Published in the Jerusalem Report, 16 October 2025
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That was a sensible qualification,
and nothing has changed since it was published except the rapid rise in Britain
of hard-left opinion following the election, and a torrent of Hamas-inspired
propaganda on social and public media.
The relentless onslaught of disinformation from Gaza, swallowed in whole
or in large part by the media, incorporated concocted death and casualty
figures, orchestrated fatal incidents presented so as to make Israel appear responsible,
and staged photographs depicting a vastly worse situation than the reality
which, in all conscience, was bad enough.
Britain’s general election in July 2024 resulted in a massive win for the Labour party. Starmer came to power with a huge majority. The results also threw up a few anomalies.
Traditionally, general elections in Britain turn on domestic issues. The economy and health are usually to the forefront of voters’ minds, together with the record of the incumbent government. This time around, though, for one bloc of ethnic minority voters a foreign war taking place 3000 miles away was more important than all the usual domestic concerns.
The activities of a brand new
organization calling itself The Muslim Vote cost the Labour party five seats,
slashed Labour majorities in a fair number of other constituencies, and placed
a caucus of rabidly anti-Israel MPs in the House of Commons.
The Muslim Vote was set up in December
2023 by an activist named Abubakr Nanabawa. It was a response
to the Labour Party’s initial decision to support Israel’s right of defense, following
Hamas’s horrifying pogrom on October 7, 2023. Any support for
Israel, justified or not, is anathema to pro-Palestinian activists. The Muslim Vote was an alliance of 23 such organizations. Its purpose was to unseat those MPs deemed insufficiently
hostile to Israel, particularly Labour party members. Its candidates would stand in opposition to
Labour, advocate immediate recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state and demand
the banning of all arms sales to Israel.
They succeeded beyond their expectations. In five constituencies its candidates beat their Labour opponents, and were voted into parliament. Once there they formed themselves into a new pro-Palestinian bloc – the Independent Alliance – headed by Jeremy Corbyn, one-time leader of the Labour party.
Suspended from the party in 2020 by its new leader, Keir Starmer, for antisemitic attitudes and remarks, he stood as an independent and trounced his Labour opponent, winning 49% of the votes compared to Labour’s 34%.
The other four pro-Palestine MPs
were elected in areas with among the highest proportion of Muslim voters in the
UK. One of Labour’s biggest shocks on election night was when the party’s
shadow Treasury minister, Jonathan Ashworth, lost his Leicester South seat by
around 1,000 votes to Shockat Adam.
“This is for Gaza!” declared Adam,
as he made his victory speech.
Then came a surprising development – the launch on July 24 of a new left-wing party. Founded jointly by Jeremy Corbyn and MP Zarah Sultana, who resigned from the Labour party to assume her new role, the new party started life with no name. Even though widely labelled by the cheeky and irreverent “the fruit and nut party” (Sultana being the fruit and Corbyn the nut case), the four remaining members of the Independent Alliance immediately backed it.
The public response, too, was
rapid and positive, with supporter sign-ups quickly running into the hundreds
of thousands. By mid-September they were
pushing a million.
Gaza and pro-Palestine sentiments
featured strongly in the party’s founding principles –both Corbyn and Sultana,
as well as the independent MPs who back them, have repeatedly cited the Gaza conflict
and Israeli policy as a key reason for creating the new party. Their platform explicitly includes opposition
to arms sales to Israel and support for Gaza and for Palestinian statehood.
Faced with these pressures,
Starmer and the lacklustre David Lammy, UK foreign secretary until the Cabinet
reshuffle of September 6, sacrificed principle for appeasement. Because their early support for Israel’s
right to defend itself was continuously challenged by strident left-wing voices,
their backing soon merged into muted, then ever-stronger, anti-Israel sentiment
and action.
Lammy’s period as foreign secretary was marked by his unquestioning acceptance of Hamas propaganda, and a vociferous anti-Israel stance. An early act as foreign secretary was to maintain that he was legally obligated to implement the International Criminal Court’s misguided arrest warrant against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His position contrasted with France's view that Netanyahu benefited from immunity from the ICC.
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When Lammy publicly asserted that
Israel had breached international law by blocking humanitarian supplies into
Gaza, his statement was formally disowned by Starmer’s office. Subsequently, Lammy restricted certain arms
sales to Israel, and supported France in its intention to recognize a non-existent Palestinian state.
Just a few words uttered by Lammy encapsulates
the extent to which he and Britain’s Labour government was in thrall to the
extremist pro-Palestinian elements now dominating the parliamentary party.
Speaking
to the UN Security Council on July 29, he
said that the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government said that it
viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people, “came with the solemn promise that nothing shall be done which
may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the Palestinian people as well.
And colleagues, this has not been upheld, and it is a historical injustice
which continues to unfold.”
He used much the same language in
a House of Commons debate on September 1.
But of course the Balfour
Declaration said no such thing. It
contained no mention of “the Palestinian people”, because no such entity
existed in 1917. What it does say is:
“nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
And there were a fair number of them, including Muslim and Christian
Arabs, Druze, Bedouin, Circassians, Samaritans and Armenians.
Lammy’s replacement as Britain’s
foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, is cause for cautious optimism. Based on her long ministerial experience – she
was a junior minister in Tony Blair’s Labour administration in 1997 – she is
likely to adopt a more nuanced approach to the complex challenges facing today’s
Middle East. During her term as Home
Secretary in the current government, one of Cooper’s more notable actions was
to proscribe the hard-left, anti-Israel group, Palestine Action.
She did so after Palestine Action
activists broke into a military airfield on June 20 and caused damage valued at
around £7 million to two planes, by spraying red paint into their turbine
engines and attacking them with crowbars. Four people were subsequently charged
with conspiracy and criminal damage.
When a Palestine Action protest was
staged outside parliament in August, Cooper publicly defended the UK police
authorities who arrested more than 500 people. Nearly 900 were arrested in a pro-Palestine
Action gathering in September. Cooper said
that many sympathizers did not “know the full nature” of those running the
group.
Palestine Action was doubtless celebrating on the day that Britain recognized a state of Palestine, even though the gesture was nothing but symbolic. Palestine has no legal existence as a state, no government, no control of its borders, and is currently split into two entities, one of them still partly controlled by a terrorist organization.
To
say that recognition was seen by Hamas as a reward for its genocidal attack on
Israel on October 7 is to state the obvious
– the organization said as much.
Britain’s act of recognition, unrelated to any peace process, was truly
shameful.
https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/article-870647
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