In the new world order, Europe needs Israel

You hardly need me to tell you that we live in bizarre times. The President of the United States believes that Ukraine somehow forced Vladimir Putin to invade it, and that it is Ukraine’s democratically elected president who is a dictator – rather than the man who has ruled Russia since 2000 and is the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Joseph Stalin. But bonkers as all that may be, the sight of the United States voting alongside Russia, Belarus and North Korea (and, strikingly and no less shockingly, Israel) against a UN resolution calling for a “comprehensive, just, and lasting peace” in Ukraine was something else altogether. The world has truly turned on its axis.

As John Bolton, national security adviser to President Trump in his first term (for just 17 months, before a spectacular falling out) has put it: “Trump has effectively switched sides in the Russo-Ukraine war, joining Russia. The US has aligned itself not with our allies in Nato, but with the longstanding, principal threat to Nato: Moscow. It’s unthinkable that an American president would do this.” Unthinkable, yes. But it happened.

We have to recalibrate everything. On Tuesday the prime minister said that UK defence spending would rise by 0.2 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, and to 3 per cent by the next parliament. That’s a start, albeit a pretty slow and unsatisfactory start. But it does at least show a willingness by Sir Keir Starmer to re-examine his previous positions. The extra money, after all, is coming from the aid budget, and if you had said last July when Labour took office that within a year Sir Keir would be telling the Commons that he was slashing foreign aid to pay for weapons and soldiers… well, we would be in men-in-white-coats territory. And yet here we are.

Which brings us to Israel.

In September the foreign secretary, David Lammy, suspended 30 arms export licences to Israel. This followed his resumption of funding to Unrwa and the government dropping its predecessor’s opposition to the ICC arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. We can all proffer our own explanations of what lay behind these decisions, but the message was clear: where the Conservatives had stood solidly behind Israel, Labour would do no such thing. If presented with a chance to make a political point that goes down well with some of the voters Labour needs to curry favour with, it would seize it.

Because the crucial point about the suspension of the arms export licences is that it was only ever a piece of political positioning. UK arms sales to Israel are relatively trivial, worth less than £50 million a year and comprising less than 0.9 per cent of Israel’s total arms imports. None of the sales are weapons; almost all relate to radars used for air defence and dual-use goods. The suspension was gesture politics.

But what an idiotic gesture it turns out to have been. Leave aside any predisposition towards Israel, and any anger that the government chose to dump on Israel not just while it was engaged in a critical battle with Hamas but, in effect, because it was engaged in a critical battle with Hamas. Look at the state of things today in cool, dispassionate terms.

With the US now allying itself with Russia and with the future of Nato looking at best unclear – with everything now up in the air – the issue for the British government, whose first responsibility is the defence of the realm, is who, what and where we can rely on for our defence. Israel has previously been and, according to the PM, remains one of our closest allies. It also happens to be one of the most innovative and brilliant nations on Earth when it comes to defence, allying its hi-tech genius with its unavoidable focus on securing its people’s safety. The UK (along with the rest of Europe) needs to strengthen and deepen our military and strategic cooperation with Israel.

Even at the time the suspension 30 arms export licences seemed a pathetic gesture – and a self-lacerating one, since far more defence equipment (and vital intelligence) now comes the other way, from Israel to the UK. The Royal Air Force relies on Israeli tech to get its planes in the air, and Israeli drones and armoured-vehicle defences protected British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the post-Trump inauguration world, of course, it has become even more stupid. Time for a reverse ferret – and PDQ, as they say.

Time, also, to come down with the full force of national security law on those such as Palestine Action who attempt to stop defence and military cooperation between Israel and the UK. We live in a new world order, moving on from the previous new world order.

And in this one, there is no room for those who threaten our security.