RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/abandoning-israel-and-the-jews

Five days after Britain’s Labour party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the general election, we can see the outline of what this is likely to mean for British Jews and their country’s relationship with Israel. That outline is not reassuring.

The new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is said to have purged his party of antisemitism and has persuaded many British Jews that he has made Labour safe again for Jewish voters. On Sunday morning, he told the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — antisemite, Holocaust denier and fan of Hitler’s wartime ally in the Middle East — that an independent state was the “undeniable right” of the Palestinian people and that “financial support for the Palestinian Authority” was one of his “immediate priorities”.

He did not tell Abbas that a condition of this financial support was that the PA must stop paying financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Israelis. Nor did he say that a condition of receiving more British taxpayers’ money was that the PA must end its indoctrination of Palestinian Arab children in Nazi-themed demonisation of the Jews, teaching them that their greatest ambition should be to murder Jews and steal all their land.

Instead, Starmer proceeded to lecture Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin  Netanyahu, that there was a “clear and urgent” need for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as an immediate increase in the volume of humanitarian aid reaching civilians. As for the war being waged by Hezbollah in Lebanon against northern Israel, Starmer warned Netanyahu:

It was crucial all parties acted with caution.

What kind of “caution” does Starmer suggest is appropriate in the face of a threat of genocide by Hezbollah and its patron, Iran? Or to put it another way, with Hezbollah primed to unleash its armoury of 150,000 rockets and other missiles that can reach all of Israel, and with Iran itself along with Iraqi, Syrian and Houthi militias not to mention the terrorist armies of the “West Bank” all primed to attack Israel if it launches all-out war against Hezbollah, does Starmer really believe that Israel actually needs to be told to act “with caution”?

Can he really not grasp that, given the daily onslaught over the past nine months from dozens of rockets, drones and guided missiles that have destroyed Israeli border towns, left swathes of northern Israel burning, made more than 60,000 Israelis refugees in their own country and kept other residents in the north trapped in their safe rooms (two Israelis were killed today by a Hezbollah rocket strike that hit their car) that if the Israelis abandon that “caution” it’s because they have no other choice?

Starmer shows absolutely zero understanding that this crisis isn’t about Hamas, Hezbollah or the Palestinian Arabs. They are proxies and pawns in an Iranian war of extermination against Israel, the essential precursor to the destruction and conquest of America, Britain and the west.

So little does he understand this that the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, is now poring over the government’s legal advice on whether to stop UK arms sales to Israel.

Once upon a time, Lammy was sympathetic to Israel. Now he is a foe. He has repeated what he said before the election, that Labour supports the request by the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Karim Khan, for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defence minister Yoav Gallant — and that if these Israelis came to the UK after such warrants were issued, Britain would arrest them.

This despite the fact that the claims upon which Khan relied were lies, distortions and blood libels drawn from Hamas-sympathising and Israel-bashing organisations, and were all demonstrably untrue.

The previous Conservative government under Rishi Sunak had submitted a preliminary legal argument to the ICC to demonstrate that it had no jurisdiction to issue these warrants. The court had given the British until July 12 to submit its full claim. Now, though, it has been reported that the Labour government will let this fall by the wayside.

If true, this would be as unsurprising as it is reprehensible.  The ICC and the international human rights establishment — the International Court of Justice, the UN, NGOs like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, B’tselem and the rest of the “humanitarian” crowd — use human rights law as a weapon to destroy Israel through legal and diplomatic means that channel these lies and blood libels. And for most of his previous career, Starmer was a human rights lawyer from a radical left-wing barristers’ set.

Look also at certain others he has appointed to his government: they tell the same vicious anti-Israel story.  The Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Shabina Mahmood, is a long-standing supporter of the Boycott Sanctions and Divestment movement (BDS) aimed at the destruction of Israel. In 2014, she urged people on Twitter to gather at a demonstration outside a Birmingham grocery store to support BDS, also posting “#FreePalestine”.

She has consistently helped push falsehoods and blood libels demonising Israel. Five days after the October 7 pogrom, when Israel had only just gone to war against Hamas in Gaza and some two weeks before its ground war started,  she wrote (after condemning Hamas for its atrocities):

I am horrified by the scenes coming out of Gaza, where innocent people are living in terror as war rages between Israel and Hamas. It is important that there is a clear distinction between a terrorist group and the innocent civilians in Gaza, who do not deserve collective punishment. It is clear that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Gaza and Israel has a duty, under international humanitarian law, to ensure access to food, water, medicines and electricity.

In March,  Mahmood called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and accused Israel of killing innocent civilians. She wrote to her constituents:

I have always supported a diplomatic process to stop the killing of innocent civilians, get humanitarian aid in and get the hostages out. But it is clear that diplomatic processes have not made sufficient progress. The conduct of this war has been intolerable, with a disproportionate level of attacks on innocent people that has rightly been the deliberations in international courts.

This individual is now Britain’s Justice Secretary.

