Last week, in advance of a debate on UK trade, the Trade Union Congress emailed Labour MPs to announce its opposition to new trade deals between Britain and countries they say are “systematically abusing human rights”.
Can you guess which country they were campaigning against?
It certainly wasn’t the Cuban dictatorship, where protests are banned, dissidents arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned and people who trying to set up independent trade unions locked up. The TUC campaigns for “solidarity” with Cuba.
And, of course, last week’s email wasn’t about Putin’s brutal regime in Russia, China’s crimes against the Uighurs or Iranian repression either.
As usual, it was about Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy and pretty much the only country in the region with a history of independent and vibrant trade unions.
What on earth is the organisation that is supposed to promote the interests of British workers doing opposing a trade deal that would create thousands of good, well-paid jobs for British, Israeli and Palestinian working people?
Trade with Israel is already worth billions to Britain. Hundreds of businesses and thousands of jobs depend on Israeli trade and investment. It provides employment in hi-tech sectors like science, technology and defence. Cars and taxis manufactured by British trade unionists are exported to Israel. Workers at Rolls Royce are building the engines for El Al’s new fleet of Dreamliner aircraft. We export clothes and cars, power generators, medical equipment, scientific instruments and pharmaceutical products.
One in seven of the drugs dispensed by the NHS comes from Israel. Israeli IT and computer software are used by businesses and households across the country. University partnerships are working on life-saving technologies and treatments.
A new trade deal will build on all of this and produce more jobs and great benefits for workers in both countries, especially in sectors like financial services, infrastructure and technology.
And as the Britain Israel Trade Union Dialogue director Steve Scott argues, the TUC should be encouraging cooperation between the Histadrut in Israel and the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions. That work has brought real benefits in pay and conditions for workers in Israel and Palestine, as well as bringing them closer together and building the closer ties, collaboration and dialogue which anyone who wants to see a peaceful settlement to the conflict should support.
Opposing trade and investment in Israel and Palestine has the complete opposite effect: not just driving people apart but putting investment at risk and putting people – including poor Palestinians who desperately need decent jobs – out of work.
Instead of promoting trade and investment to create jobs, bringing people together and creating the foundations on which a peace process can be built, so many on the left seem to single out Israel and hold it to standards never applied to countries with truly appalling records on human rights.
It is another example of the poisonous debate about Israel on the left, a debate which is now much, much worse after Jeremy Corbyn’s terrible leadership of the Labour Party. Too many are now obsessed with this tiny country and willing to believe any half-truths, distortions and downright lies spread in attacks about the Middle East’s only Jewish state.
Wholesale cultural change is needed for the left to break free from this obsession and to judge Israel the way any other country is judged. Until that happens, the left will remain at odds with the spirit of the fair-minded British public who believe this obsession with Israel is, at best, unfair and at worst rather sinister in its motives.