Does an early Nobel peace prize beckon for Keir Starmer? Could the new prime minister be poised to surpass the achievement of Barack Obama, who bagged the award less than 10 months after taking office? The question arises because the Labour government has succeeded in a task most thought impossible: uniting advocates of the two sides in what may be the world’s bitterest conflict. This week Labour managed to lead both the loudest supporters of Israel and the most trenchant defenders of the Palestinians to a rare position of agreement. Just one problem: what those two sides had in common was their shared fury at the UK government.
The point of convergence was Britain’s suspension of 30 arms export licences to Israel, the decision taken after the government determined a “clear risk” that the hardware sold – military aircraft, helicopters, drones and targeting equipment – could be used in violations of international humanitarian law (IHL).
For one side, what deepened the offence was the timing. At the very moment the announcement came in the House of Commons, they were burying their dead in Jerusalem. While the foreign secretary, David Lammy, was on his feet, a few thousand miles away the parents of a 23-year-old who, along with five fellow hostages, had been murdered by Hamas in a Gaza tunnel a few days earlier, said a final goodbye to their son.
It was that juxtaposition, that split-screen, which saw the Labour government assailed. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the move “shameful”, while Britain’s chief rabbi said it “beggars belief”. Spotting an opportunity, former PM Boris Johnson asked of Lammy and Starmer, “Do they want Hamas to win?”
Plenty of those critics assumed Labour was acting out of political calculation, anxious to placate a left angered by Israel’s nearly year-long war against Hamas, a left that showed its muscle in the general election, when pro-Gaza independents grabbed a handful of seats off Labour and came close in several others. If that was the aim, it roundly failed. Because that camp was as scathing in its condemnation as its counterparts on the other side, denouncing the government for doing far too little, leaving some 320 licences untouched. Amnesty International called the decision to allow the continued, if indirect, supply to Israel of parts for F-35 fighter jets “catastrophically bad”, while the Campaign Against Arms Trade said it was “utterly outrageous and unjustifiable”.
How did the government land itself in this spot, slammed from both sides? The answer tells us something important about both this new government and how administrations like it around the world, formed by parties of the centre-left, are struggling more than ever to navigate the always-treacherous terrain of the Israel-Palestine conflict in this latest age of Netanyahu.
Speak to those close to the government’s decision-making process and they will insist that all the talk of political signalling and trade-offs is misplaced, that this was not a matter of political operatives sitting around, gaming out how to manage Labour’s electoral coalition, but something much more straightforward: a chiefly legal process, led by officials and done properly.
In this telling, there was almost no decision to take. There is a policy in place, one that predates this government and that ministers are obliged to follow. At its heart is a “purely legal analysis”, which, when it identifies a clear risk that this or that item will give rise to a breach of IHL, leaves ministers with no legal choice but to suspend permission to sell that item.
According to this account, the precise number of suspended licences was a technical matter too. It didn’t come from Lammy plucking a figure out of the air, high enough to slap Israel on the wrist but low enough to avoid a diplomatic rift. Rather it was arrived at by officials’ assessment of exactly which bits of kit might clash with IHL and were not covered by any other standing exemptions. As for timing, even that, says the government, was just a matter of following the rulebook: once the decision was taken, it had to be announced to parliament at the first possible opportunity, which meant Monday. The result: anger all around.
Even those who support the decision concede that that timing was awful. Of course, there is no good day for such an announcement: since 7 October, there will have been few days when a parent, whether Israeli or Palestinian, has not buried a child. But the funerals on Monday were a moment of special intensity, in part because one of those killed, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had become the focus of a very particular attachment not just in Israel, but among Jews around the world.
Part of that was the simple fact that Hersh’s parents mounted their global campaign for his rescue in English; part of it was the constant, and extraordinary, insistence by them on speaking not only of their own pain, but of that of bereaved Palestinian mothers and fathers in Gaza too. Hersh’s father talked at the Democratic convention in Chicago last month of “the surplus of agony” among Israelis and Palestinians: there is enough of it to go around.
So to announce measures against Israel as Hersh’s body was lowered into the ground was never going to go well, just as those enraged by 40,000 dead in Gaza were never going to be placated by the suspension of a mere tenth of UK arms licences to Israel. Yes, there was an extra urgency that came from the fact that a legal challenge to the UK arms sales regime to Israel was due to be heard in court the very next day, Tuesday – a challenge the government was likely to lose had it not acted first. But surely there was a different hour to do it.
Still, none of this should detract from the main point here. We now have a government that takes the law seriously, that does not, as its predecessors did, grant itself room for manoeuvre when there isn’t any. The lead for that is doubtless set from the top, by a serious lawyer who believes in rule of law perhaps above all else. That is admirable.
Yet it has brought little applause. It’s the latest illustration of how much harder the Israel-Palestine issue – never easy – has become for politicians of the centre-left such as Starmer or Lammy. Read the foreign secretary’s Commons speech, and you can see his effort to stress that he wants the best for both peoples. The goal, he said, was “safety, security and sovereignty for both Israel and a Palestinian state.” It was a similar message that Kamala Harris delivered in Chicago: unbending support for Israel’s right to defend itself along with the demand that “the Palestinian people can realise their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination”.
There was a time when Israeli governments could have nodded along to such balanced sentiments. For all the denunciations issued by their official institutions many, if not most, diaspora Jews, in Britain and elsewhere, would subscribe to those sentiments still. Even Netanyahu would once have paid them lip service, back when he felt obliged to feign support for the two-state solution. But the beating heart of his government now is the brutal far rightists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, those who think Palestinians’ only role is to get out of their way. In this reality, any concession to the needs of the other, even when the law demands it, is seen as a threat or, worse, a betrayal.
That poses little difficulty to politicians of the nationalist right. A Donald Trump can throw in his lot with one side, Israel, and pretend the other is not there. But for the likes of Starmer or Harris, it is all infinitely harder – and so much more painful.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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