Apparently Keir Starmer has finally found a conscience. Over the past 18 months, the British prime minister has consistently support Israel as it carries out a genocide: when Israel destroyed 90 per cent of the residential buildings in Gaza, when it bombed hospitals and healthcare workers, killed more journalists than every major conflict in the last 100 years combined, and massacred civilians, including an estimated 15,000 children, Starmer was apparently unmoved, rarely mustering any criticism stronger than urging both sides to respect international law. In fact, he has defended Israel’s war crimes, arguing at the very beginning of the war that it “has the right” to deprive Gaza’s civilian population of water and electricity. But Israel’s recent escalation of its blockade on Gaza – which, according to the UN, has placed 14,000 babies at risk of imminent death by starvation – has inspired a change of course. But how meaningful is Labour’s new approach really?
Last week, Starmer issued a joint statement with the French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, which called for an end to the “expansion” of Israel’s military offensive and for aid to be allowed to enter the Gaza Strip, and threatened further concrete action if these demands are not met. Speaking in the House of Commons on May 21, he condemned “the level of suffering of innocent children being bombed again” as “utterly intolerable”. The foreign secretary David Lammy, too, has described the blockade as “morally wrong” and “unjustifiable”, and Israel’s plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza as “repellent”, “dangerous” and “monstrous” – strong words for a man who has repeatedly downplayed or refused to condemn Israel’s war crimes, including the bombing of a refugee camp, and who in November 2023 abstained on a parliamentary vote calling for a ceasefire.
Alongside this shift in rhetoric, the British government has announced the suspension of free trade negotiations with Israel, and imposed sanctions on “three individuals, two illegal settler outposts and two organisations supporting violence against Palestinian communities in the West Bank”. There have been no sanctions imposed on the Israeli state itself, despite it being by far the most powerful organisation supporting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israeli settlers are not out on a limb: they enjoy the full backing of their government, which not only routinely fails to punish them for their crimes, up to and including murder, but provides them with weapons, funding and military protection. Israel’s ruling party, Likud, is determined to build further settlements in the West Bank, which – as a ruling by the International Court of Justice confirmed last year – is illegal under international law. There is no such thing as a lawful settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Still, Labour’s latest steps are better than nothing, and there is a degree of symbolic power in even suggesting there might be a limit to Israel’s longstanding impunity – Netanyahu himself, who denounced Starmer’s joint intervention, seems to think so. That the government is changing course at all is a testament to the impact of the Palestine movement, along with the fact that British public opinion is firmly in favour of a permanent ceasefire (79 per cent support it, just 4 per cent oppose), as it has been for well over a year. It comes alongside a noticeable shift in the rhetoric of the mainstream media, with several major newspapers, including the Independent and the Financial Times, calling on Israel to end the blockade.
But as a number of Palestinian-led groups have pointed out, including BDS and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Labour’s response is both long overdue and grossly inadequate while Britain continues to provide Israel with direct support. A recent report in Middle East Eye found that Labour has massively increased the amount of weapons and military technology being sent to Israel, and that $169m worth of military equipment – including aircraft, radars, targeting equipment and explosive devices – was approved for export after Labour introduced a partial arms embargo. David Lammy has been accused of misleading parliament about the extent and nature of these exports, after claiming they were “defensive in nature” and “not what we describe routinely as arms”.
Britain is not just enabling Israel’s genocide, it is an active participant. Its involvement goes much further than selling weapons: a report published by Declassified UK this March found that over 500 spy planes have been sent from Britain’s army base in Cyprus to Israel, where they conducted surveillance operations above Gaza (the government has claimed this has solely been for the purpose of hostage recovery). There have also been reports that the Israeli government has been allowed to use the same army base: when Labour MP Kim Johnson tabled a question about this in parliament last week, she was told that the government has blocked all questions on the use of military airbases. But Labour looks set to have a harder time in evading accountability. As enormous crowds continue to gather across Britain in solidarity with Palestine, political pressure around the issue is building: 65 signatories from nine different political parties and independent parliamentarians have signed an open letter demanding full transparency from the UK government on its research and decision-making about whether there is a “serious risk” of genocide in Gaza.
While the current situation in Gaza is as dire and desperate as it’s ever been, it is not qualitatively different from what Israel has been doing for the last 18 months: blocking aid from entering the strip and depriving Gaza’s population of basic necessities is by no means a new tactic. It is now over a year since the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel is committing genocide. As the BDS movement has argued, Labour’s latest measures fall “dangerously short” of meeting Britain’s obligations under the Genocide Convention, which holds that states are legally obliged to prevent and punish genocide immediately. Britain has not only failed in these obligations, it has been directly complicit in the worst atrocities of the 21st century.
David Lammy and Keir Starmer deserve no credit for feigning moral outrage at the inevitable consequences of their own actions, and if there is any justice in the world they will one day be held accountable for aiding and abetting crimes against humanity. For now, Palestinian-led organisations are calling on the British government to “cancel or suspend economic relationships, trade agreements and academic relations with Israel that may contribute to its unlawful presence and apartheid regime in the occupied territory” and to finally impose a full arms embargo on Israel.