military aid that the British lavished on the Arab side in that 1947-1949 conflict.
So Corbyn’s call for an arms embargo on Israel brings us back to the earliest days of the state. But now Israel has one of the most powerful armies in the world, is itself in the top ten of the world’s arms exporters, and in some areas of military technology — such as drones — is among the world leaders. Furthermore, while Israel does import a large amount of weaponry from the United Kingdom, there is nothing it receives from the U.K. that is not available elsewhere, albeit at a higher price. Israel is a good customer, and its expert use of the weapons it buys serves as a kind of advertisement for those weapons with other potential buyers. The amount of British sales to Israel has gone way up in the last three years: £20m worth of arms licensed in 2015, £86m in 2016, and £221m in 2017.
If Corbyn wants to put a total arms embargo on Israel, will he also call for an arms embargo on any other countries? One country buys 49% of all British arms exports — Saudi Arabia. On what grounds could Corbyn deny democratic Israel arms and yet continue to supply them to one of the world’s most repressive regimes, a state where Wahhabism is the official religion, where human rights hardly exist, where non-Muslim workers have no rights and often are treated as little better than slaves, where women have far fewer rights than do men, where public executions and public amputations are the norm, where a ruling dynasty helps itself to tens of billions of dollars of the nation’s wealth? How could Jeremy Corbyn conceivably justify continuing to supply such a country with weaponry? And what of the other major buyers of British arms that are dictatorships or despotisms? China, the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Venezuela, Egypt, Bahrain are among them. Most are outright dictatorships; Venezuela and Pakistan hold “elections,” but there is so much fraud, intimidation, and corruption that these cannot be considered democracies in the Western sense. If any kind of morality is to be invoked in arms sales, then none of these countries ought to be supplied. Is Jeremy Corbyn ready to declare an embargo on all of these countries, or is he interested only in depriving Israel’s Jews of the wherewithal to defend themselves?
“The UK has consistently armed many of the most brutal and authoritarian regimes in the world, and a number have been invited to London to buy weapons,” said Andrew Smith of Campaign Against Arms Trade. “These arms sales aren’t morally neutral, they are a clear sign of political and military support for these regimes.”
I suspect Smith was not talking about Israel, which is neither brutal nor authoritarian, but about Saudi Arabia, China, Venezuela, the Emirates, Kazakhstan. That’s not something Jeremy Corbyn wants to hear. But even if Smith meant to include Israel in his indictment — as supposedly “brutal” in its suppression of the Hamas-sponsored riots in Gaza — he would certainly be aghast at an arms embargo that targeted only that country.