Why Limiting Israel Arms Sales Doesn’t Absolve the UK

Each day the Labour government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a few – the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity, writes Jonathan Cook.

By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

The Guardian reported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.

By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then foreign secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. 

Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Several points need making about the information provided to The Guardian:

No. 1: The source says that the advice to Cameron on Israeli war crimes was “so obvious” it could not have been misunderstood by him or anyone else in the previous government. Given that the new Labour government has been similarly advised, forcing it to partially suspend arms sales, one conclusion only is possible: Cameron is complicit in Israel’s war crimes.

The International Criminal Court must immediately investigate him. Its British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, needs to issue an arrest warrant for Cameron as soon as possible. No ifs or buts.

No. 2: Now that it’s in government, Labour has a legal duty to make clear the timeline of the advice Cameron received — and who else received it — to help the ICC in its prosecution of the former foreign secretary and other British officials for complicity in Israel’s atrocities.

No. 3: The current furore being kicked up over Labour’s suspension of a tiny fraction of arm sales to Israel needs to be put firmly in context. David Lammy, Cameron’s successor, is keen to evade any risk of complicity charges himself. Leaders of the previous government are denouncing his decision on arms sales only because it exposes their own complicity in war crimes. Their outrage is desperate arse-covering — something the media ought to be highlighting but isn’t.

No. 4: Labour needs to explain why, according to the source, the advice it has published has apparently been watered down from the advice Cameron received. As a result, Lammy has suspended 30 of 350 arms contracts with Israel — or 8 percent of the total. He has avoided suspending the British components most likely to be assisting Israel in its war crimes: those used in Israel’s F-35 jets, made in the U.S.

Why? Because that would incur the full wrath of the Biden administration. He and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, dare not take on Washington.

In other words, Lammy’s decision has not only exposed the complicity of Cameron and the previous Tory leadership in Israeli war crimes. It also exposes Lammy and Starmer’s complicity. Put bluntly, following this week’s announcement, they are now 8 percent less complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity than Cameron and the Tories were.

There has been lots of fake indignation from Israel and its lobbyists, especially in Britain’s Jewish community, about how offensive it is that the government should announce its suspension of a small fraction of arms sales to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza the day six Israeli hostages were buried.

The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, for example, is incensed that the U.K. is limiting its arming of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, saying it “beggars belief.” He is thereby calling for the U.K. to trash international law, and ignore its own officials’ advice that Israel risks using British weapons to commit war crimes. He is demanding that the U.K. facilitate genocide.

The British Board of Deputies, which claims to represent British Jews, has retweeted Mirvis’ comment. The board’s president has been all over the airwaves similarly decrying Lammy’s decision.

Israel would, of course, have always found some reason to be appalled at the timing. There is an obviously far more important consideration than the bogus “sensitivities” of Israel and genocide apologists like Rabbi Mirvis. Each day the U.K. government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a small percentage – more Palestinians in Gaza die and the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But equally to the point: according to the rules Prime Minister Keir Starmer imposed on the Labour Party — that Britain’s Jewish leaders get to define what offends Jews and what amounts to anti-Semitism, especially on issues concerning Israel — the Labour government is now, judged by those standards, anti-Semitic. You can’t have one set of rules for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, and another for Starmer and the Labour right.

Or rather you can. That is precisely the game the entire British establishment has been playing for the past seven years. A game that has facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza even more than the sales of British weapons to Israel.

Many have dismissed the significance of recent rulings against Israel from the International Court of Justice — that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and that its decades of occupation are illegal and a form of apartheid — as well as moves from the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal.

Here we see how mistaken that approach is. Those legal decisions have set the two wings of the British establishment — the Tories and the Starmerite Labour right — at loggerheads. Both are now desperate in their different ways to distance themselves from charges of complicity.

The rulings have also opened up a potential rift with Washington. The State Department spokesman has been shown having to frantically justify why the U.S. is not banning its own arms sales.

Journalist Humeyra Pamuk questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on why the US has not followed the UK's decision to suspend arms sales to Israel over concerns about potential violations of international law. pic.twitter.com/mujwDyblgZ

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 4, 2024

Admittedly, these are only small fissures in the Western system of oligarchy. But those fissures are weaknesses — weaknesses that those who care about human rights, care about international law, care about stopping a genocide, and care about saving their own humanity can exploit.

We have few opportunities. We need to grasp every single one of them.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support. 

This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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