Tag Archives: hamas

The UK’s relationship with Israel: a study in sophistry

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Summary: Is high office worth the price of a soul?

In the Guardian profile of David Lammy on Saturday 2 August 2025 I was struck by one sentence: “On Radio 4’s Today, he [Lammy] energetically rebutts the suggestion that he hasn’t blocked all arms exports to Israel.”

This led me to check again what Lammy had said when announcing the suspension of some arms licences to Israel in September 2024. Then he said, “There are a number of export licences that we have assessed are not for military use in the current conflict and therefore do not require suspension. They include items that are not being used by the Israel Defence Forces in the current conflict, such as trainer aircraft or other naval equipment. They also include export licences for civilian use, covering a range of products such as food-testing chemicals, telecoms, and data equipment.”

That passage begs many questions. For example, is it possible to train pilots to drop 2,000 pound bombs on defenceless women and children without the use of British supplied trainer aircraft? Or how would the Israeli policy of banning Gazans from fishing in the Mediterranean be impeded if it did not have British supplied naval equipment? Those who have paid any attention to advances in the use of information systems in intelligence analysis for military operations will also wonder what role British supplied telecoms and data equipment have played in the Israeli identification and assassination of journalists, health and aid workers across Gaza. 

Sophistry – the use of clever sounding arguments to deceive – is, of course, stock in trade of politicians. There is the stench of such sophistry in Lammy’s pronouncements on Israel, which remains a valued ally of the UK in spite of the extraordinary genocide that it has wrought on Gaza in plain view of the world.


In September 2024 Lammy asserted that, “There is no equivalence between Hamas terrorists… and Israel’s democratic Government”.  To which one can only conclude that Lammy, desperate for high office, has, in the words of Orwell, submitted to the Party’s final most essential command: that he reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears. 

On 2 August, the Guardian reported that Lammy “calls shooting civilians waiting for aid ‘grotesque’, ‘sick’; demands ‘accountability’ from the Israeli side. He says things are ‘desperate for people on the ground, desperate for the hostages in Gaza’, that the world is ‘desperate for a ceasefire, for the suffering to come to an end’”.

And yet, Lammy participates in a government that has continued the Tory’s policy of providing direct military support to Israel. As late as August 2025 the Jerusalem Post reported that the UK flies surveillance over Gaza to “locate hostages”. It should be remembered that that on encountering Israeli hostages, stripped to their underpants and begging for help in Hebrew, the Israeli Defence Forces shot them. So it seems unlikely that the Israeli government  is interested in hostages as anything other than an excuse for more violence. In this context the UK’s “search for hostages” is likely a mere pretext for more general intelligence sharing.

It is possible that Lammy and the rest of the British government may finally be becoming squeamish at the level of killing in Gaza. But that does not absolve them of past complicity. Netanyahu and the rest of those that they have allied with have not changed. As a lawyer Lammy “ought to have known” that his allies were just going to do exactly what they said they were going to do at the start of the butchery. 

Given the weakness of international institutions that the British and other Western Governments have contributed to through their complicity in Israel’s war crimes, Lammy and his colleagues in policy may yet avoid a criminal reckoning. But they will always have to answer to their consciences on whether the perks of high office were actually worth the price of their souls. 

Humanitarian response for slow learners: lessons urgently needed for Gaza

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Summary: calls for humanitarian aid are being used by pusillanimous politicians to distract from their failures to directly address the causes of humanitarian crisis in Gaza, most specifically Israel’s genocidal assault.

For over five years in the late 1990s I worked, mostly for Oxfam GB, organizing assistance, including water supply and sanitation, for the civilian victims of the civil war in Angola. 

So, humanitarian response is a subject area I know a little about. As students of management and leadership will be aware, a problem with a bit of expertise is that you can presume that everyone understands the fundamentals as well as you do. This is called taken-for-grantedness in the literature. 

I have been taking-for-granted that David Lammy and Keir Starmer – human rights lawyers after all, as they like to tell us, and therefore smarter than everyone else, as they like to imply – would understand the fundamentals of humanitarianism. After all, they have been pontificating on it since the start of Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2023. 

But maybe they don’t. Maybe it is possible that they are not the craven accomplices to war crimes that their ongoing military and diplomatic support of Israel suggests. Perhaps they are just pig ignorant of the vitally important stuff that successful humanitarian response requires. 

So, here are a couple of the most basic lessons of humanitarianism for their edification.

1. The solution to a humanitarian crisis caused by war is not aid. It is an end to war. At the early stages of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, Starmer and others attempted to deflect from their monstrous acquiesce in Netanyahu’s war crimes by rejecting the calls for  an immediate ceasefire and instead calling for pauses in the violence to allow for the delivery of more aid. 

The technical term for this position in relation to humanitarian response is “Oxford Union debating horseshite”. It is part of an approach to politics that values a plausible sounding point to win an immediate argument over the concrete measures necessary to resolve the actual causes of the crisis that the argument is about. Food assistance, vital as it is, does not protect from the other forms of collective punishment, such as the cutting of power and water that Keir Starmer advocated Israel doing, let alone the mass burning alive of children that Israel has routinised in Gaza since the outset of its violence.

2. If a belligerent nation is using famine as a weapon of war, then they are not going to permit humanitarian assistance unless put under robust pressure to do so. Robust pressure, not expressions of sadness or concern: Boycotts. Divestments. Sanctions. Criminal accounting.

3. If an assaulting army deliberately massacres humanitarian workers delivering food aid to hungry people, they are probably using famine as a weapon of war. Humanitarian workers not party to that war crime will therefore be made a target.

4. If an assaulting army on encountering their own nationals, stripped to their underpants and begging for help in their own language, shoots them, then that army is not on a rescue mission. Imagine what fate awaits those who cannot speak the attackers language. But you don’t have to because it has been documented by those the Israelis would seek to make victims. Indeed, the Israelis themselves have even videoed their own war crimes to show the world, so proud are they of what they inflict.

5. If an assaulting army is enslaving the civilian population they are attacking, then they are certainly not interested in any aspect of the humanitarian well-being of those civilians. In March 2025 the Israeli newspaper Haaertz reported that, ‘In Gaza, Almost Every IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves.’

The British government used to like to depict itself as a world leader against slavery. But there has been a deafening silence from that government, and indeed much of the anti-slavery community, on this matter. 

6. If you have soldiers in place to machine gun aid recipients, then the purpose of an aid distribution is not humanitarian. It is war crimes. 

7. If you are materially supporting a political regime that has publicly stated its war aims are ethnic cleansing, then no amount of humanitarian assistance will mitigate that. You too are practicing genocide, even if you are also offering the doomed their meagre last meals. 

Maybe these ideas are new to Starmer, Lammy and the rest of their government. But they are not hard. Indeed, tens of thousands of ordinary British people demonstrate that they grasp these most fundamental points already as, month in, month out, they gather in protests across the country to indict their own government for its abject moral collapse.