Tory MP Accuses Israel

Brazier’s comments were made in a letter to Communities Secretary Eric Pickles, which questioned rules on tendering by local authorities. Brazier expressed concern that Veolia, a French waste management company, who are tendering for Canterbury. The letter came as a small group of pro-Palestinian activists in Canterbury picketed a meeting of the city council over the proposed Veolia contract.

While claiming that he has “never taken part in any anti-Israeli boycott”, Brazier alleges that “Veolia have been intimately involved in highly illegal activities in the occupied territories”, for instance, “establishing and operating transport systems, which are both run on an apartheid basis, and make the settlement process even more irreversible than it is at the moment.” Veolia hold a stake in and help operate the Jerusalem Light Railway.

He stated that, due to his “particular interest” in Lebanon, he “can be in no doubt at all of the fury Israeli settlement activity is causing in all Israel’s neighbours (and the role it played in the sweeping electoral successes of the extremists in Egypt last autumn).”

He then referenced a lecture from Richard Holmes, who, before dying last year, was a top army academic, arguing, “that Israeli activity in the Occupied Territories was playing a major role in inciting the anger felt in Pakistan and Afghanistan and whipping up feeling against our troops.”

Brazier further claimed that Israel’s settlements are pushing Arab countries towards Iran, and that if “we have to go to war to keep the straits of Hormuz open, Israeli settlement activity will have made it much harder.”

In response to Brazier’s letter, the British Israel Coalition said: “While it seems rather unlikely that Egyptian protesters took down the Mubarak regime because of Israel’s military policy in Zone B of the West Bank (as opposed to the more reasonable explanation that they had no food, jobs or freedom under Mubarak); what is far more disgusting is the idea that Taliban fighters that murder little girls who desire an education, or attack British troops trying to defend Afghani freedoms, do so because of the Jewish desire to live as a free people in their own land in another part of the World.”

The British Israel Coalition is further calling on its supporters to write to Brazier directly, to challenge his “indisputably disgusting” claims.

Photo: Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk