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Suspension of Military Aid to Israel Is an Embarrassing Mistake
(Telegraph-UK) Jake Wallis Simons - Over the last three years, Britain sold 3.1 billion pounds worth of weapons to Qatar, the world's foremost sponsor of Sunni jihadism and the principal benefactor of Hamas. It sold 1.9 billion pounds worth to Saudi Arabia, which has been engaged in a bloody war in Yemen that has not been fought entirely according to democratic norms. Turkey, which has crushed the Kurds once again with less concern for human rights than one might hope, received 799 million pounds in British arms. By contrast, Israel, the Middle East's sole democracy and the only power to respect the rights of women and minorities, which is locked in an existential struggle against the forces of jihadism that menace us all, bought 83 million pounds of British arms, 1% of its total weapons purchases. Yet it is the Jewish state that attracted the criticism of Foreign Secretary David Lammy amid misinformation that it has been prosecuting the war in Gaza to excess. In fact, Israel has been fighting a cleaner war in Gaza than has ever been waged anywhere in the world. Arguably, the Israeli-British security partnership has benefited us more. Britain's Watchkeeper surveillance UAVs, based on Israel's Hermes 450 drone, have saved countless British lives in Afghanistan. British troops have trained with Israel's cutting-edge Rhino mobile command and control center. In 2015, Israeli intelligence helped the Metropolitan police discover a bomb factory in northwest London, complete with three tons of ammonium nitrate. This suspension of 30 arms export licenses will surely prove an ill-judged blip, to be rectified when wiser heads prevail.