When shameless Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu calls the UK government’s block on just 30 of 350 arms export licences to Israel a “shameful decision”, he is speaking as a man indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and corruption, including including breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, in Israel’s own courts. Watching him its hard to imagine that he has any self awareness at all.

He also seems incapable of grasping that his description of Hamas, as “a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1200 people on October 7”, begs the question of how anyone objective would define his own armed forces; who have killed 40 times as many people since. A lot of weight is being put on the adverbs and adjectives in this description. Are those 40,000 deaths not murders? Are the killings not savage? Are the people of Gaza not being terrorised? Is this not genocidal? The International Criminal Court has made an interim ruling saying that it is.

The comment on this limited ban below by UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis (in italics) is similarly morally compromised; which is shown when you consider the situation in the round (not in italics).

“It beggars belief that the British government, a close strategic ally of Israel, has announced a partial suspension of arms licences, at a time when Israel is fighting a war for its very survival on seven fronts. The “war for its very survival” takes the form of a massacre in Gaza courtesy of US arms supplies and diplomatic backing, escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a nervous stand off in the North with Hezbollah. Any other “fronts”, like the Red Sea, Eastern Med or Persian Gulf are being covered by gigantic US aircraft carrier task forces; with a few Royal Navy frigates to show willing.

But clearly, for Sir Ephraim, the over 40,000 people killed by the IDF in the Gaza strip since October 7th and the further 502 in the West Bank are not enough. Many more have to die to ensure Israel’s survival as an apartheid state. For Mirvis, because Israel is a “strategic ally”, we should be prepared to turn a blind eye to what it is doing and keep passing it the ammunition so it can keep doing it. The UK complicity here is its usual auxiliary effort to the main supply from the United States, which is rushing just under two arms shipments a day; which it would not be doing if it didn’t think doing so was in its own interests.

And that means that all too often the game that is played in the media is to treat Israeli victims as rounded human beings deserving of sympathy and identification, while Palestinian victims are just statistics. Because large numbers tend to blur in the mind, it might bring the reality home more to condiers just the casualties of the Israeli assault in the last three days.

This is from the UN OCHA report.

• On 1 September, 11 Palestinians were killed and tens of others injured when Safad school hosting Internally Displaced Persons was hit in Az Zaitoun neighbourhood, east of Gaza city.
• On 29 August, nine Palestinians, including three children (of whom two were newborn), and two women (of whom one was pregnant), were killed when the upper floor of a residential tower was hit in western An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in Deir al Balah.
• On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and at least 13 others injured in Deir al Balah.
• On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and others injured when internally displaced people’s (IDP) tents were hit in Wadi Saber area, east Khan Younis.
• On 31 August, seven Palestinians from the same family were killed when a house was hit in As Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city.
• On 31 August, five Palestinians, including three females and a doctor, were killed when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
• On 31 August, five Palestinians, including four females, were killed and 15 others injured when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.

Mirvis goes on that such action has been forced upon it (Israel) on the 7th October, as if the genocidal scale of the reaction is not Israel’s responsibility and without reflecting that,

• before Oct 7th, 20 Palestinians were being killed in the conflict for every Israeli
• and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank was proceeding slowly but surely in the face of world indifference.

This is odd because he is very well aware of the latter, having taken part in National Day demonstrations in East Jerusalem in which settlers march through Palestinian Streets while chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn”.

He emphasises that this is “at the very moment when six hostages murdered in cold blood by cruel terrorists were being buried by their families” – without reflecting that had Netanyahu not sabotaged the recent ceasefire deal those hostages would probably still be alive. This has not gone unnoticed in Israel itself, leading to a General Strike and furious demonstrations last Monday.

He also does not mention the 184 Palestinians killed over the weekend by the IDF. Does he think those 184 people were not killed in cold blood? Or that their killers were kind? And consider the numbers. 184 to 6. Thirty one times as many people. Nearly three Grenfells. Half a primary school full.

That ratio of 31 deaths to 1 indicates how little these lives weigh in the balance. Their names will not be published. Nor will their pictures. Their relatives will not be interviewed. Their stories will barely be acknowledged. So, Sir Ephraim can look, and not see. Truly eyeless in Gaza.

