Questions for Pat McFadden

The Labour Cabinet minister Pat McFadden was asked on Sky News about Israel's illegal invasion of Syria, and he replied that Israel was "making sure its position in the Golan is secure".  That's a rather startling line of argument, because the Golan Heights is not part of Israel - it's only controlled by Israel because of a previous illegal invasion of Syria during the Six Day War of 1967.  Almost every country in the world continues to recognise the Golan as an integral part of Syria, and the UK is no exception.  So McFadden seems to genuinely believe that the desire to make one illegally occupied part of Syria "secure for Israel" is a perfectly logical and reasonable excuse for illegally invading yet another part of Syria.

McFadden was then asked by Kay Burley whether the UK supported Israel's actions, and he replied "We will always support Israel's right to defend itself and make itself secure".  That's a very clear answer - he had already characterised Israel's invasion as an exercise in "making itself secure", and given that the UK will "always" support any such action, he is therefore inescapably saying that the UK supports Israel's illegal invasion of land that the UK regards as Syrian sovereign territory.

This raises a number of obvious questions - 

1) Given that the Labour leadership characterised 7th October as a Hamas invasion of Israel, and said that Israel had a right to "defend herself" against the invasion, does Syria also have a right to "defend herself" against the Israeli invasion?

2) If not, why not?  Is it because "invasions to feel secure" are in a different category from other types of invasions?  If so, who makes the certification?  Indeed, is it a self-certification process?  Did the invasion become acceptable simply because Israel put out a press release saying they were invading for security?  Isn't that pretty much what Russia did when it invaded Ukraine?

3) Does the Labour blank cheque of "always" supporting invasions to help secure previously conquered territory only apply to Israel, or can other countries benefit from this exciting opportunity?  

4) If it's an Israel-only thing, what can other countries do to become more like Israel and gain similar special privileges?  Perhaps they could install a fugitive from justice, wanted by the world's highest court for war crimes, as their head of government?  Hang on, doesn't that describe Russia again?

5) Come to think of it, if you were trying to work out whether a country's claim to have illegally invaded a neighbouring sovereign state "for security" was a cock-and-bull story or not, wouldn't you normally be inclined to be more sceptical rather than less sceptical if that country happened to be led by a wanted war criminal?

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The US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller is without doubt one of the most preposterous, grotesque figures of the modern age, but even he exceeded himself on the hypocrisy stakes by declaring that it would be good if the International Criminal Court took action against Assad, because the US supports the work of the ICC and it only ever had a dispute with them over "jurisdiction" on the question of the arrest warrant for Netanyahu.  Hmmm.  What Biden actually said about the Netanyahu warrant was that it was "outrageous", and that it implied there was moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, and that America would always stand with its beloved Bibi.  Yeah, that sounds very much like a minor technical quibble over jurisdiction.

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