Well, I know which company I won’t be buying electricity from this year.
I’m quite keen to switch to a green energy company and support investment in renewable technologies. But I crossed Ecotricity off my list after the company’s owner, Dale Vince, blundered into the debate about the Middle East last week.
Mr Vince is also the chairman of League Two football club Forest Green Rovers and said the Palestinian flag was flown at their stadium because the “conflict there has all the same ingredients as the one in Ukraine”.
“I think the things that are getting people exercised about Ukraine… the destruction of homes and of hospitals, the murder of civilians, the sieges of cities, all of those things — and this is what I’ve said — those ingredients exist in Palestine and they have done for decades,” he said.
No one says the Israel-Palestine conflict is not important, but it is a disgrace to compare it to the appalling situation unfolding in Ukraine.
Why is not possible to support the poor people of Ukraine without having to make the debate about Israel?
With 200 land-based conflicts going on around the world, why single out this one? Why are flags not flown at his club for the 4,000 Palestinians butchered by Assad in Syria or the poor people of Yemen?
Mr Vince, a Labour Party member who says he wants to go into politics, explains his view: “What happens when anybody speaks out for the Palestinians, which is they get accused of being antisemitic,” he said. “And these things are not the same. It’s possible to be against what the Israeli government is doing without being against the Israeli people. And without being against Jews more generally. It’s not antisemitic to say what’s happening in Palestine is wrong. It’s a crime against humanity.”
Of course it is possible to speak up for the Palestinians without being antisemitic. I have campaigned for a Palestinian state for decades and I know plenty of Israelis and members of the Jewish community in the UK who speak up on this issue without indulging in anti-Jewish racism.
The last few years — particularly after Jeremy Corbyn’s period in charge of the Labour Party — have left large parts of the British left obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
As a result, so many on the left single Israel out, compare its actions to every atrocity anywhere else in the world, hold it to standards never applied to other countries, and accuse it of things which are plainly not true — when they clearly know next to nothing about the conflict.
Look at the invasion of Ukraine. Putin is a gangster who has made himself one of the world’s richest people by looting the Russian economy and leaving its citizens in penury. He routinely murders his opponents at home and abroad using, for example, biological weapons on the streets of Britain.
He invaded Ukraine on a pretext, launched indiscriminate artillery attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities, reducing them to rubble and killing thousands of civilians. His troops, some of them paid mercenaries, have murdered innocent civilians, raped women and children and looted their homes.
How dare people compare the brutal carnage in Ukraine to Israel and Palestine?
The only indiscriminate bombs and rockets in that conflict are the ones fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza by Hamas and other terrorist groups. When, as in last year’s conflict, Israel is forced to take action to prevent these attacks, it takes great care to avoid civilian casualties, targeting Hamas facilities and the places they use to fire their rockets. Residents are warned beforehand.
And why does Israel get all the blame and Hamas a completely free pass? If Hamas stopped attacking Israeli civilians, the conflict would end. But people like Mr Vince need to understand that Hamas is not interested in a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel. It is an Isis-style terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction and the murder of the Jews who live there.
