Israel Is Running Out of Road

Keir Starmer once said Labour faced a choice between “protest or power”. I guess it’s protest then.

After 10 months of million-man marches demanding an end to Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza, scrappy grassroots campaigns that elected Westminster’s first group of pro-Palestine independents and direct actions that took out key military infrastructure, the government’s hand has been forced: Labour is most likely going to restrict arms exports to Israel.

Alongside Middle East Eye, Novara Media broke the news on Thursday that David Lammy is gearing up to restrict weapons sales to Israel on the advice of civil service lawyers, which he also intends to publish. Just as significantly, the UK plans to drop its objections to the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan, who is seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant (Khan’s is no empty threat, either: Netanyahu has already cancelled visits to the Czech Republic and to his mate Viktor Orban, fearing arrest).

This, fewer than 24 hours after news from America that Potus-in-waiting Kamala Harris, speaker Nancy Pelosi and roughly half of the House Democrats skipped Netanyahu’s address to Congress (and there was me thinking that BDS is antisemitic). It’s been a rough week for Netanyahu – and it’s about time.

Operationally, little will change for Israel in the immediate term. Any suspension of Britain’s arms licenses to the country will likely only be partial: Lammy has already said he opposes a blanket ban, suggesting he wants to target only offensive (rather than defensive) weapons – an arbitrary, and legally meaningless, distinction, much like selling a street-fighter a machete because they insist they’ll use it to chop salad. Not that our weapons matter much to Israel, anyway.

The UK licensed £42m of arms to Israel in 2022, a frankly paltry figure compared to the roughly $3.8bn America sends annually. And you can bet these precision-guided munitions, air defence systems, tank rounds and artillery shells will keep flowing from Washington for as long as Joe Biden – a self-described Zionist of over 50 years’ standing – has anything to do with it.

Yet these symbolic gestures will have material consequences for Israel, whose shunning by its closest allies weaken its bargaining position if another ceasefire deal is tabled, for example. If Harris does win, and is anywhere near as frosty with Bibi in the Oval Office as she is in the West Wing, he’s in serious trouble.

Daniel Levy is director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations and was a negotiator on the Oslo Accords. Speaking to Novara Media in the early hours of this morning, he said that the UK appears intent on “reducing the exceptionalism applied to Israel – and that by necessity will impact bilateral relations.”

“If that is the path, then how far it goes will partly depend on Israel’s reaction,” Levy said. So far, that reaction seems muted: on Friday morning, a report emerged in the Hebrew-language version of the paywalled, left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz – hardly somewhere you’d place a story if you wanted it to go viral – that Israel was “deeply disappointed” by the UK’s plan to withdraw its objections to the ICC. “This is a fundamentally wrong decision,” an anonymous official told the paper, adding that it “distorts justice and truth, and violates the right of all democracies to fight terrorism.”

This is a far cry from Netanyahu’s signature hissy fits – I don’t see a Holocaust reference anywhere, for one thing. It seems the Israeli strongman – the vast majority of whose citizens think he should resign, and whose few remaining friends are now icing him out – realises the jig is up. Painfully gradually, a consensus is building – in international courts, foreign parliaments, on the streets – that cannot be smeared as antisemitic. “Genocide” will make liberals wince for years to come (until one day they start teaching it in schools, and wearing pins on its anniversary) but I’d prepare to hear the words “violations of international law” coming out of the mouths of a fair few Labour Friends of Israel pretty damn soon.

The question repeatedly put to UK and US leaders – how many Palestinians does Israel have to kill before you will stop it? – finally has an answer: 39,670. History will never forgive the politicians who woke up 293 days too late realising they’ve made a horrible mistake – but they’re acting at last.