Craven Tokenism: The UK Suspension Of Arms Export Licenses To Israel

The government of Sir Keir Starmer, despite remaining glued to a foreign policy friendly and accommodating to Israel, has found the strain a bit much of late. While galloping to victory in the July elections, leaving the British Labour Party a heaving majority, a certain ill-temper could be found among the ranks on his attitudes regarding Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mish Rahman, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, summed up the mood by professing embarrassment “about my affiliation with Labour” in light of the party’s response to the killings in Gaza. “It was hard even to tell members of my own extended family to go and knock on doors to tell people to vote for a party that originally gave Israel carte blanche in its response to the horrific 7 October attacks.”

The election itself saw Labour suffer losses among British Muslims, which has dropped as a share between 2019 and 2024. The loss of Leicester South, held by Shadow Paymaster Jon Ashworth, to independent Shockat Adam, was emblematic. (The seat has a Muslim population close to 30%.) The trend was also evident in such otherwise safe Labour strongholds as the seats of Dewsbury and Batley and Birmingham Perry Barr, both with a prominent bloc of Muslim voters. Combing through the Starmer landslide, one could still find instances of Labour’s electoral bruising.

To offer some mild reassurance to the disgruntled, notably regarding arms sales to Israel, the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy promised to revisit the policy, editing it, as it were, to see if it stood the test of international humanitarian law.

On September 2, Lammy told fellow parliamentarians “with regret” that the assessment he had received left him “unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

In doing so, he announced that Britain would be suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licenses with Israel. “We recognise, of course, Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods that Israel’s employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly.”

The measure was one of the weakest imaginable, an example of hightide gesture politics, paltry in effort, and paltry in effect. Few gains will be noticed from this change in policy, not least because 30 out of 350 is fractionally embarrassing. Furthermore, UK arms exports to Israel account for less than 1% of the total arms Israel received. As a point of comparison, UK arms sales to Israel in 2022 totalled £42 million. The offering from the United States dwarfs that contribution, annually totalling $US3.8 billion (£2.9 billion).

This very lack of effect was explicitly noted by the minister, begging the question as to what any genuine change might have entailed. The government, he assured the House, still supported Israel’s right to self-defence. Had the share of UK weapons to Israel been much larger, would such self-defence still have been justifiably prosecuted with such viciousness?

It is certainly telling what the suspension policy on exports spared. While the new policy covers various components for military aircraft and vehicles, the F-35 fighters, which have been used with especially murderous effect by the Israeli Air Force, are exempted. This, explained Defence Secretary John Healey on BBC Breakfast, was “a deliberate and important carve out for these modern fighter jets.”

The rationale is thick with splendid hypocrisy. Because the support of the F-35 is a global program spanning multiple partners, the UK’s role in it had to be preserved, irrespective of what the fighters were actually used for. “These are not just jets that the UK or Israel use,” reasoned Healey, “it’s 20 countries and around 1,000 of these jets around the world and the UK makes important, critical components for all those jets that go into a global pool.”

Like an undergraduate student failing to master an all too challenging paper, Healey offers the exoneration that cowardice supplies in readiness. It was “hard to distinguish those [parts] that may go into Israeli jets and secondly this is a global supply chain with the UK a vital part of that supply chain”. To disrupt the supply of such parts would, essentially, “risk the operation of fighter jets that are central to our own UK security, that of our allies and of NATO.”

Another knotty point was the legal or ethical value one could ultimately attribute to the decision. Lammy was adamant that the policy revision was not intended, in any way, to cast aspersions against Israel’s conduct of the war, despite an assessment suggesting otherwise. “This is a forward looking evaluation, not a determination of guilt, and it does not prejudge any future determinations by the competent courts.” This routine garbling ignored the assessment’s references to the inordinate number of civilian deaths, the sheer extent of the destruction in Gaza, and “credible claims” that Palestinian detainees had been mistreated.

This latest gesture of tokenistic principle on the part of the UK government elevates impotence to the level of doctrine. Lammy and Healey was merely taking a line Starmer has courted with numbing consistency: that of the craven, the insignificantly disruptive and the painfully cautious.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email:bkampmark@gmail.com

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