Undermining Seriousness

Back in late 2023, Keir Starmer said that Israel had the right to cut off water and power to Gaza (then later denied that this was what he meant, despite fairly clear evidence to the contrary). The Labour line since then has, for the most part, consistently avowed Israel’s right to defend itself, even as bombarding a captive population, pulverising hospitals and schools, and blocking humanitarian aid has looked like anything but defence. 

Lammy himself memorably lamented that while bombing a refugee camp was wrong, ‘it can be legally justified’. Furthermore, a year into what human rights organisations, legal scholars, and UN experts have called a genocide, he suggested that applying this term to Gaza ‘undermined the seriousness’ of the crime, claiming that there was a numerical threshold. There is not. In any case, the official number killed when he made this claim stood at 42,000; it is now over 53,000 and could be more than twice that, according to a recent report in The Economist.

It is worth noting that Lammy’s top-down stance on Gaza was neither inevitable nor necessary — and, crucially, it was often completely at odds with grassroots opinion on the Left. In this regard, his behaviour was very much in line with that of the Labour elite more generally. At the same time as Lammy was mounting the above arguments, Labour ignored popular opposition to the horror in the Middle East, from hundreds of thousands protesting in solidarity with Palestinians to polls regularly reflecting widespread support for a ceasefire and a full arms embargo. It also withstood the resignation of droves of its own councillors.

If outrage could not be mustered at the top of the party while opposition was so widespread throughout the Labour movement — and while Israel was bombing hospitals and schools in so-called ‘safe zones’, destroying every university in Gaza, and creating the mass graves of medics — why is it suddenly appropriate now? How has the calculus changed since Israel detonated the US-mediated ceasefire agreement and instituted a total humanitarian blockade? 

The threats from Israeli politicians to ‘purify’ Gaza have become increasingly brazen and unhinged, but there has been plenty of genocidal rhetoric since the first days following 7 October — as indeed there was beforehand. Perhaps Israel’s recent open discussion of its endgame in Gaza as a permanent occupation and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants finally crossed a line. Perhaps the UN’s warning last week that 14,000 babies could die of starvation was too much to bear. Perhaps, perceiving a cooling towards Israel by several EU states and even by Trump, who avoided stopping off during his Middle East tour, the Labour leadership did not want to be left behind.

Certainly, the British government’s about-face is coordinated with partners in Europe and elsewhere in mind. Lammy’s announcement that the UK would pause its trade negotiations with Israel was preceded by similar noises from the EU. Starmer issued a joint statement with Canada and France last week threatening Israel with ‘concrete action’ if it did not end its renewed offensive and allow aid in. But while the condemnation of Israel’s behaviour may be a watershed, the lack of concrete action to oppose the Israeli genocide is far more significant. Any serious response would include, at the very least, a full arms embargo, massive diplomatic pressure, and a refugee resettlement scheme for displaced Palestinians.

But perhaps more Machiavellian motivations are behind the continuing shifts and ambiguities in the Lammyite line on Israel. Pausing talks on a future trade deal leaves the UK’s existing trading relationship with Israel intact. As several backbenchers have noted, there is a logical chasm between the government’s newfound revulsion at Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its continued material support for those operations. While some arms export licences were suspended in September 2024, the three months that followed saw the sale of more military equipment than the total approved by the Tory government between 2020 and 2023. The UK has continued to supply 15 percent of the components to the global pool of F-35 fighter jets used to lethal effect in Gaza — a position defended in court only a few days before Lammy’s tub-thumping speech, essentially arguing that those exports trumped the duty to prevent genocide.

On the same day as the high court hearing, Maria Eagle, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, spoke at an event for Israel’s Independence Day — commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba Day — during which she celebrated the RAF’s surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. The government maintains that these flights, operating out of the RAF’s Cyprus base, are solely used for intelligence relating to the recovery of Israeli hostages, but it has rebuffed parliamentary inquiries into their exact purpose. Action on Armed Violence has reported at least 518 surveillance flights since December 2023, including 24 in the two weeks before Israel’s attack on Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024, which killed 274 Palestinians.

Under the Rubble

The vocabulary for what we have seen in Gaza has long since been exhausted, squeezed of its meaning under so much rubble. Similarly, attempts to describe the government’s performance as hypocrisy or gaslighting are unsatisfactory. Such accusations, in any case, have lost whatever weight they may have carried in another political era. As we are frequently told, we have become apathetic, desensitised, or hopeless in the face of so much untrammelled carnage.

And yet, on 17 May, half a million people marched in solidarity with Palestine. Young activists continue to risk harassment and arrest by directly attacking arms factories and other complicit sites. At a more parochial level, thousands are clamouring for their local councils to end investments in Israeli companies — and with some success. 

In Lammy’s own seat, the Labour-led local council has brushed off a local divestment campaign aimed at its pension fund, which invests £38 million in companies complicit in Israel’s genocide and occupation. In April, Haringey gained its first Green councillor in a by-election landslide that has been interpreted locally as a rebuke of Labour’s stance on Gaza and its ever-rightward drift. 

All of this is insufficient. But the simple fact that such tendencies have endured through nineteen months of live-streamed genocide is important. The government is clearly much more susceptible to pressure from Reform than from the Left or its own base. But it is not entirely impervious: it is doubtful that it would have shifted even symbolically without a groundswell of opposition from below. And that is something to build on.