"This house believes that Israel is a rogue state" was the motion in a debate at the hallowed Cambridge Union on 21 October, that has become famous for all the wrong reasons.
The debate was supposed to consist of three speakers for and three against the motion. That is, before it was cleverly hijacked in the best English debating tradition.
Lauren Booth - the high-profile step-sister-in-law of Tony Blair, who famously converted to Islam and described the Gaza Strip as "the largest concentration camp in the world today" - proposed the motion. So far so good. The trouble started with the third speaker for the motion, a 19-year-old Canadian student called Gabriel Latner.
As Latner rose to make his speech in favour of the motion, he turned to Booth (his supposed colleague) and surprised her by saying "I'm going to nail you to the f*cking wall up there" - and then proceeded to do just that, with a brilliant speech that turned the motion on its head.
Apparently, up until he started speaking, no-one had realised that he intended to speak FOR Israel.
"I will not be arguing that Israel is ‘bad’... I will only be arguing that Israel is ‘rogue’."The content of his speech deserves to be read in full, and you can do that by clicking here. Basically, he began by examining the definition of the word "rogue" in the sense of "anomolous" and "other", and then pointed out several ways in which Israel is indeed these things - to its credit.
For example, Israel's treatment of the Darfur refugees is unusual - therefore rogueish - compared with that of other countries:
The IDF sends out soldiers and medics to patrol the Egyptian border. They are sent looking for refugees attempting to cross into Israel. Not to send them back into Egypt, but to save them from dehydration, heat exhaustion, and Egyptian bullets. Compare that to the US’s reaction to illegal immigration across their border with Mexico...
"Consider for a moment," he said, pointing to Ran Guidor, a representative of the Israeli Ambassador, and one of the three speakers opposing the motion:
Incredibly (given the anti-Israel climate in British academia generally), the motion (in its Boothian sense) was defeated; but had it passed that might have been an even greater victory for Latner, with nobody being quite sure in what sense it had been passed!The Israeli government has signed off to allow one of their senior diplomatic representatives to participate in a debate on their very legitimacy. That’s remarkable. Do you think for a minute, that any other country would do the same?
If the Yale University Debating Society were to have a debate where the motion was ‘This house believes Britain is a racist, totalitarian state that has done irrevocable harm to the peoples of the world’, that Britain would allow any of its officials to participate? No. Would China participate in a debate about the status of Taiwan? Never. And there is no chance in hell that an American government official would ever be permitted to argue in a debate concerning its treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
But Israel has sent Mr Ran Gidor to argue tonight against [a 'journalist' come reality TV star, and myself,] a 19 year old law student who is entirely unqualified to speak on the issue at hand.
...and then unfortunately, there was the business of that rather unsavoury comment to be dealt with - not quite cricket, eh, what? "But surely," I hear you objecting, "What is an F-word between adults in 2010?"
Well, amazing as it may seem, Booth complained (I'm sure it was not sour grapes but genuine indignation at the F word) and Latner was duly expelled from the Cambridge Union for life [!!!] for swearing at a lady (and declining to apologise).
But apart from that unfortunate lapse in clear thinking, I say "Jolly good show Latner - eh, what?"