Then there’s the new Attorney-General, Richard Hermer KC. Hermer, who belongs to another radical left-wing barristers’ set, is not a member of parliament and Starmer is putting him in the House of Lords so that he can join the government. This enthusiasm for Hermer is extremely troubling. For Hermer — who belongs to a Reform synagogue — has a record of undermining Israel’s defence with deeply questionable legal and other arguments.

Last year, Hermer provided legal opposition to a Conservative bill banning public bodies from imposing their own boycotts of Israel and other divestment campaigns against foreign countries and ­territories. He had previously advised Labour it could not legally prevent public bodies from boycotting Israel.

Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, has said:

Richard Hermer KC provided a seriously inaccurate opinion to the Labour Party on the last government’s Bill to ban BDS by public authorities and refused to correct it even after I pointed out the inaccuracies. I view his appointment [as Attorney-General] with great misgiving.

In May 2023, Hermer signed a letter by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights calling on the British government to decline any invitation to stick up for Israel at the International Court of Justice, which had been asked by the UN to provide an opinion on the legal consequences of Israeli actions in Gaza and the disputed “West Bank” territories. The letter stated:

The Israeli government is led by a coalition of far-right parties whose common goal is the formal annexation of the West Bank and the extension of a one-state reality of unequal rights over more than five million Palestinians under occupation. It is perfectly possible that the court will consider aspects of that situation to amount to apartheid.

Hermer was one of eight Jewish lawyers who, ten days after the October  7 pogrom in southern Israel, wrote an open letter expressing “significant concern” over Israel’s response. Although these lawyers described the Hamas attacks as a “moral outrage” and an “egregious violation of all norms of international law” and said Israel had a right to self-defence, they wrote:

There are some aspects of Israel’s response that already cause significant concern. International law forbids sieges of civilian populations.Gaza is home to some (two million) fellow human beings (almost half of whom are children) and it would be a grave violation of international law to hold them under siege and while doing so deprive them of basic necessities such as food and water.

And they suggested falsely that Israel might be guilty of “collective punishment”, that it might have “an intent  to cause indiscriminate damage” (the very opposite of the truth) and that there was a need to “remind Israel of its international law obligations”.

After being criticised for opposing the BDS bill, Hermer wrote that he supported Jewish and Israeli organisations and had “dear family members” serving in the IDF. But he went on: “I also happen to believe…that the continued Israel occupation of the West Bank is unlawful” and “ deeply damaging to the interests of Israel…”

In the House of Commons during a debate on the BDS bill, Conservative MP Sir Simon Clarke pointed out :

Mr Hermer has previously authored a chapter in a book called Corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation: evidence from the London session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, which is edited by some extremely interesting people — I fear that they are interesting in the most negative sense.

The co-author of that book was Asa Winstanley, a rabidly anti-Israel journalist with the rabidly anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada. He has written about the “false claims of mass rape” in the October 7 Hamas pogrom, despite the copious evidence of these rapes from survivors and from the video footage and testimony provided by the Hamas terrorists themselves; ludicrously described Israel’s war in Gaza as “genocidal” and the truly genocidal Iran and Hezbollah as the “axis of resistance”; and accused Israel and its “global lobby” of smearing as an antisemite the egregiously Jew-hating rock musician Roger Waters.

Clarke asked about Hermer:

Is this really the calibre of individual who should be advising the official Opposition?

Now this individual is Britain’s Attorney-General.

Many if not the majority of Labour MPs — like the rest of the left — support the Palestinian cause. Their hostility towards Israel runs on a scale from relatively unpleasant to vicious.  Despite this, however, the general election saw numerous attacks by Muslims on Labour candidates, all because Starmer had said Israel had a right to defend itself and he had refused for months to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

These attacks on Labour candidates, which were abusive, threatening and violent, were spearheaded by an organised Islamic bloc determined to force Labour to adopt a Muslim agenda. It ran Independent candidates campaigning on “Palestine-Gaza” against the Labour party. Islamic sectarian politics had now come to Britain. The Labour party was shocked by the result.

Constituencies with a Muslim population of 20 per cent or more saw a 23-point drop in support for Labour, leading to the loss of no fewer than five parliamentary Labour seats to these “Palestine-Gaza” Independents. In areas with a significant Muslim population that was below 20 per cent, several other Labour MPs held onto their seats by a whisker.

In a polling day post on X/Twitter, the hard-left, pro-Hamas former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn — who was thrown out of the party and was also elected as an Independent —  had declared that in this election:

Palestine is on the ballot paper.

With the wind in the sails of Muslim political sectarians outside the Labour government, and with hostility to Israel as well as a determination to stamp out “Islamophobia” (aka any criticism of the Islamic world) deeply embedded inside it under the leadership of a former radical “human rights” lawyer, Britain is now on course to abandon Israel and the Jews — in the middle of a war of extermination against Israel and a global onslaught against the Jewish people.

And Labour has the gall to claim it’s a moral project.