Suddenly, something is shifting. Last week, a stunning parliamentary intervention was delivered by the Tory backbencher Kit Malthouse. In a question to Hamish Falconer, Labour’s Middle East minister, he noted that “it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the slaughter in Gaza”, adding that “crimes come daily”. Given Britain was signatory to various conventions imposing a “positive obligation to act to prevent genocide” and other crimes, Malthouse asked what advice the government had taken as to the liability of the prime minister, the foreign secretary, Falconer himself and previous ministers “when the reckoning comes”.
The idea of a “reckoning” is clearly playing on the minds of western politicians. Perhaps it is even keeping them up at night. This week, Britain joined France and Canada in denouncing the suffering in Gaza as “intolerable”, threatening an unspecified “concrete” response if Israel’s current onslaught into the Gaza Strip continues. Speaking in the Commons today, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, announced the UK was suspending trade talks with Israel, summoning its ambassador to the UK and imposing sanctions on a few extremist settlers. “The world is judging. History will judge them,” he said, in reference to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
