The sanctions are not about hurting Israel but capitulating to sectarian politics
Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich shame Israel. It disgraces the country that they serve in its cabinet, and their presence in the government demonstrates that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu puts his own career above the needs of his own people.
All of which has nothing to do with the British government, which has no business deciding who should and should not be in the government of foreign nations. We gave up ordering the colonials around when we stopped running the Empire.
The sanctions against Ben-Gvir and Smotrich will have precisely zero impact on Israel. For one thing, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy: I doubt either of them have the least desire to visit a country with a Government that so brazenly panders to the anti-Israel brigade.
Because it is obvious what this is about. The statement announcing the sanctions was jointly signed by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway – four of the most obsessively anti-Israel nations on earth under their current governments.
Last week, for example, Australia banned an Israeli tech entrepreneur, Hillel Fuld, from entry over his supposed 'Islamophobia rhetoric' – in reality, exposing Hamas' Islamist supporters – and, in a deeply Orwellian accusation, for denying media reports of alleged Israeli war crimes. All today's statement needed was the signatures of Spain and Ireland for the full set.
Labour has spent its first year in office pandering to its anti-Israel MPs, with a mix of dangerous and performative gestures that expose the shallowness of its foreign policy. Restoring funding to Unrwa, despite the allegations that some of its employees took part in the October 7 massacre; banning the export of some arms to Israel; backing the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and the former Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant; now this.
But it is not even Labour's own MPs that this gesture is really aimed at. Rather it is the potential supporters of the next cadre of so-called 'Independent Gaza' MPs. Labour is scared witless by the rise of sectarian politics in its constituencies.
There are 37 constituencies with a Muslim population over 20 per cent, and in a further 73 seats the Muslim population is between 10 and 20 per cent. Labour's vote fell by over 14 per cent last year from 2019 in those constituencies where the Muslim population was above 15 per cent. This is a huge problem for Labour. It is not Israel that the party is most concerned will notice the sanctions, but Muslim voters in Britain.
As for the sanctions themselves: the hypocrisy is mind-blowing. Qatar funds and houses Hamas. But we do not sanction Qatar. We beg for its money. But then hypocrisy and cant define this Government.
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