The U.K. government announced this week that it would suspend free trade talks with Israel, as Foreign Minister David Lammy condemned in Parliament the “monstrous” situation in Gaza.
Three illegal settlers in the West Bank were also sanctioned by the Foreign Office. Those included Daniella Weiss, the settler leader who featured in Louis Theroux’s recent BBC documentary The Settlers.
“I find this deeply painful as a lifelong friend of Israel and a believer in the values expressed in its declaration of independence,” Lammy declared in the Commons.
The first signs of a shift in the U.K. government’s tone came on Monday night, when Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a joint statement on the Middle East.
“We strongly oppose the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza. The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable. Yesterday’s announcement that Israel will allow a basic quantity of food into Gaza is wholly inadequate,” they declared.
The immediate background to these developments was the escalation in Israel’s bombardment, siege, and starvation of Gaza, with the United Nations warning on Tuesday that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours if aid did not reach them in time.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to pre-empt international condemnation over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza by allowing a minuscule amount of aid into the strip.
“We’re going to take control of all the Gaza strip”, he announced on Monday. “Our best friends in the world — [U.S.] senators I know as strong supporters of Israel — have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge”.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich went even further, declaring the same day that humanitarian aid was only being allowed into Gaza “so the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.” The goal, he added, was to “conquer, clear, and stay” in Gaza.
Still Complicit
The official calls for a final solution in Gaza, it seems, prompted the U.K. government to attempt to put some daylight between itself and the Netanyahu regime.
But reading beyond the headlines, it’s clear that Starmer and Lammy are very much as complicit in the Gaza genocide as they were last week.
While the U.K.-Israel Free Trade Agreement negotiations have been ongoing since 2022, there seemed little prospect of them concluding any time soon.
Indeed, Israel’s Foreign Ministry even said on Tuesday that “the free trade agreement negotiations were not being advanced at all by the current UK government.”
The Labour government has thus paused negotiations on a potential future deal, while pre-existing trade agreements with Israel remain in place, and the “2030 roadmap for U.K.-Israel bilateral relations” has merely been put under “review.”
“There are elements of that road map, particularly as they pertain to security issues and the work we do jointly on Iran, that would not be right to suspend, but we are reviewing it,” Lammy said.
Military Collaboration
Which brings us to Britain’s ongoing military collaboration with Israel.
The joint work on Iran that Lammy mentioned presumably refers to Project HEZUK, a secret defence agreement between Britain and Israel which is designed to counter “the destabilising regional activity of Iran and Hizballah.”
Project HEZUK would achieve this, according to leaked Israeli documents, by strengthening U.K.-Israeli intelligence collaboration and increasing military cooperation, with the effect of deepening bilateral security integration.
Then there’s the spy flights.
Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) informed Declassified this week that the Royal Air Force (RAF) would continue to send surveillance planes over Gaza to collect intelligence for Israel.
The same evening, around four hours after Lammy’s announcement, a spy flight took off from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and spent around five hours collecting footage over Gaza.
The MoD’s press office declined to make ministers or senior officials available for an interview about this policy.
And then there’s the sale of arms.
Last week, it was revealed that the Labour government had licensed exports of more military equipment to Israel than the Tories did for all of 2020-2023 combined.
These figures, downplayed by Lammy in Parliament as “clickbait,” were drawn from the government’s own strategic arms export data.
Lammy has also ruled out stopping exports of F-35 parts to global pools which supply Israel, despite those fighter jets being directly linked to war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
The U.K. government’s lawyers argued in court last week that there was no evidence that Israel was targeting women and children or committing genocide so that it could continue to supply F-35 components to global pools used by Israel.
Paradoxically, they also claimed that while the U.K. government has a “duty to prevent genocide,” a determination that this duty has been violated “cannot be made until genocide actually occurs,” the facts of which can only be determined by the “competent court”.
Since it may take years for the “competent court” to adjudicate on Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.K. government has thus effectively relieved itself of any obligation to “prevent genocide” in the here and now.
Sanctions
Lammy also condemned Smotrich’s plans for “cleansing” and “destroying what’s left” of Gaza as “extremism,” “dangerous,” “repellant” and even “monstrous.” He added that the Israeli finance minister’s statements indicated “we are now entering a dark new phase in this conflict.”
Yet in court last week, the Labour government’s lawyers argued that Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir “have limited influence” over the Israeli government and their words therefore “did not reflect the strategy of the decision makers within the War Cabinet.”
Either Smotrich’s statements are reflective of Israeli policy, or they are not. The U.K. government cannot have it both ways.
Lammy’s apparent revulsion at Smotrich’s rhetoric only emphasises the Labour government’s failure to impose any meaningful sanctions on Israeli officials.
Former U.K. Foreign Secretary David Cameron admitted last year that the Tory government had been “working up” plans to sanction Smotrich and Ben Gvir, describing them as “extremist.”
What happened to those plans under Labour?
Ceasefire
Labour’s top brass could have called for a ceasefire in Gaza and meaningful sanctions on Israel at any point during this genocide – but it chose not to.
On Oct, 31, 2023, as leader of the opposition, Starmer told Chatham House that he did not believe a ceasefire was the “correct position” because hostages would still “be held” in Gaza and Hamas would be left “with the infrastructure and the capability to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October 7th.”
Weeks later, the Labour Party whipped MPs to abstain on a crucial ceasefire motion brought by the Scottish National Party, with Starmer admitting that he had privately spoken with Israeli President Isaac Herzog about the issue.
Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now dead, and the Labour government is belatedly conceding, with apparently zero introspection, that its approach was a disaster and played firmly into Netanyahu’s hands.
“Israel’s plan is morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate and utterly counterproductive, and whatever Israeli ministers claim, it is not the way to bring the hostages safely home,” Lammy told parliament on Tuesday.
“Nearly all the hostages have been freed through negotiations, not military force,” he admitted, undermining the MoD’s own rationale for spy flights, adding that Israel’s military plan “will not eliminate Hamas or make Israel secure either.”
The Labour government’s suspension of trade talks with Israel is too little too late. If international law is to mean anything, Starmer and Lammy should be tried in The Hague.
Source: Consortium News.
