Alicia Kearns is ultra-ignorant about Israel

THAT was neat timing of Alicia Kearns, the Conservative chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, to declare that the UK should impose an arms embargo on Israel: the week marking the six-month anniversary of Hamas’s attempt to realise its stated ambition to murder as many Jews as it can.

In an effort to explain why this country ‘has no choice’ but to stop our — actually insignificant — arms sales, Kearns told the BBC that Israel has ‘the most ultra-Orthodox government of my lifetime’ (she is all of 36).

The implication was clear: it is the highly religious element within Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition which is somehow at the heart of what Kearns views as Israel’s militaristic excesses.

This is exactly the opposite of the truth. While the ultra-Orthodox parties, with 18 seats in the Knesset, are helping to preserve Netanyahu’s parliamentary majority, they are doing so only because he is maintaining the historic exemption they have from military service.

Indeed, there is increasing outrage within Israel at this special treatment for the Haredim (as they are called) and it might well bring down the government. Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that the ultra-Orthodox should lose their exemption from the draft, to which the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel retorted: ‘If you force us to go to the army, we’ll all move abroad.’

So why does Kearns make an explicit link between the ‘ultra-Orthodox’ — men who devote their lives entirely to the study of the Torah — and the Israeli army’s campaign in Gaza? I can’t believe the reason is anti-Semitism: it can only be ignorance. Not the quality one would wish at the helm of our parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee.