Starmer’s moral clarity on Ukraine is absent when it comes to the Jewish state

While he thinks any compromise with Russian president Vladimir Putin would amount to surrender and an invitation to further aggression, he has constantly urged upon Israel a ceasefire and a resumption of “two-state solution” negotiations with the Palestinians – which would incentivise them to redouble their attempt to destroy the Jewish state.

While his government expresses horror that the Trump administration is sanitising Putin with lies, Starmer continues to promulgate a narrative that demonises Israel and foments hatred of Jews.

In parliament earlier this month, Starmer rebuked Israel for blocking aid supplies to Gaza, inevitably fuelling the belief that it’s unlawful. This is untrue. The Geneva Convention requires limited humanitarian aid for civilians, but only if no advantage will result “to the military efforts or economy of the enemy”.

Since Hamas has seized most of the aid delivered to Gaza during the war, depriving its inhabitants of essential supplies while making millions of dollars on the black market to keep its genocidal war going, it’s clear that withholding aid is not only legal but entirely justifiable.

Yet despite being a human rights lawyer, Starmer has not only lent his name to this misrepresentation of international law but has consistently reinforced the wicked narrative that Israel has been blocking essential aid supplies.

He has suspended some arms supplies to Israel and refuses to acknowledge what Trump has grasped: that the Gazans have been hopelessly indoctrinated into wanting to destroy Israel and murder Jews.

Liri Albag, the freed 20-year-old Israeli hostage, has related what happened when she was dragged into captivity. “When I saw the Gaza crowd – women, children, the elderly, young men – running after the car, praising the terrorists, kissing them, celebrating, I understood: there are no innocent civilians there,” she said.

Other former hostages have said that not one Gazan behaved kindly towards them or tried to help them. IDF soldiers have related how every house they entered in Gaza contained a Hamas terrorist tunnel. Opinion polls show the vast majority of Gazans want to murder Jews and destroy Israel.

Yet while Trump gets the difference between aggressor and victim over Israel, he appears to deny it with Ukraine.

He’s clear that Hamas are an unconscionable enemy that must be eradicated. Noting in a message to the terrorist group that he had “just met with your former hostages whose lives you have destroyed,” he said: “I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job. Not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say.”

This moral clarity is absent in his attitude to Ukraine. You don’t have to like Zelensky or the Ukrainians to understand that, with Putin making plain that he wants to reconstruct the ancient Russian empire, he must be deterred if Europe is to be defended and tyrants around the world aren’t to be emboldened.

By blaming Ukraine for starting the war and then claiming to be holding the ring between the two sides, Trump is doing to Ukraine what the Palestinian narrative does to Israel: blaming the victim while sanitising and incentivising the aggressor – all under the bankrupt rubric of moral equivalence.

With Trump constantly erupting with new edicts, it is a foolish person who would confidently predict the likely outcome of his attitude towards either Ukraine or Israel. Maybe he will bring peace in our time to both these theatres of war. Maybe he will lose faith in Putin’s word while his own words on Israel turn out to be hollow.

The irony is that his self-image as peacemaker may land Trump in the space normally occupied by his foes on the left – opposing war at all costs and instead negotiating with the devil; while Starmer, the liberal universalist, committed to law not war and would thus deny Israel the military victory that justice requires, treats the Donbas as his Waterloo.