Our deeply compromised and unprincipled Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has FINALLY – woken up to the true depravity of Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing Ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – without whose support Netanyahu’s government would collapse.
It’s been blindingly obvious for the last year or more that these two were intent on ‘cleansing’ all Palestinians from Gaza, before taking it over completely, while simultaneously ramping up illegal settlements on the West Bank – with a view, no doubt, to doing exactly the same there in a few years’ time.
I have questioned David Lammy’s principles before. Watching a genocide play out in real time, day after day, calibrating “an appropriate response” from the UK is obviously not without its diplomatic challenges – given the need not to depart from the prevailing international consensus, however abhorrent that consensus may be. But continuing to licence the sale of huge amounts of arms to Israel (including key components for the F35 fighters that have been responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of completely innocent men, women and children across the entire Gaza Strip), is altogether different. And his complete failure to address that tells us a lot about the man.
As is often the case, Lammy’s comments were elegant and, possibly, even heart-felt:
“morally unjustifiable”, “repellent and monstrous”, and, most telling of all, “ an affront to the values of the British people”.
As if our values haven’t been affronted by everything that’s been going on for the last 18 months.
He was obviously very angry that Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir had so egregiously overstepped the mark (through their self-evident war crime of blocking all food and medical aid getting into Gaza, combined with the renewed military offensive in the south of the country) that it left him with no option but to reprimand them for such hateful excesses.
But so bloody what? As we know, Lammy has some kind of weird ‘church-fundraising-thermometer look-alike for assessing whether or not Israel’s atrocities in Gaza do or do not constitute a genocide, having opined that not enough Palestinian citizens had been killed for the UK to call it out as a genocide. Many thousands of innocent deaths later, together with the prospect of yet more thousands of children dying for lack of food, water and basic healthcare, maybe that red line had crept far enough up the thermometer for him to use the G-word?
No such luck. Even now.
The international pressure on Israel is certainly building. France and Canada joined the UK in a joint statement. Lammy also announced that discussions on a trade deal with Israel would be suspended. Elsewhere, Spain’s Prime Minister has described Israel as “a genocidal state”. Even Donald Trump seems to be losing faith in Netanyahu: his decision not to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour was genuinely very striking.
But it’s still all just words. Endless, increasingly bloody words. Without further sanctions; without a suspension of all arms sales; without a decisive shift in terms of recognising Palestinian statehood (as 148 countries have already done), it means literally nothing.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir will be laughing out loud at Lammy’s futile words, whilst blackmailing Netanyahu into the next round of atrocities. It matters little to them that 67% of Israelis want to see an end to the conflict with the remaining hostages brought home: for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, they’re as good as dead already. Here’s Smotrich at his most genocidally hateful: “we are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction which has no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us”.
As many are now saying, “there will be a reckoning for all this”. Lammy and Starmer will be right up there in the list of those knowingly complicit in what might well be judged to be the most heinous genocide since the Holocaust.
