Lammy's lamentable libels
There's a symbiotic relationship between Muslims against Israel and Labour supporters against Israel
Almost at the very moment yesterday that Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the six Israeli hostages murdered by Hamas last week, was being buried in a deeply traumatised and anguished Israel, the British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, announced a partial arms embargo against the Jewish state.
The day after the IDF had discovered in a Gaza tunnel the bodies of the six hostages, all of whom had been shot in the back of the head at close range by Hamas, Lammy told the House of Commons that Britain was suspending 30 out of 350 arms export licences to Israel, including components for military aircraft, helicopters and drones.
He told MPs that a two-month review had found a “clear risk” that UK arms might be used in serious violation of international humanitarian law.
This was absolute rubbish. There is no such risk and the government knows it. It was choosing to defame and punish Israel, at a time of epidemic antisemitism and anti-Israel derangement, in order to feed the ravenous hatred of Israel that consumes a high proportion of Labour MPs and party supporters as well as Labour's steadily increasing Muslim constituency.
This despicable move was made even more nauseating by the hand-on-heart protestations of unwavering support for Israel that accompanied it. Lammy and the Foreign Office said the UK backed Israel’s right to defend itself, claimed the embargo wouldn’t compromise Israel’s security and said it wouldn’t change the UK’s “steadfast support” for the Jewish state.
Today, after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the British embargo as “shameful” and said it would “embolden Hamas”, Downing Street refused to accept that the decision would damage diplomatic relations with Israel.
Who do they think they’re fooling? They’ve thrown Israel under the bus at the moment that it’s fighting for its life under a seven-front genocidal onslaught from Iran and its proxies. The British punished Israel for defending itself on the very day it was burying its war dead.
The Defence Secretary, John Healey, said the UK remained “a staunch ally of Israel” but that the British government had a “duty to the rule of law”. But Israel isn’t breaking any law. Nor does the British government say it is. It says merely there’s a “serious risk” that it might.
But there’s no evidence to back that either. It’s an entirely tendentious assertion by the Foreign Office, which has drawn overwhelmingly on malicious falsehoods produced by the Hamas-linked UN and NGOs that lie reflexively about Israel as part of a global strategy to bring about its destruction.
The Foreign Office summary of its decision making process says:
The assessment process gathers information from a wide range of sources, including: reporting from NGOs on the ground; reports from other FCDO desks and from Posts; reporting in the media; statements from the UN, NGOs and other organisations; and reporting from HMG engagement with Israeli counterparts. The process also draws on a log of military incidents (such as air strikes or ground operations) and statements by political actors, which is prepared on a regular basis. This information is analysed to focus on incidents in Gaza for which there is credible information and/or reliable evidence, and broader thematic issues of particular concern.
But it’s not credible at all. It is instead a disgraceful farrago of Hamas-sourced propaganda. Just look at this statement by Lammy. He said:
Israel’s actions in Gaza continue to lead to immense loss of civilian life, widespread destruction to civilian infrastructure, and immense suffering.
This is drivel. The Hamas numbers of civilians killed in Gaza are wildly inflated and indeed ludicrous, since they acknowledge not one terrorist among the total. Even if the overall numbers are correct, given the number of terrorists who Israel says it has killed in this war the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in Gaza is unprecedentedly low and a fraction of the number of civilians killed in British and American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is indeed immense destruction and suffering in Gaza. But that’s the fault of Hamas, which sited its entire apparatus of genocidal warfare among Gaza’s civilian population, used those civilians as cannon fodder and human shields and constructed hundreds of miles of tunnels to house its terrorist infrastructure while constructing not one civilian shelter. Yet the Foreign Office ignores all that and blames Israel — the intended target and victim of these Hamas war crimes — instead.
Just how wicked is this?
The impact on Israel’s military capabilities will indeed be minimal. Israel buys relatively few weapons from Britain, which buys far more weapons from Israel. Given the incalculable benefits Britain also derives from Israeli intelligence and military expertise — the very expertise the British government has now besmirched by recycling Hamas-derived lies and distortions — Britain has far more to lose than Israel from a cooling of this relationship.
The arms embargo is but the latest in a series of deeply hostile moves against Israel by the new Labour government. It restored funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency, despite the evidence of this body’s overwhelming ties to Hamas.
The British government also supported the request by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defence minster Yoav Gallant. Lammy even threatened that, if such warrants were issued and the two came to Britain, the UK would indeed arrest them. This despite the fact that, as several international lawyers have argued, just about every argument Khan used was wrong, unfounded and drawn from sources deeply hostile to Israel. Khan’s submission was deeply disreputable since it owed everything to politics and nothing to law.
The Foreign Office has always been institutionally, virulently hostile to the Jewish state. Now its innate bigotry is running rampant and unchecked under a Labour administration that dances to a similar tune.
People assume this is because Labour is running scared of losing the increasingly powerful Muslim vote. At the general election in July, no fewer than five constituencies previously held by Labour MPs were snatched by independents running on a pro-Gaza ticket. The five were the hard-left former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (who was thrown out of the Labour party) and four Muslims: Shockat Adam, Ayoub Khan, Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed.
Hard on the heels of Lammy’s arms embargo announcement yesterday, these five independent pro-Gaza MPs announced they were forming an “official” parliamentary alliance to campaign for left-wing causes including ending arms sales to Israel. The group will have the same number of MPs as Reform UK and the Democratic Unionist party, which each have five MPs, and more than the Green party and Plaid Cymru, which each have four.
Sectarian anti-Israel politics is already poisoning parliamentary proceedings. Click here to watch what happened in the Commons yesterday when a Northern Ireland Democratic Unionist MP, Sammy Wilson, denounced Lammy’s arms embargo on the grounds that “the only beneficiaries would be Hamas terrorists”. On the bench immediately behind him, one of the pro-Gaza MPs, Iqbal Mohamed, started heckling with exclamations of “Shame! Shame! 40,000 dead !” The cradle of democracy is now being rocked to the sound of Hamas propaganda.
The symbiotic relationship between Muslims against Israel and Labour supporters against Israel is illustrated by the story of what happened when Jess Phillips, the government minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls (sic), sought urgent treatment in the emergency department of a Birmingham hospital. The Mail reported:
She was greeted by scenes of appalling overcrowding. “I have genuinely seen better facilities, health facilities, in war zones, in developing countries around the world,” the minister continued. Nevertheless, eventually she got to the front of the queue.
But this, she said, was “undoubtedly” for two reasons only. “I got through because of who I am. Also the doctor who saw me was Palestinian, as it turns out. Almost all the doctors in Birmingham seemed to be.”
While in opposition, Phillips resigned from Labour's front bench to vote in favour of a ceasefire in Gaza five weeks after Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis — many of whom were mutilated or raped — and took another 120 hostage.
Her vote, she said, was the other reason that she received preferential treatment. “He was sort of like, ‘I like you. You voted for a ceasefire’. [Because of that] I got through quicker.”
Far from reflecting on how MPs who voted against a ceasefire — still less a Jewish citizen — might have fared, Phillips, whose majority at the last election plummeted from 10,659 to just 693, with George Galloway's Workers’ Party in second place, continued her account of her treatment. She declines the opportunity to comment further.
One might have thought a doctor who discriminated against other sick patients because he shared the political views of one of the patients would be disciplined. Not under rule by today’s Labour party where those particular views are de rigeur. Phillips herself — a zealot for equality — seemed quite satisfied that she had jumped the queue as the result of a shared noble cause: hatred of Israel.
In response to the government’s arms embargo against Israel, Jewish community leaders have expressed dismay and concern. The Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said the move “beggars belief”, that it would “serve to encourage our shared enemies” and would “not help to secure the release of the remaining 101 hostages’ held in Gaza”. The president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, said the decision risked sending a dangerous message to Hamas and other adversaries of the UK and he called for the decision to be “reviewed at the earliest opportunity”.
Yet when Sir Keir Starmer, as leader of the opposition, declared that he had rid the Labour party of Corbynista antisemitism and made it safe for Jews to support it again, British Jews flocked to do so. Their leaders fawned over Starmer’s achievement. The day after he became prime minister, Rosenberg congratulated him on a “historic” victory. He gushed:
Nobody in the Jewish community will forget the state the Labour Party was in when Keir took it over in 2020, riddled with antisemitism and – frankly – unfit to govern. The fact that the incoming Prime Minister has changed the party so profoundly, transforming Labour’s fortunes from seismic defeat to a landslide victory, is an enormous testament to his personal strength, determination and political courage.
I took a different view. The week before July’s general election, I wrote in the Jewish Chronicle:
The question about a Starmer government is not whether it will be bad for the Jews. The only question is how bad.
Now we know.