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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.
Lammy is right. But the problem for him is that this “judgment” will extend far beyond the direct perpetrators. It will also include Israel’s enablers.
The foreign secretary might have announced his measures with great pomp and gravity, but they amounted to tokenistic nonsense. Even David Cameron tried to go further a year ago when he was foreign secretary, before abandoning plans to directly sanction two senior Israeli government ministers, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. With the international criminal court having issued arrest warrants against the Israeli leadership six months ago, panic is clearly breaking out in government. And yet it is still not doing all it can to stop Israel. Just last week, the UK was in court defending Britain’s continued export of F-35 fighter jet parts that end up in Israel.
This is about much more than just a failure to act now. It is about what led us to this moment. Keir Starmer, you see, once agreed that it was appropriate for Israel to impose a siege on Gaza cutting off power and water. (“I think that Israel does have that right. It is an ongoing situation.” He added: “Obviously, everything should be done within international law.”) He later claimed to have said no such thing, despite having said it. He then presided over an exodus of disgusted predominantly Muslim councillors – an adviser briefed that this was Labour “shaking off the fleas” – and took disciplinary action against pro-Palestine MPs. His government has suspended just 8% of arms deals to Israel under immense legal pressure, and approved more military equipment in the three months that followed than had been approved by the Tories in the three years between 2020 and 2023. Nothing the government now does can scrub these facts from the coming reckoning.
Another Tory MP, Edward Leigh, stood up last week, declaring himself a member of Conservative Friends of Israel “for over 40 years, longer than anyone here”. His question was direct: “When is genocide not genocide?” He has been joined by his Tory colleague Mark Pritchard, who noted he had backed Israel for 20 years “pretty much at all costs, quite frankly”. Withdrawing that support, he too alluded to the coming reckoning: “I’m really concerned that this is a moment in history when people look back, where we’ve got it wrong as a country.”
The scale of that reckoning must be proportionate to the scale of the crime. A month into Israel’s onslaught – after which at least 5,139 civilians had been killed, according to conservative baseline figures by the NGO Airwars – the Economist published an editorial headlined “Why Israel must fight on”. A more recent offering, long after the territory has been essentially wiped from the Earth, is titled “The war in Gaza must end”. Or look at Rupert Murdoch’s Times. Usually a reliable supporter of Israel, it now runs opinion pieces asking why we are “closing our eyes to Gaza’s horror”.
A truth is dawning: that this will be remembered as one of history’s great crimes. Right now, the UN warns that 14,000 babies could perish in the next 48 hours without aid. The Israeli opposition leader and former general Yair Golan – who earlier this year declared, “We’d all like to wake up one spring morning and find that 7 million Palestinians who live between the sea and the river have simply disappeared” – now declares his country is “killing babies as a hobby”.
Still, Israel acts with impunity. Having imposed a total siege since the beginning of March, Netanyahu yesterday declared “minimal humanitarian aid” would be allowed in. Why? Not to alleviate Palestinian suffering, but because even zealous pro-Israel politicians “have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge”. A pinprick, in other words, for cosmetic purposes. Meanwhile, Smotrich declares: “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us.” Zvi Sukkot, a parliamentarian in Smotrich’s party, boasts: “Everyone got used to the idea that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night … And nobody in the world cares.”
On 24 October 2023, I wrote a column on these pages with the headline “Israel is clear about its intentions in Gaza – world leaders cannot plead ignorance of what is coming”. Why? Because Israel’s leaders and officials made devastatingly clear what they would do from day one. “As the calamity of Israel’s onslaught against Gaza becomes apparent, those who cheered it on will panic about reputational damage and plead their earlier ignorance,” I wrote. “Do not let them get away with it this time.” As the people of Gaza now prepare for the worst, being right has never felt so bitter. But it took no special insight or powers of prophecy, for here was a catastrophe foretold from the start.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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