Keir Starmer ignores election anger over Palestine at his peril
What do the first two weeks of a Labour government tell us about how Keir Starmer intends to run Britain's foreign policy?
Before the election, David Lammy, then shadow foreign secretary, laid out his vision of Britain’s role on the international stage.
Lammy hoisted the flag of "progressive realism" by which he meant "the pursuit of ideals without delusions about what is achievable".
What progressive ideals have Starmer and Lammy pursued "realistically"?
The government started brightly with a leak to The Guardian that the UK would drop its legal objection to the International Criminal Court (ICC) application for arrest warrants targeting Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in Gaza.
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This move was coupled with appointing Richard Hermer as attorney general. Hermer is one of the lawyers who signed a letter in May 2023 calling for the former foreign secretary, James Cleverly, to participate in the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about the legal consequences of Israel’s actions in the occupied territories and Jerusalem.
These moves boded well.
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The previous Tory government had contested the ICC’s jurisdiction over Israel though the issue had been exhaustively examined by the court for nine long years before it decided in 2021 that it had jurisdiction.
Cast your mind back to a statement Lammy made to parliament when the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, backtracked on that policy by saying it was not for the British government to state whether the ICC had jurisdiction or not.
"Labour has been clear throughout this conflict that international law must be upheld, that the independence of international courts must be respected, and that all sides must be accountable. Israel must now comply with the orders in the ICJ ruling in full," Lammy told parliament.
Now that the Labour Party is in power, will Starmer and Lammy respect international courts?
Optimism was short-lived.
First moral test
Within days, the distinguished human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson - who gave Starmer his first job as a lawyer - revealed that Washington was putting pressure on Starmer to back down. The issue would be the "first big moral test" of Starmer’s premiership, Robertson wrote pessimistically.
Last week, Starmer and Lammy flew to the US for the Nato summit. Others might say for instructions. Washington doubled down, saying it would pursue its own objection that the ICC had no jurisdiction over Israel.
Lammy’s next trip was to Israel, where he astonished many by shaking hands with Netanyahu, one of the men accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan.
The timing of Lammy’s handshake could not have been worse.
The meeting took place just hours after Netanyahu had authorised an air strike on al-Mawasi in Khan Younis which had previously been designated a safe zone. Over 90 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded.
Netanyahu waited until 9pm that night for proof that the strike had killed its alleged target, Mohamed Deif, the leader of Hamas’ military wing, but none came.
Even by the measure of nine months of repeated massacres of civilians in Gaza, this air strike marked a new low in depravity, and showed contempt for the ICC and the International Court of Justice which had already warned Israel to stick to its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
Not one word - that I can find - came from Lammy’s lips about al-Mawasi massacre, despite the fact that his prime minister had swiftly reacted to the Russian strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv in the same week.
A day after Lammy’s meeting with Netanyahu, the well-sourced Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that the British foreign secretary had given Israel assurances that the UK will maintain its objection to the application that was initially raised by the Conservative government.
The Foreign Office denied that any decision had been taken.
Cowardice not realism
Is their silence on al-Mawasi massacre, their apparent bowing to pressure from the US and Israel over the ICC - is this what Starmer and Lammy call realism?
I have another word for it: cowardice.
It is no surprise that Starmer is following the path every British government has trod in this conflict. But it is a surprise to find him doing so in these extraordinary times.
It is no surprise that Starmer is following the path every British government has trod in this conflict. But it is a surprise to find him doing so in these extraordinary times
Never before has Israel launched a war in Gaza that has lasted nine months. Never before has up to 40,000 people been killed directly, and possibly three times as many indirectly, as the Lancet medical journal reported this month. Never before has Israel been in the dock of two of the highest international courts.
Supplying arms to Israel in any circumstance is questionable. Doing so in these circumstances could well amount to complicity in war crimes and genocide.
Exhibit number two is the expectation that Lammy will restore Britain’s £35m ($45m) of funding to Unrwa.
This was cut off precipitously, and without due diligence, after Israel claimed that Unrwa members participated in the 7 October attack and that up to 10 percent of its staff in Gaza were members of Hamas - Israel offered no evidence to either claim, not even to Unrwa.
Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) has backed the move to restore funding with an important caveat; it is campaigning to change Unrwa’s mandate.
The group says Unrwa perpetuates an "unreasonable expectation" that most Palestinian refugees could return to Israel, as opposed to a future Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
"In the medium-term, therefore, the UK should work at the UN with our allies to establish a framework that considers UNRWA as "transitory". This should put in place a firm process which leads to UNRWA’s resources and services mandate being transferred to a revitalised Palestinian Authority and, in other cases, to the UNHCR."
This is the core of what Netanyahu wanted to achieve all along. His purpose in wanting to make Unrwa disappear had nothing to do with fighting Hamas.
What can be more cynical than continuing a policy you know can never be enacted by any Israeli leader?
Unrwa is the only UN agency that recognises Palestinian refugees and their descendants. No Unrwa, no refugee problem, to borrow a phrase from Stalin.
Should Britain, which is historically responsible for the first major Palestinian refugee crisis in 1948, known as the Nakba, follow Israel down this path? It will do so at its peril, in the Middle East and at home.
LFI argued, speciously, that getting rid of Unrwa and transferring its schools and teachers to the Palestinian Authority (PA) would boost the PA and a future Palestinian state.
This is the height of cynicism, for as Starmer was promising in the King's Speech that his government would dedicate itself to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one, the Knesset threw out the two-state solution - by an overwhelming majority.
Among those who voted to throw it out was Benny Gantz, on whom Starmer and Biden place such hope. What can be more cynical than continuing a policy you know can never be enacted by any Israeli leader?
A vilification campaign
Exhibit number three in this charge sheet is yet more damning.
It concerns the Labour Party’s reaction to the clear rejection it received from the Muslim community in Britain, which before Israel’s war on Gaza, used to be its biggest block vote.
A political party can have one of two reactions to constituents who decide not to vote for it. It can either acknowledge that it is their right to protest, that this is the only way they can register their dissatisfaction with their MP’s performance, and that it's democracy in action which the party can learn from. It can then approach members of this community and engage with them.
Or it can ignore this community and turn to other voters like disaffected Tories.
Those are the only two options if, as the Labour party claims, it believes in democracy.
What the Labour Party can not do is seek to criminalise and de-legitimise that protest vote by saying the vote against sitting Labour MPs was the work of intimidation, and that it was a "toxic" campaign to bully ordinary voters into rejecting their sitting MP.
What the party can not do is appoint fake Muslim councils to talk on behalf of a community that had no say in choosing them. Because, if Labour goes down that authoritarian path, the anger and disaffection in that community will grow exponentially, with all the consequences that this entails.
This is the course that John Ashworth, Rupa Haq, Lisa Nandy, Wes Streeting, Jess Phillips and Khaled Mahmood have all apparently set themselves on.
There appears to be a coordinated campaign, because all of these Labour MPs and former MPs are saying the same thing at the same time.
The home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is now convening a "Defending Democracy Taskforce" to discuss election intimidation. The Home Office will conduct a "rapid" review of the election campaign and the police are looking at "a number of incidents".
I always thought of Cooper as a decent and thoughtful person, not a clone of the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
The loudest of the voices crying foul is Ashworth. He claimed he was toppled on a "lie" that he had blood on his hands for voting against a ceasefire in Gaza for much of the last nine months.
The evidence: a filmed dispute in which activist Majid Freeman confronted the Labour politician for his purported support for Israel on Gaza and accused him of having blood on his hands.
Freeman was later charged with encouragement of terrorism and supporting a proscribed organisation.
Ashworth then claimed in a post on X that Freeman was a "key campaigner for [Leicester South’s] new MP Shockat Adam". Ashworth deleted the post, after receiving a warning from lawyers acting on behalf of Adam.
A lesson in democracy
This is not a good start to an official campaign of vilification and demonisation of voters who dared not to vote for Labour as a government.
Voters, Muslim or otherwise, have every right to vote out of office MPs who don’t represent them on an issue as crucial as this. MPs had styled this brutal military campaign as "Israel’s right to defend itself".
This resulted in multiple massacres, frequent attacks on hospitals, collective starvation, and the destruction of houses on a scale not seen since the Allied bombing of Hamburg and Dresden. The Labour MPs who voted against an immediate and permanent ceasefire are in no sense of the word victims.
Muslim voters are not 'intimidating' the MPs. They are holding them to account for the votes they cast in parliament
Muslim and other pro-Palestine voters are not "intimidating" the MPs. They are holding them to account for the votes they cast in parliament. If anyone needs a lesson in democracy it is Ashworth and Cooper.
If Ashworth had, as he says he has, a political brain, he should arrange to meet his new MP, learn from him about what is going on in Gaza and ask him what he could do to support his constituents.
Then Ashworth should do the same in every mosque in Leicester.
That would be wiser than seeking to demonise his victor and the people who voted for him. Because it could be the start of a political comeback for Ashworth in Leicester South.
The real victims of what Britain is supporting by arming Israel are in Gaza. They are being blown to bits in the safe zones that the Israeli military have designated for them.
Every Palestinian in Gaza stands taller than any member of Starmer's cabinet or any other MP who voted repeatedly against a permanent ceasefire.
Like France and Germany, Britain is set on a path of criminalising peacefully expressed political dissent. This authoritarian response has failed every time it has been tried.
French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to divide French Muslims into "good Muslims" and "bad Muslims". He paid a heavy price for that policy in the recent elections.
Across Europe, the defenders of liberal democracy are resorting increasingly to illiberal means
That same policy was tried in Austria where at one point in their campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, road signs were erected warning motorists of dangerous mosques. It was tried in Germany, where a declaration of support for Israel is now baked into the laws of obtaining citizenship.
Across Europe, the defenders of liberal democracy are resorting increasingly to illiberal means. All they do is stoke the fires of anti-Muslim racism and those in the far right who have no qualms about expressing that.
Little wonder that the leader of the far-right Reform UK party, Nigel Farrage, and former Prime Minister Liz Truss flock to the Republican Convention where Trump is being crowned king.
An international alliance of the far right is being formed.
Disastrous consequences
Little wonder that Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, dismissed Britain as the "first Islamist country with nuclear weapons", a statement instantly dismissed by the Labour government. Because this is the minefield that Starmer and Cooper are leading us into, just as Macron led France into it.
Vance has got other views too about Israel. He told Fox News that the US, under a second Trump term, would help Israel finish the war as soon as possible. Not push for a ceasefire, but finish the war.
And when that task was completed, he would push for an alliance of Sunni Arab states and Israel against Iran.
This is the America that awaits us in the Middle East and it would have disastrous consequences.
First Israel is unlikely to defeat Hamas militarily. Second, the very opposite is happening between Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. They are coming together in their joint support for resistance against Israeli occupation.
The Sunni leaders of the states Vance is talking about see this all too well and also understand they are powerless to stop it. But make no mistake, Vance feels right now like the voice of the future.
In defying Joe Biden to stop his war in Gaza, Netanyahu will have got his tactics right. All he has to do is play for time, because Biden’s voice on Gaza will fade as the election looms. He can hope for a ceasefire, but that is all.
The Biden camp is fatally divided. The candidate himself leans ominously on his immediate family for advice and succour. And you can almost hear the oxygen being sucked into Trump’s campaign. After the assassination attempt, he can argue that he exists by divine will.
God help Palestine under a second Trump term. But it is into the hands of the far right that Starmer’s government is leading Britain.
As opposition leader, you can accuse Starmer of many things, but his worst sin as prime minister will be to fail, and open the doors to the political gates of hell.
For it is not just the Labour Party that he would have dragged down by calling in the police to quell pro-Palestinian dissent in Britain. But the very democracy on which Britain thrives.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye
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