UK Halts Some Arms Exports to Israel as Labour Chases Muslim Votes
Minouche Shafik’s new boss, David Lammy, dismays Netanyahu, Mirvis
[The Editors is called The Editors, plural, not The Editor, singular, for a reason. When I launched it, a shrewd friend advised, “it can’t just be you.” I’m delighted to start introducing some additional voices. Today’s comes from Michael Mosbacher, who is associate comment editor at London's Daily Telegraph. He is a past editor of Standpoint and The Critic, having co-founded both British magazines.—Ira Stoll.]
On Monday, as Israel was burying the six hostages murdered by Hamas, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, announced that the UK was suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licenses to Israel.
Lammy, the Labour Party politician who recently offered Minouche Shafik a lifeline out of the Columbia University presidency, claimed the arms-export move was based on legal advice.
In a display of supposed even-handedness, Lammy made some noises about condemning Hamas and Iran and stated that the UK was imposing new sanctions on “four Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps targets,” well short of the widely demanded proscription of the organization as a whole (something that successive British governments, including the previous Conservative administration, have all unfathomably refused to do).
The move has soured UK-Israel relations, with Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rebuking the “shameful” decision. Many are asking why Israel is once again being singled out for such treatment? The UK remains happy to supply many multiples of what has gone to Israel to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Sales to Israel have in fact been very modest and amount to a fraction of a percent of the country’s arsenal — £42 million (roughly $55 million) in 2022 and only £18.2 million (roughly $24 million) in 2023.
Whatever hindrance Lammy’s move puts in the way of Israel’s operations on the ground, the harm it does to relations and the message it sends out is much more consequential and damaging. The new British Government has also been keen to march in lockstep with the Biden administration on Israel and international affairs more widely. And now their policies are out of kilter, going well beyond Biden’s withholding a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs. Why has Labour allowed this to happen?
Prior to Keir Starmer taking over as Labour leader in 2020, the party had gone through a truly rancid period under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Anti-Israel agitation, alongside opposing the United States’s global role in its entirety, has been the leitmotif of Corbyn’s whole career. Labour’s relations with Britain’s Jewish community were shredded, amidst a welter of antisemitic attacks on some of the party’s own members and MPs.
Starmer realized that for the party to be seen as having moved back into the mainstream, not just among Britain’s Jews but among centrist voters, it was essential to expunge this taint of antisemitism. And he did much to achieve this, not least excluding Jeremy Corbyn from the parliamentary Labour party in October 2020 for belittling the extent of antisemitism in the party. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 pogrom, Starmer not only mouthed usual platitudes of standing in solidarity with Israel but also robustly supported Israel’s right to defend itself.
What has changed is that, as I have written previously (see “Britain Will Be the First Islamist Country With an A-Bomb, JD Vance Warns”), Labour now faces a challenge for the UK’s Muslim vote — and that challenge looks like it is getting more organized. Traditionally Britain’s 4 million Muslims have been one of the party’s most reliable voting blocks. But in July’s election, four independent MPs were elected in heavily Muslim constituencies standing on a “solidarity with Gaza” ticket, with another four coming close.
The elected four, alongside Corbyn (who was reelected running as an independent on a somewhat wider, socialist platform) came together on Monday to form a new grouping in the Commons, the Independent Alliance. This grouping will be equal in MPs to Nigel Farage’s much more hyped Reform UK and larger than the vehemently anti-Israel Green party with its four MPs.
Many in Labour fear that this group is a nascent sectarian political party that will soon be actively targeting Labour in strongly Muslim areas. In this summer’s election, the victory of the Gaza independents was one of the big surprises. And with a more organized, higher profile campaign, such candidates could have a chance of defeating Labour in many of the 30 or so seats in which a quarter or more of the vote is Muslim. As the Islamic population grows, its potential political impact may rise. And it will become harder to be a Labour MP and publicly show support for Israel.
That Lammy’s announcement came on the same day the new group formed is surely coincidental, but the two events are certainly intertwined. Labour is taking a much more hostile line on Israel, because it is fearful of losing constituencies it previously always believed it could rely on. This is augmented by the fact that Labour may also lose some non-Muslim left-wing, woke voters over Gaza to the Green Party.
When the UK’s then Tory government imposed an arms embargo during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, it was Labour leader Harold Wilson who made the most passionate arguments in the Commons against the policy and for backing Israel. Wilson’s view was that support for the Jewish state should be an integral part of the Labour message. Very few MPs of that mindset remain in Labour. If there were, Lammy’s announcement might have been prevented.
Visceral support for the Jewish state is, tragically, a fast-disappearing quality on the British, indeed the wider European, left. It may soon become extinct.
In the Commons debate, the only criticism Lammy got from Labour MPs was for not going further. Corbyn predictably bobbed up to say it was too little, too late. Disappointingly, while Conservative politicians outside the chamber attacked the move, in the chamber the Tory shadow foreign secretary Andrew Mitchell made no substantive criticism of the new stance. The only MPs to robustly challenge the policy in the debate were Protestants from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party.
Lammy’s announcement won’t do Labour much political good.
It will rekindle fears that the party is reverting to its Corbynite nadir. Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has already said the move “beggars belief” in the light of the threats Israel is currently facing. “As Israel faces down the threat of Iran and its proxies, not just to its own people, but to all of us in the democratic west…this announcement will serve to encourage our shared enemies. It will not help to secure the release of the remaining 101 hostages,” Mirvis said in a social media post.
But it will do little to appease the Corbynistas and myriad Israel haters or take the wind out of their new party project. Even by its own logic, Lammy’s stance is hopeless; it will satisfy virtually no one whilst tarnishing Labour’s hard rewon post-Corbyn reputation.
What it will do is further stigmatize Israel and reinforce the conviction of those going on weekly anti-Israel marches that they are one step closer to their aims. There has been a police crackdown on some of the more extreme “direct action” organizers and arrests have been made under counter terrorism laws — but if that was a welcome move towards delegitimizing the incitement and law-breaking so often seen on these marches, Lammy’s concession relegitimizes their wide demands.
The mob will be tempted to push harder in the hope that Labour may take another step in their direction. That is the pattern set by Lammy’s announcement. About the best hope is that next time Lammy capitulates, he’ll consider delaying the announcement to allow a more decent interval after the burials of the murdered Israelis.
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