RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bereft of vision, the modern politician is obsessed with ‘optics’. Which makes foreign secretary David Lammy’s announcement this week that the UK will be suspending some arms exports to Israel all the more surreal. The optics of withholding weapons from the Jewish State the day after we discovered that its enemy is so ruthless it will happily murder young Jews in cold blood are atrocious. Did not one functionary in the Foreign Office think to raise his or her hand and say: ‘Sir, should we at least wait until the bodies of those six Israeli hostages are cold before we shame and punish the nation they came from?’

This goes way beyond optics, of course. It is more than a failure of spin. It is a failure – a colossal, unforgivable one – of morality. As the bodies of the six slain Jews found in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah were being transported back to a grief-stricken Israel, our government took action not against the Islamist extremists who carried out this unutterable atrocity, but against the nation that suffered it. Mere hours after the discovery of an act of fascistic savagery, our government handed a propaganda victory to the fascists by dragging Israel’s name through the mud. What were they thinking? Shameful doesn’t cover it.

Mr Lammy has said around 10 per cent of arms sales to Israel will be suspended. Thirty out of 350 arms-exports licences will be cancelled, primarily affecting parts for fighter jets, helicopters and drones. The reason for this smug, haughty smackdown of the Jewish State? Because there’s a ‘clear risk’, said Lammy, that such equipment will be used to ‘commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law’. Big talk from a politician who noisily supported the West’s imperial bombardment of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the widescale torture and rape of prisoners.

Many are damning Lammy’s partial embargo as gesture politics. ‘What is the point?’, headlines wonder. Denying Israel a few parts for planes won’t make much difference, some moan. For the frothing Israelophobes of the iffy left, nothing less than a complete arms embargo will do. They want not one gun to go to crazy Israel. If only there was a word to describe people who agitate morning, noon and night for the disarming of a Jewish nation that recently suffered the worst act of anti-Semitic violence since the Holocaust.

The obsession with the partial nature of Lammy’s reprimanding of Israel misses the point. What the Foreign Office has just done is huge – and profoundly troubling. Sure, it won’t make much of a dent in Israel’s ability to fight Hamas, but it will cast aspersions on Israel’s fight against Hamas. It won’t militarily weaken Israel’s war on the pogromists that slaughtered more than a thousand of its people on 7 October, but it might morally weaken that war with its sly implication that there’s a criminal element to this crusade against Hamas’s army of anti-Semites. The partial arms embargo is indicative of something far more unsettling: a solidarity embargo as Britain slowly but surely turns its back on the Jewish nation.

The BBC has clocked the significance of Lammy’s actions. ‘It felt like quite a moment’, writes political editor Chris Mason. ‘[S]ignals matter in politics’, he says, and the signal here is that Britain under Labour is taking a more ‘Israel-sceptic posture’. Indeed, Lammy’s partial arms halt comes hot on the heels of the new government’s resumption of funding for UNRWA and its ditching of Britain’s challenge to the right of the International Criminal Court to seek an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. In normal times, such a flagrant moral abandonment of our old ally of Israel would be geopolitically foolish; in the wake of the 7 October pogrom and its unleashing of a global wave of Jew hate, it feels nothing short of sickening.

What’s driving the creeping desertion of Israel? We know it’s not an outbreak of hippyish peacenik conscience among government officials. After all, Britain will still hawk arms round the world, including to truly tyrannical regimes. Last year it was reported that UK arms sales had reached a record annual high of £8.5 billion, and that 54 per cent of the arms went to nations categorised as ‘not free’ by Freedom House. They included Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. Yes, Qatar, the state that happily hosts the leaders of Hamas. So Britain is trimming arms sales to the Jewish nation while selling billions of pounds’ worth of lethal hardware to the repressive regime in which Hamas’s mass murderers of Jews live in obscene luxury. And our old war heroes turn in their graves.

It seems to me that our government, horrendously, has elevated virtue-signalling over the truly virtuous task of standing by an ally that is under assault by an army of racist terrorists. Lammy and the rest seem more keen on placating Israelophobic elements here at home – in Labour, on the left, in Islamist circles – than they are in backing a friend that was attacked by an enemy not only of Israel and the Jews but also of civilisation itself. It’s a species of appeasement. We might call it Islamo-appeasement. The adoption of a tougher stance against the world’s prime victim of Islamist violence – Israel – in an effort to pacify the noisy haters of Israel in both dinner-party circles and dangerous circles in the UK itself. It is suicidally short-termist. If the Foreign Office cannot see that it is directly and wholly in Britain’s interests to support the fight against radical Islamists who hate us too, then it is even more morally lost than I thought.

Preventing the export of some military parts to Israel won’t have much consequence, people say. They are beyond wrong. The consequences of Lammy’s announcement will be vast and dire. It will communicate to our allies that we might well abandon them in their hour of need. It will reduce Britain to an unreliable partner in global affairs. And it will embolden the sworn foes of Israel. Hamas will be thrilled by what the Foreign Office has done. It will giddily cite it as Western approval for the Hamas lie that Israel’s war in Gaza is a criminal enterprise. Hamas’s sponsors in Iran will be thrilled, too. Finally, the theocrats will crow, the Western alliance is fraying and the screws on the Jewish State are tightening. And they won’t be wrong.

This partial embargo is bad for us all. For it suggests that Britain under Labour has no appreciation of what’s at stake in the Israel-Hamas War. No understanding of the mortal threat to Jewish life and civilisational values posed by a hateful army like Hamas. No sensitivity to the menace posed by Islamism to the entire Western world and the Enlightenment values we once held dear. This government of cowards and charlatans has just put a smile on the faces of Islamofascists everywhere. For shame.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy