Foreign Affairs

When she became Prime Minister in 2016, May made a series of pledges about the kind of Brexit she wanted. In subsequent speeches she fleshed out that vision. The Conservative Party was broadly united. Sure, Remainers would have preferred to remain, and Brexiteers would have preferred a more buccaneering Brexit, but this was a compromise that could work for all.

But she did not act as she had promised to. Inside government, she had cut out the Brexiteers in pursuit of a secret plan that few knew of. Whilst DExEU prepared a plan that matched her stated aims, May produced the Chequers Plan which did not.

In July last year Brexiteers warned that the Chequers Plan was unacceptable. They used all means available to them, except a leadership challenge, to get it spiked. Resignations, alternative plans, media pressures, honest calculations of the numbers of rebels.

May pushed on. The Withdrawal Agreement (WA) was the outcome.

When that was published Brexiteers did what they could to get it spiked. More resignations, more time spent explaining alternatives, more honest calculations of the numbers of rebels.

It didn’t work. May pushed on. Brexiteers forced an internal party confidence vote. May promised legally binding reassurances on the backstop aspect of the WA. She won, and pushed on.

Well, sort of. Actually she just delayed last night’s rejection of the WA by six weeks, and achieved nothing in the mean time. The letter she got from the EU did nothing to change the WA. As such, it was not the legally binding assurances she had promised in order to stay on as PM.

Last night she lost the WA vote by an historic number. 117 of her own MPs voted against her, some using their vote to resign from the government.

And yet today I see various people arguing that those Brexiteers who voted against the WA are various shades of irresponsible, unreasonable and idiotic, putting Brexit and the country at great risk in pursuit of unrealistic ends.

But when I trace the steps that brought us to this point and then read those outraged comments about Brexiteers, I simply think: are you out of your tree!? How can you not see that May’s handling of this whole process has inevitably brought us to this point? Has party loyalty blinded you to reality? Or do you know the truth but your political ambitions are preventing you from being honest?

The simple truth is that one person is responsible for this mess, and she is not named Jacob, David, Boris, Steve, Dominic, Esther, Sir Bill, nor Owen.

It is all down to Theresa May. She double-dealt against her own Ministers. She promised the electorate one thing, then tried to force through another. She made promises in order to stay on as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, and then didn’t keep them. She ignored warnings, advice, and alternatives in the bloody-minded pursuit of her own plan. Trying to push the blame for this situation on to others – the ERG, the DUP, even the Labour Party – is, quite simply, shirking her responsibility.

It was a struggle but I think I’ve managed to add to the fairly comprehensive list of reasons to reject Northern Ireland’s assimilation into an all-island state.

Who would want to be part of a country where a majority of the population appear to hold such a distorted, counter-factual, view of Israel?

This week Tánaiste Simon Coveney reacted to the ongoing disorder on the Gaza-Israel border in his now customarily aggressive manner by summoning the Israeli Ambassador to explain his country’s actions in shooting dead, what has now transpired to be, a whole bunch of terrorists.

He earlier tweeted about having been in Gaza recently and how “shocking and tragic” the whole thing was. In his statement he claimed that Israeli actions were “disproportionate” and that Israeli forces should “show restraint”. Coveney and Varadkar’s uniquely Irish brand of populism – which involves railing against a traditional enemy a day in the hope that you can appeal to the lowest common denominator – may only last as long as the electoral cycle. What it does do however is shine a light on social attitudes in the Republic.

Statements from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade since the start of 2018 reveal a lot. Not surprisingly, a lot of Coveney’s time seems to be taken up with by Brexit and political developments in Northern Ireland. There have been two statements on Syria, one of which was pointing out how much money they had given away. There is one statement relating to the Democratic Republic of Congo, again about aid. There is a statement condemning a terrorist attack in Libya. There are three statements on Gaza and not a single one of them mentions terrorism.

If the numbers speak for themselves then, NI excepted, Israel is Ireland’s number one foreign policy concern. There is no mention of Myanmar, South Sudan, Somalia or anywhere else where there is conflict around the world. Why? Because no-one cares.

It would be remiss not to point out that Ireland is not the only country where this is the case. There are many in the UK who become utterly hysterical about Israel yet are incapable of offering any opinion about any other conflict at all. Yet they do not represent such a high proportion of the population that the government feels the needs to abandon common sense and the established rights of nation states to accommodate them.

