The former leader of Israel’s Labour Party has warned that imposing an arms embargo on Israel would strengthen Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with the JC, Michaeli, who led Israel's Labour Party from 2021 until earlier this year after she stood down as party leader following the party's disappointing performance in the 2022 general election and was succeeded by former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan, rebuked those calling for tougher measures against Israel: “Maybe people think inflicting an embargo on Israel is for Israel's good, but it's not. It's not because it does not bring a ceasefire any closer,” adding it “does not promote peace.”

She said: “Any kind of sanctions on Israel have not worked in the past. On the contrary, it only strengthens the right, because it goes to show them that, ‘everyone's against us’, even those who we thought were our allies.”

Michaeli condemned those who would seek to create an equivalence between Israel and Hamas or Hezbollah: “at the end of the day, Israel is a state and not a terror organisation … it belongs to the democratic free world. Yes, we have our challenges, but so does every democracy these days”.

She also warned that additional punitive measures would “weaken Israel” and, “really threaten the people who live in it. It really jeopardises us” as well as “strengthen the bad guys of the world. And I think some people who want to do good somehow miss that.”

However, despite the fact that in government the UK Labour Party has taken measures such as a limited restriction of arms sales to Israel, Michaeli said she was “appreciative” that “Labour supports Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself” and acknowledged Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer – who she described as a “very impressive person and politician”, having met him while she was Labour leader – was “under huge pressure from people who don't necessarily support Israel” to take a more critical approach to the Jewish state, as other European socialist parties have.

Former Israeli Labour Party leader Merav Michaeli with Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer (right). Credit: Labour Friends of Israel.

During her visit to the UK organised by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) Michaeli met various British politicians, including Middle East Minister Hamish Falconer. While the JC’s interview with her was taking place in Westminster, an Urgent Question had been granted in the House of Commons regarding the Knesset voting to take restrictive measures against controversial Palestinian UN agency Unrwa.

As Labour MPs lined up to condemn the vote, Michaeli explained why there is such a disconnect between the two parliaments. “The reason why there's such an unbelievable consensus in Israel against Unrwa today is because of October 7”, Michaeli said, referencing the Israeli claims that staff working for the agency participated in the atrocities. Even if only a handful of Unrwa staff took direct part in the massacre, “a lot of people who work in Unrwa are Hamas's people” she said.

She said she regretted that Israeli governments had not taken on the issues and controversies associated with Unrwa prior to the conflict: “only for Palestinians there is a designated agency with a completely different definition of a refugee, which, instead of lessening the number of refugees, only increases them”. Unlike the standard definition of a refugee, according to Unrwa, a Palestinian refugee is defined as, “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict”.  Their descendants are also counted as refugees, meaning that their numbers have increased from around 750,000 to nearly six million today. “That really does not make any sense”, Michaeli said.

A journalist and broadcaster before stepping into frontline politics, she is critical of the world media’s coverage of the conflict: “The reality in Israel is absent from international media. It is certainly very frustrating.”

She’s exasperated by perceptions that Israelis are “happy to go to war” or “don’t care” about the ongoing hostilities. “Look at our casualties and the price that we pay, how, how can it be portrayed as if we don't care?” she asked. “Israelis want this war over. This is completely not portrayed. The people of Israel don't get any airtime”.

Also in Michaeli’s crosshairs was the easy ride given to Hamas by many UK broadcasters: “This is a terror organisation terrorising its own people … it is a part of a big scheme headed by Iran that wants to destroy the State of Israel, that wants to kill Jews for being Jews”.

Alongside her passionate defence of Israel, Michaeli is just as fervent about opposing Netanyahu’s government.

Her new party, The Democrats, formed by a merger of Labour and left-wing party Meretz, recently announced that they would walk out of the Knesset chamber when members of the far-right extremist Kahanist coalition party Otzma Yehudit, led by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, take the podium. “I’ve never, ever, ever stayed on the floor when any of them were speaking”, she said.

Does she blame Netanyahu for giving the extremists legitimacy? Prior to the last Israeli election, he backed a merger between Otzma Yehudit and far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s party Religious Zionism to help secure more seats for his right-wing coalition.

“I have been blaming Bibi forever. Seriously, I blame Bibi for a lot of things. This is why I hope that we get elections as soon as possible ... And this is why I was part of forming the government that replaced Netanyahu, even though it wasn't the government of my dreams”, she said referring to the short-lived coalition government that led to Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid becoming prime ministers in a union of left-wing and right-wing parties alongside Arab party Ra’am.

A longstanding feminist campaigner throughout her career, her principles extent to the semantics of her social media posts. Michaeli makes the point of using both the feminine and masculine forms in Hebrew (in which verbs always denote a subject's sex, and the masculine form tends to be the default).

What was her reaction to the outright dismissal by some women’s groups of the gender-based violence experienced by Israeli women on October 7?

“This is really, really a soft spot”, she said and after a lengthy pause continued: “It makes me sad and it makes me discouraged, not because they did not stand up with Israeli women, but because they fell for everything that we as feminist women have been fighting, for forever.”

“They have been acting towards us the way women have been treated forever … if you can't remember that we have to believe each other because we are women, because we are still unequal in the world, and because if you don't stand together, we don't stand a chance, then it'll come back to haunt us … It works against the hundreds of years of feminist battles to acknowledge women's lives, reality, rights and so forth… I wasn't, hurt or offended as an Israeli woman. I was sorry to see my sisters, feminist women, fall into the patriarchy’s trap. It jeopardises all of us in the longer run.”