BRITAIN LETTING DISTASTE FOR JEWISH STATE GET IN THE WAY OF NOT HAVING A NUCLEAR WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Priorities:

The British government has blocked almost one third of British military exports to Israel this year, citing possible threats to regional stability and fears the equipment might facilitate human rights violations. According to official figures, the value of UK military sales arms to Israel declined by one third last year, and has fallen by a drastic 75 percent since 2005... in May the UK's Legal Services Commission, the state agency that provides funding for attorney's fees for indigent defendants, agreed to underwrite the costs of litigation brought by a Palestinian man in a British court seeking a ban on arms sales to Israel.

The British government is paying for someone to sue the British government to stop arms sales to Israel. That, brothers and sisters, is some solid work right there.

Anyway, this "regional tensions" thing is not just an excuse, it's an excuse that's so transparently false that you begin to suspect that Britain wants people to know that it's intentionally setting itself in opposition to Israel. There's only one thing that anyone can be really sure of about the Middle East: every time that a hostile Arab state reaches military parity with Israel, they take it as an invitation to start a war. Say what you will about deterrence theory or Israeli aggression or Arab intransigence: as a matter of undeniable historical fact, military parity between Israel and its Arab enemies is correlated with acts of war against Israel that spiral outward. And of course, the other neat thing about weakening Israel's conventional arsenal is that it forces Jerusalem to rely more heavily on nuclear weapons, both in terms of actual warfighting (if they get overrun) and in terms of the threshold for the weapons' use (to prevent same). Well played, Britain, well played.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]