Par For The Leftist Course: Welsh Nationalists Elect A Pro-Palestinian Firebrand As Party Leader

Listen Wales.
Here was a people whom even you could afford to despise,
Growing nothing, making nothing, 

Belonging nowhere, a people 

Whose sweat glands had atrophied, 

Who lived by their wits.

Who lived by playing the violin. 

A lot better incidentally 

Than you ever played the harp. 

And because they were such people 

They went like lambs to the slaughter.

But some survived - yes,listen closer now,

And these are a different people,

They have switched off Mendelssohn

And tuned into Maccabaeus.

The mountains are red with their blood,

The deserts are green with their seed.

Listen, Wales!

So wrote the well-known Welsh poet Harri Webb (1920-94).

But Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, is hardly distinguished for sympathy for Jews and Israel.

Take, for example, the attitude of Jill Evans MEP, who chaired the party from 1994-96, and is vice-president of the Green/European Free Alliance (EFA), and deputises on the parliamentary delegation for relations with the Palestine Legislative Council.

Her espousal of the Palestinian cause will be apparent from a glance here

In 2002, for example, she told a Palestine Solidarity Campaign rally in Cardiff:

"This demonstration is about justice: justice for Palestinian people. Their right to self-determination and to a Palestinian state. And justice for all those innocent people in the occupied territories who are killed and injured daily by brutal military oppression and aggression.

....There have been deliberate attacks on paramedics, emergency medical staff and patients in ambulances - in clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch has documented many breaches of international humanitarian law. There is such profound shock at the cruelty that Chris Patten, former Tory MP and current European Commissioner for External Relations [now Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, folks!], this week said that the Israeli policy of blockade & destruction was designed not to destroy terrorism but to destroy the Palestinian Authority....

We can't imagine the desperation of young men and women who turn themselves into human bombs because they see no other way of defending their families and communities....

Israel must withdraw immediately from the Palestinian territories as UN resolutions and many, many countries have called on them to do. Today, we in Wales call for this as well. They must be brought back to the negotiating table and work out a just and peaceful agreement and abide by it. I will continue to campaign for that as Plaid Cymru - The Party of Wales in the European Parliament, as we will in CND Cymru as part of an ever growing international network of movements working for peace, justice and human rights."

In 2006 she told a so-called Peace Vigil for the Middle East in Cardiff:

"In March this year I visited Lebanon with a delegation from CYTUN (the Christian churches in Wales).... 

The only hotel spaces taken up in Beirut now are by Lebanese families fleeing the Israeli onslaught in the south and foreigners awaiting evacuation.

The reaction of the international community has been shameful. Even Israel has been surprised by the lack of condemnation of their actions..... Deaths in Gaza continue, nearly unnoticed with four killed by an Israeli tank shell just this morning....

The Israeli actions have not just been 'disproportionate' or 'excessive'. They are getting away with murder. They are targeting innocent civilians and using the actions of a few in Hizbullah and Hamas as an excuse to punish the whole populations of Lebanon and Gaza. These are crimes against humanity. And the world is standing by."

Earlier this month, Leanne Wood, who once served as Jill Evans's political researcher, was elected Leader of Plaid Cymru.  She's a radical firebrand who wants Wales to become a socialist republic, and in 2004 was expelled from the Commons chamber for referring to the Queen as Mrs. Windsor and refusing to withdraw the discourteous remark:

"I don't recognise the Queen.

It is consistent with the position that I have held for a very long time. Last time I boycotted her visit.

I don't think I was treated fairly, I don't think it was necessary.

I called her that because that's her name."

Her far leftist credentials include membership of feminist and anti-war groups and, inevitably, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Elin Jones, a member of the Welsh Assembly whom she defeated in the leadership election, is also a supporter of the Palestinian cause.  It is par for the course in leftist circles in Wales.  And that goes for the Liberal Democrats too.

I've written about Wales before, in such posts as this.

Unfortunately, despite  a lingering streak of philosemitism of the kind evinced by Manchester-born Welshman David Lloyd George (pictured with Leopold Amery, framer of the Balfour Declaration) who famously said that he knew the names of the kings of Israel before he knew the names of the kings of his own country, and whose pro-Zionism was strengthened through his close friendship with his Welsh solicitor, Morris Wartski, there is a rampant anti-Zionist streak in Welsh political circles of the left, a rampant anti-Zionist streak to which the Anglican Church in Wales, as represented by its spiritual leader, Archbishop Dr Barry Morgan, is emphatically not immune.