The UK’s partial arms ban on Israel is not enough

Nick Dearden

On Monday, the British government halted 30 licences that would have allowed British companies to supply military parts to Israel. Those include components for fighter aircraft, helicopters, drones and items that facilitate ground targeting. Foreign Secretary David Lammy explained to parliament that a government assessment showed there was a clear danger these items could be used by Israel to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law.

Anyone who has switched on the news over the past 11 months could have told him as much. Gaza has become a human rights-free zone where history’s first livestreamed genocide is taking place.

This year, lawyers working for the government issued legal advice on whether Israel was breaking international law. A Tory MP, who had seen the document, said she believed that Israel was indeed committing such acts.

The details of this legal advice remain a closely guarded secret despite a promise by the Labour Party, while in opposition, to publish it. We can assume, however, that the analysis made for stark reading as it seems to have finally pushed the Labour government to take action, however inadequate. It will no doubt hope that by taking action on the most egregious arms sales, it will free itself of liability.

And yet, the Labour government has been desperate to avoid any perception that it is punishing Israel. Monday’s announcement was taken with “deep regret”, and the foreign secretary was at pains to make clear “this is not an arms embargo” in a speech in which he described himself as a “liberal, progressive Zionist”.

The measures are the bare minimum we should expect. While 30 licences will be halted, 320 are still in force. The UK also plays a role in supplying components for the F-35 fighter jets, the “most lethal … fighter aircraft in the world”, according to its manufacturer. The fighters are being used extensively in Gaza, and the government has exempted these products from the new measures.

The principal reason appears to be that the UK is under intense pressure from the United States to keep supplying parts. Only last week, Robert O’Brien, an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, warned of serious consequences under a future administration if the UK enacts an embargo.

The Labour government and its Tory predecessor have been massively out of step with public opinion, which has, broadly speaking, been horrified by the violence meted out in Gaza. At the last election, Labour lost several seats to antiwar candidates because of its stance on this issue. And a July opinion poll showed a majority of Brits in favour of ending arms sales.

Especially worrying for a new government that wants to appear in charge is the backlash from civil servants who have been saying for months that they are unhappy with the official position on arms exports. In mid-August, Mark Smith, a diplomat with years of experience on these issues, resigned after complaining he had been repeatedly ignored. In his resignation letter, he wrote that he could “no longer carry out my duties in the knowledge that this Department may be complicit in War Crimes”.

Smith was right to be worried. The government is facing a legal challenge over its continued supply of arms. And this could quickly get personal. The London police are considering evidence against former government ministers for complicity in war crimes. Last week, my organisation, Global Justice Now, published legal advice showing that civil servants as well as ministers could bear liability for war crimes committed by Israeli personnel.

While this complicity obviously relates to the provision of weapons, military and logistical support and intelligence – which Britain continues to share with Israel – it also includes diplomatic and economic support – in particular, relationships that assist in the ongoing illegal occupation of Palestine.

Unlike Spain and Ireland, Britain has never called into question its trade relationship with Israel. It continues to allow produce from illegal Israeli settlements to be imported, in effect helping in their maintenance.

But worst of all, the Labour cabinet has said it wants a new trade deal with Israel as one of its priorities. In itself, negotiating such a deal is clearly failing to use the power the British government has at its disposal to prevent a possible genocide. It seems rather to reward Israel for its crimes.

But given that the UK is particularly keen to create closer links with Israel’s security and technology sectors, including those working on artificial intelligence, such a deal could well constitute direct assistance to those Israeli economic actors most implicated in war crimes.

And here we get some indication as to why we see such full-blooded support for Israel from our political elite. As author Naomi Klein wrote in March, Western elites can see in Gaza the future of where our deeply divided, horribly unequal world is headed. Israel’s Iron Dome has become “a super-concentrated and claustrophobic version of the very same model of security to which all Global North governments subscribe. … It’s a model in which the borders of wealthy states – grown wealthy through their own colonial genocides – are protected by their own versions of the Iron Dome.” The West is heavily invested in that model succeeding in Israel.

It is no coincidence that large parts of the Israeli economy are now dedicated to developing the most advanced technology to control the dispossessed. Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions says: “The occupied territories are … a huge laboratory where Israel can perfect all these weapons systems, surveillance systems and technologies. … Israel needs a controlled conflict.”

This all goes some way to explaining why a Labour government in Britain is so reluctant to call out the most egregious war crimes imaginable. It helps us understand why it is so determined to enhance our economic cooperation with the country that has perpetrated these crimes, even at the cost of unpopularity. Ultimately, it doesn’t want to be locked out of the military and technological partnerships that it believes will dominate the increasingly divided world we live in.

But people in the West should have no interest in our government being part of this global apartheid, not least because these same means of controlling populations will end up, one way or another, being used against us.

Monday’s announcement shows we can make the cost of complicity too high. At a time when just switching on the news has become unbearable, we need to celebrate this victory. But we also need to maintain the pressure – for the sake of the people of Palestine, but also for the sake of all of us.