The government’s partial arms embargo against Israel has caused considerable blowback. People have been appalled that, when the Jewish state is fighting for its life, the Starmer administration is punishing it on the basis of demonstrable falsehoods put out by Hamas and its echo chamber of international courts and NGOs, waging lawfare against Israel’s existence.
British Jews who believed that Sir Keir Starmer had rid Labour of its hard-left animus against Israel are now being forced to confront what they so unwisely chose to deny: that anti-Zionism and antisemitism remain hardwired into the Labour Party and the left in general.
Others have pointed to the increasing importance to Labour of the Muslim vote, and the emergence in the Commons of a sectarian bloc of five independent MPs who campaigned in the general election “for Gaza”.
These factors have certainly played a large part in the new government’s hostility to Israel. However, we shouldn’t downplay the stupefying ignorance and institutionalised malice of the Foreign Office.
Last week, I set out in The Times Israel’s excruciating dilemma over the need both to rescue the hostages and defeat Hamas. In a subsequent letter to the paper claiming that I was “on another planet”, Edward Chaplin, Britain’s former ambassador to Jordan and Iraq, wrote that Israeli leaders needed the “moral courage” to persuade the country that peace could only be achieved “via negotiations that give the Palestinians a state they can call their own”.
This is the kind of boilerplate ignorance that might be expected from the “globalise the intifada” mob who don’t know from which river or to which sea “Palestine” must be free. But from a former senior diplomat? Does the former ambassador to Jordan and Iraq really not know that the Palestinian Arabs were offered a state of their own (to which the Jews agreed) in 1937, 1939, 1947, 2000 and 2008, but rejected it on every occasion in favour of war or terror?
Apparently not. Nor do his current equivalents in the US State Department, who insist that the way to stop the seven-front genocidal war being waged by Iran and its proxies to destroy Israel and the West is to establish a Palestinian state run by more Iranian proxies intent upon destroying Israel.
In both Britain and America, the foreign policy establishment similarly regurgitates as truth murderous Hamas lies.
The Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, intoned: “Israel’s actions in Gaza continue to lead to immense loss of civilian life, widespread destruction to civilian infrastructure, and immense suffering”.
An American diplomatic official complained to The Times about the “relentlessness and ferocity” of Israel’s war and said it was a “head-scratcher” why Israel thought “this scorched-earth policy” was the best way to fight its enemies.
This was all drivel. If Israel’s war had really been “ferocious” and “scorched- earth”, the population of Gaza would have been decimated. Instead, the IDF has been regularly moving the entire population out of harm’s way — while Hamas has been using those civilians as cannon fodder and human shields.
The only people claiming “immense loss of civilian life” are Hamas, its UN patsies and other fellow-travellers. The number of civilians killed in Gaza according to Hamas statistics is ludicrous, since not one terrorist is acknowledged among the total. Given the number of terrorists whom Israel says it has killed in this war, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in Gaza is unprecedentedly low and a fraction of the proportion of civilians killed in British and American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of course, this hallucinatory anti-Israel derangement is now widespread. But how does one explain its grip amongst officials in government departments that actually deal daily with foreign affairs?
The British foreign service has a history of vicious opposition to the Jewish homeland, going back to the Palestine Mandate in the 1920s. Foreign Office diplomats were entranced by an entirely romantic view of the Arab world combined with an entirely cynical estimation of its value to British interests.
This older “camel corps” has been superseded by a new breed of Israel-hating officials, the “progressive” leftists who subscribe to the brain-dead myth that Israel is a colonialist interloper that has oppressed the “indigenous” Palestinians and deprived them of a state of their own.
Precisely because they specialise in world affairs, western diplomats are the supreme worshippers at the shrine of universalism, the doctrine that fetishises transnational courts where international law has been turned into a weapon of Israel’s destruction.
In addition, the one-time intellectual powerhouse of the Foreign Office has become dismayingly dumbed down. In the London Review of Books in 2016, a despairing letter from a former Foreign Office official lamented that, from 2007 onwards, it had become a “hollowed-out shell”, with “a cult of managerialism that seemed to regard foreign policy as an inconvenient side-issue” — and was now known to the general public only for its travel advice.
It was bad enough under the (mostly) Israel-friendly Conservatives. Now that Israel-bashing Labour is in the government stables, Foreign Office bigotry is free to gallop out of control.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist
