“Britain has imposed a de facto arms embargo on Israel for the first time in 20 years, official sources have told the Guardian. The ban applies to military equipment that could be used in Israel’s continuing operations in the Palestinian territories,” the Guardian cheerfully reports.

The sources insist Britain has not imposed a formal or complete ban and Whitehall officials are coy about discussing which sales have been blocked. Decisions, they say, are being taken on a case-by-case basis. However, they add that military equipment that would have been cleared before Israel’s offensive against the Palestinians, is now being blocked.

One Whitehall official pointed to the government’s guidelines which state that arms exports would be blocked if they were for ‘internal repression’, affected ‘adversely regional stability in any significant way’, or if there was a clear risk ‘that the intended recipient would use the proposed export aggressively against another country, or to assert by force a territorial claim’.

Of course, Britain has placed no such restrictions on exports of its own pro-Palestinian Arab population, who — should any one of them wish to visit an Israeli pizza parlour or crash a bat-mitzvah wrapped in Semtex — are free to do so.

—–