This could be the slogan of either of the major parties in Britain as they vie for irrelevance in their Middle East policies, bemoans Lucy Towers Election fever is about to hit the UK. With the polls so close -- some put the difference as tight as six per cent between David Cameron's Conservative party and Brown's war weary government of 13 years, even the Liberal Democrats -- who rarely hover above 19 points in the polls -- are getting in on the action by making as much noise as possible about their role as kingmaker should the outcome of the count be a hung parliament. With Britain's current foreign policy on the Middle East doing nothing but flagging, the election should be a golden opportunity to change. No such luck. At a debate last week at Chatham House between the foreign affairs spokesmen from the three biggest parties the Arab-Israeli conflict got a brief look-in, Afghanistan was only alluded to and the lack of any mention of Iraq was an outrage. There is virtually no difference between the main parties on Israel and Palestine. "We are all in favour of a two-state solution in the Middle East," said William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, as the other two nodded in agreement. At this point each no doubt thought they had managed to put a tick firmly -- and non-controversially -- in the box of mentioning Israel and Palestine and that was the problem over and done with. As the architects of the Balfour declaration, which carved Palestine in two in 1917, Britain has a long standing interest in the conflict it did so much to help create. But after 13 years in power the Labour Party has made no progress towards a peace roadmap. When justifying the Iraq invasion to a speech to the House of Commons on 18 March 2003 the then PM Tony Blair stated that military intervention in Iraq would lead to "broader engagement" with, and more stability for the Palestinian problem. But then he has lied right from the word go about Iraq, so no surprise there. Britain rolled over when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flouted the peace roadmap by continuing to build homes on the West Bank, opposed in July 2006 a United Nations Security Council resolution for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire during the Israeli onslaught of Lebanon, refused to vote on the UN Human Right's Council's report criticising Israel's strategy of targeting and terrorising Gaza citizens in November 2008. And on and on. Actions such as these have done nothing to stave off the view that the Labour government's whole policy in the region is not only driven largely by a US-UK "alliance" but is flagrantly and unashamedly pro-Israel and pro-Zionist. "Zionism is pervasive in New Labour," boasted Jon Mendelsohn, former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, to the Jerusalem Post. To its credit, British media has taken some steps to expose this sad state of affairs. Channel 4's Dispatches "Inside Britain's Israeli Lobby" in 2009, Al-Jazeera's 2008 documentary From Balfour to Blair and the New Statesman issue on the Kosher Conspiracy have all concluded that Israel lobbyists do more harm than good for Israel-Palestine peace. Appointments, including the elevation of Lord Levy _ who the Jerusalem Post calls "the notional leader of British Jewry" -- from chief fundraiser for the Labour Party to special advisor for the Middle East in 1998 led one civil servant to quip, "Why bother with a foreign office at all?" Labour Friends of Israel "work within the Labour Party to promote the state of Israel." Since 2001 LFI has organised well over 60 free trips for MPs to Israel and, together with the Conservative Friends of Israel, accounts for 13 per cent of all funded trips for MPs. Perhaps the 80 per cent of Tories who are members are really after a junket to the Holy Land. In 2006 Hague also received a dressing down from Lord Kalms, former Treasurer of the Conservative Party and Conservative Friends of Israel, after he called Israel's use of force against Lebanon "disproportionate" and MP David Davis has also commented that the CFI should continue to play a significant role in policy development in the Conservative Party. By far the most vocal on the Arab-Israeli issue are the Liberal Democrats, but as the third party they are able to take more risks with their foreign policy. That said, Nick Clegg their leader has called on Gordon Brown to halt the sale of British arms to Israel, condemned Israel's rocket attacks, and called on the EU, Israel's biggest export market, to apply sanctions on Israel. The only flicker of light at the end of this tunnel is if the Liberal Democrats have the deciding vote in a hung parliament and show some backbone, though the Tories and Labour would be very unlikely to let Israel come between them on a vote of no-confidence. How long before such scandals as Mossad's use of forged British passports agents to assassinate the Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai finally wakes our politicians up to the fact they are playing with fire?