You could argue that, for historical reasons, the Irish back what they see as the underdog. But there’s a kind of soft bigotry in the attitudes of those who attach themselves to the Palestinian cause when it comes to interpreting events like this week’s. There’s an expectation that irrationality – which extends to bomb throwing and attempts to infiltrate Sderot while fully armed – is part of the Palestinian psyche. This is the only way one could possibly explain the Israel-bashers’ apparent inability to notice any of the reams of evidence relating to a coordinated terrorist action. In some cases they’ve failed to mention Hamas at all.

Instead, we’re apparently to focus on Israel’s ‘proportionality’. This argument is unfathomable. The presence of large numbers of armed, violent militants attempting to get to a civilian population with kidnap and murder in mind would not be tolerated by any self-respecting nation. Given that there were thousands present and the only deaths so far publicly acknowledged are of members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad it seems that proportionality, as is always the case with the Israeli military, is an attribute well catered for. Either snipers took well aimed shots at recognised threats in accordance with recognised IDF rules of engagement, or everyone there was a terrorist. And nobody is claiming the latter.

People making this argument are effectively asking for Israel to be less good at protecting itself. They’re asking the IDF to kill fewer of the terrorists that threaten its people. That’s not how it works.

Cultural relativism explains the soft bigotry about Palestinians, which leads to a reluctance to call out terrorism for what it is. But it also explains the much harder and more virulent hatred of Israel – a democracy its critics, for reasons they are unable to explain, expect not to defend itself.

The label ‘Apartheid’ is bandied around frequently these days, sadly it hasn’t stuck to the one State who, in my humble opinion, not only deserves it but whose human rights atrocities are routinely ignored and glossed over by the International Community for the sake of not rocking the boat. Unlike other States, whose human rights atrocities are more fashionable as cause celebres, Saudi Arabia’s prolific human rights abuses are ignored for the sake of business as usual.

Apartheid is originally defined as a system of institutionalised racial segregation and discrimination in South Africa between 1948 and 1994. What Saudi Arabia practices is a system of institutionalised gender segregation and discrimination. Feminist psychologist Phyllis Chesler defines Gender Apartheid as ‘practices which condemn girls and women to a separate and subordinate sub-existence…’ These descriptions describe the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia accurately and I’m not the only Arab Woman who thinks so:

Gender Apartheid is the best word to describe the situation in Saudi Arabia. I don’t believe there is any other place in the world where gender decides everything a person does on a daily basis and to the minutest details. To the outside world this manifests in the ban on women driving and the compulsory Abaya. However, it goes much deeper than that in that gender discrimination is institutionalized in every sector of the Saudi government. The majority of government ministries are off limits to women, both as visitors and as employees.

Elham Manea:

Women in the Kingdom, a 2008 Human Rights Watch report maintains, are infringes on their basic human rights.

 In other words, every adult Saudi woman, regardless of her economic or social status, must obtain permission from her male guardian to work, travel, study, seek medical treatment or marry. She is also deprived of making the most trivial decisions on behalf of her children. This system is supported by the imposition of complete sex segregation, which prevents women from participating meaningfully in public life.

I must stress that most Arab countries don’t enforce gender segregation on anywhere near the scale that Saudi Arabia does. In the majority of the Arab nations the headscarf is not a mandatory requirement and women are both welcome and encouraged to be part of civic life. Saudi Arabia is an outlier even amongst Gulf States, and the behaviour of Saudi tars all her immediate neighbours with the same brush. The other Gulf States have become more sensitive to Western criticism in recent years. Most have put a great deal of time, money and effort into upgrading their institutions and legal systems, though progress is painfully slow at times. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, remains deaf to both internal and external calls for reform.

Saudi Arabia practices the most overt, inhuman and unapologetic form of Apartheid on the face of the contemporary world. In comparison to Apartheid South Africa, the Saudi Kingdom has got off easy, with a fraction of the censure from the International Community very little of which has been official. It is time we started calling Saudi Arabia an Apartheid State and giving it the condemnation it deserves. I look forward to the intense reinvigoration of Anti-Apartheid movements with its ire directed at the Saudi State.

Sara is a journalist, art apprentice, and neo-decadent poet. Follow her on Twitter: @Sayde_Scarlett

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The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Conservatives for Liberty