On the same page, on the same day, as part of his pitch for the Conservative leadership, Tom Tugendhat called for the UK to be “willing to stand by our allies” (Israel) by continuing to supply it with arms as it, according to Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, creates a “situation in Gaza that is beyond desperate… Civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear,” including

• Severe overcrowding, coupled with the lack of clean water, sanitation facilities and basic hygiene items like soap, which is taking a heavy toll on children, with skin infections continuing to increase among them. As of 30 June, WHO had already recorded 103,385 cases of scabies and lice, 65,368 cases of skin rashes and 11,214 cases of chickenpox in the Strip.
• With MSF support, the Palestinian Agricultural Development Association (PARC) has been providing emergency latrines, solar water pumps and basic health care to some of the displaced people arriving in the Al Mawasi area of Khan Younis. “Every day, we see between 300 to 400 people at the medical clinic, of which 200 cases are related to skin conditions,” explained PARC pediatrician Dr. Youssef Salaf Al-Farra, underscoring that children are the most affected by highly contagious skin conditions.
• MSF claims that, for three months, it has been trying to import 4,000 hygiene kits, comprising items such as soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and laundry power, to improve living conditions in Khan Younis, but the importation has not been allowed by Israeli authorities (my emphasis).

As Tugendhat puts it, if you can’t “stand by an ally” at times like this when it is busily reducing children to misery, “what is the point of an alliance?” So true. Because in an alliance, what “our” allies do gets brushed under the carpet, understated, justified, euphemised out of existence.

UK defence secretary, John Healey’s comment that that Britain remained “a staunch ally” of Israel and that the ban on just 30 liscences out of 350 would not “have a material impact on Israel’s security” shows that he hopes this level of gesture will be enough to defuse the pressure of the solidarity movement on the government, while it continues to “stand by an ally” no matter what it does. It won’t be. Israel reacts so aggresively to these gestures not because they undermine its practical capacity to keep killing on a mass scale, but because they undermine its perceived legitimacy in doing so. When even “unshakable” allies like the UK feel compelled to take even a symbolic distance, the ground is moving under its feet.

All the more reason to keep up the pressure. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign petition for a complete end to the arms trade with Israel is here.

The scale of desperation to keep the narrative under control in the UK is shown by the deeply repressive arrests of journalists like Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson under “terrorism” legislation. This follows the Israeli style of narrative control, in which they have put 52 Palestinian journalists in prison and have killed 116 in Gaza.

The arrest of Medhurst – who was held for 24 hours – was under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This means that it doesn’t matter what is true. In a conflict in which

• our government defines one side as “terrorist” and the other side as a “democracy with a right to defend itself”
• and a context in which it is increasingly normative to describe inconvenient facts as ideologically driven opinions

reporting on facts that put that ally in a bad light can be framed as being supportive of a proscribed organisation especially if they are true. I must admit a certain trepidation in writing this, in case 16 counter-terrorism officers in balaclavas descend my home at 7.30 in the morning, and sieze this laptop and my phone for “content posted online” like they did to Helen Wilkinson.

At the same time, the police look as though they are angling for a confrontation at Saturday’s first mass solidarity demonstration of the Autumn by putting such restrictions on its assembly point and timing that will give them many excuses to make arrests, no matter how peaceful the demonstrators are.

The statement condemning this has so far been signed by

• Palestine Solidarity Campaign
• Palestinian Forum in Britain
• Friends of Al-Aqsa
• Stop the War Coalition
• Muslim Association of Britain
• Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Signatories

• Apsana Begum MP
• Baroness Christine Blower
• Richard Burgon MP
• Ian Byrne MP
• Jeremy Corbyn MP
• Lord Bryn Davies
• Maryam Eslamdoust, General Secretary TSSA
• Alex Gordon, President RMT
• Fran Heathcote, General Secretary, PCS
• Lord John Hendy
• Imran Hussain MP
• Daniel Kebede, General Secretary NEU
• Ayoub Khan MP
• Ian Lavery MP
• John Leach, Assistant General Secretary RMT
• Clive Lewis MP
• Mick Lynch, General Secretary RMT
• Andy McDonald MP
• John McDonnell MP
• Iqbal Mohammed MP
• Grahame Morris MP
• Zarah Sultana MP
• Jon Trickett MP
• Mick Whelan, General Secretary ASLEF
• Sarah Woolley, General Secretary BFAWU