It's time to treat Israel like apartheid-era South Africa

It's the moderates you need to watch out for. When they turn, the effect can be much more devastating than the shouters and flag-wavers.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

That was my reaction to a column about Israel that Matthew Parris recently wrote for The Times, in which he called for meaningful sanctions to be applied by the international community with the explicit aim of getting rid of Netanyahu and his rotten government.

Parris embodies for me an almost Orwellian notion of Britishness — that’s Orwellian in the sense of the novelist’s essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”, rather than the dystopian nightmare of 1984 (and, to be precise, he was writing there about Englishness, but still).

For decades since quitting as a Tory MP in 1986, Parris has written columns that stand for decency, fair play, moderation, individualism, humour and restraint, as well as liberty in thought, deed, and expression, and an attachment to the past and tradition, tempered by tolerance and pragmatism. He voted Lib Dem in 2019, unable to stomach the unprincipled populism of Boris Johnson, but considers himself a lifelong conservative.

So consider this reasonable man and ponder his sober call for sanctions against Israel — premised, he says, on his personal experience of how sanctions worked against apartheid South Africa, the country in which he was born.

He admits that he was initially opposed to sanctions in the latter case, but ended up convinced of their necessity. And he adds: “Even that wicked regime did not try to extinguish the identity of - or slaughter in their tens of thousands - the Black race, or raze their homelands to the ground.”

If that had come from the pen of Owen Jones, Ken Loach or Jeremy Corbyn, Israel’s defenders would shrug. “They would say that, wouldn’t they?” And, indeed, the very next day's Times letters page included the now-routine denunciation of any forthright critic of Israel as parroting antisemitic propaganda.