Starmer's Palestine ultimatum is as empty and as it is dangerous
Sir Keir Starmer has demanded that Israel 's prime minister end the 'appalling' situation in Gaza and stop plans to annex the West Bank, currently occupied by Israel.
If Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't do this then the UK will recognise a Palestinian State. Some 144 countries - including UN Security Council permanent members Russia and China - have already done that but Netanyahu has continued his onslaught on Gaza.
The UK can and should go much further.
Thirty one prominent Israelis have demanded, in a letter to the Guardian, that their own country be subjected to immediate economic sanctions.
Britain must rally to their side to save Israel and cauterize the infection of its relentless violence against Gaza before it spreads.
On Monday, the heads of five major Israeli universities called on Netanyahu to share the mortal imperative 'shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust' to do 'all we can to prevent cruel, indiscriminate harm to non-combat men, women and children' and warned that Israel risks being complicit in crimes against humanity.
Its targeting of the enclave leaves Israel charged with meeting all the definitions of ethic cleansing and multiple experts, including Israeli human rights groups, have accused the government of genocide. There would be a lot less parsing of the realities verses the interpretation of terms if any other nation was starving, bombing, shooting and shelling civilians in such quantities.
And this, for Starmer, is the issue. He appears worried that criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic. But he is behind the ethical curve. Israel should not be being threatened with a meaningless recognition of a 'Palestinian state' that Netanyahu has said he is opposed to anyway.
Israel must face immediate economic and cultural sanctions to show that the impunity which it has enjoyed so far on razing Gaza is over. Now is the time to end Israel's preferential trade deals with Europe, to shut down its access to international banking systems, and cripple its economy.
It is a moral failure on a national scale to allow the UK to continue to export arms or parts of weapons and planes, for use by Israel.
Israel needs to be saved from the extremism that has captured the Netanyahu government. Failure to do so would be a betrayal, among other things, of the ethical nobility that has been the global legacy of Judaism over three millennia.
The UK sanctioned Israeli government ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich in response to their repeated incitements of violence against Palestinians. But Netanyahu, against whom the International Criminal Court has issues an arrest warrant for war crimes, has faced no UK sanctions at all.
The head of Israel's air force, major general Tomer Bar, recently visited the UK and attended air displays and rubbed shoulders with RAF and other officers from around the world.
Bar is in charge of the organisation that has killed more Palestinian civilians than any other, ever. To date at least 60,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to local officials. More than 50 per cent are women and children, some are militants, murderers and hostage takers with Hamas and other groups.
Hamas, which is a murderous militant group, with dwindling support among Palestinians, wants to destroy Israel.
It is rightly designated a terrorist organisation and support for it in the UK is an offence.
But Israel has suffered no consequences from the UK for its continued assault on Gaza. Nor for the the relentless killing of Palestinians in the West Bank by extremist Israeli settlers - as they gobble up the ancestral lands of living Palestinians.
For decades there has been the argument that there is, and can be, no 'moral equivalence' between groups like Hamas and the Israeli state. The former is an organisation with murder in its heart. The latter was always described as the 'only democracy in the Middle East' with the 'most moral army in the world'.
Israel isn't a democracy. A nation that controls the lives of at least five million people in Gaza and the West Bank but refuses to incorporate them into its body politic for more than half a century isn't a democracy. I have seen IDF and Israeli border police shoot civilians and children, as well as journalists many times. It's not a 'moral army' as the daily horrors in Gaza have further shown.
If Israel, right now, is able to get away with what it is doing in Gaza it will spread the 'kill-or-be-killed' infection across the Middle East as surely as the same disease has ravaged the Democratic Republic of the Congo since the international community did nothing to end the impunity for genocide after the Rwandan horrors of 1994.
Once the shooting stops in Gaza, its population will be encouraged to leave by an unsanctioned Israeli government. The aim of the current campaign in the strip is, of course, the rescue of hostages and the elimination of Hamas. It is also the removal of its Palestinian population. If Israel is allowed to, it will rapidly move to that phase.
It will also learn that it can act with impunity on the West Bank. Far from a return to a 'two state process' as demanded by Starmer, Netanyahu or his successor is certain to annex what Israel wants of the West Bank, pen the remaining Palestinians into self-administering apartheid enclaves, and hope that they eventually clear off too.
Israel's near and far neighbours will see this. More radicals elements will harness the injustice visited on the Palestinians as proof that the West especially, hates Islam and plot more terror attacks around the world. The US and Israeli attacks on Iran's nuclear weapons programme has taught the ayatollahs running Tehran that their very survival now depends of getting a nuke.
A thick seam of decency runs through Israel. Peace Now, the anti-settler movement which monitors the West Bank, was founded by war heroes from Israel 1967 victory in the Six Day war when the West Bank was captured from Jordan.
Bet Selem, the leading Israeli human rights group, Physicians for Human Rights, and Breaking the Silence are all populated by high minded former Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers who are horrified by what their country has been doing.
Some support the idea of economic sanctions to end Israel's impunity, Some do not. But none I have ever spoken to agrees with the premise that calling for boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions against Israel is antisemitic.
Britain has no heft in the Netanyahu government. Its colonial legacy is only felt now on the West Bank where British laws left over from the Palestinian Mandate are used by the IDF to blow up the homes of alleged 'terrorists'.
Former IDF spokesman Lt Col Peter Lerner tweeted a long thread in support of a two state solution and pointed out that 'Israel's war with Hamas is also a war of legitimacy.
'And with every image of suffering, every unchecked [Israeli] ministerial outburst, every diplomatic snub, we are losing it,' he wrote.
He added: 'If we conflate Hamas with all Palestinians, we fall into Hamas' trap: turning our self defence into collective punishment. That's not just a PR failure, it's a strategic one'.
Britain can reinforce that message with sanctions or at least the immediate threat of them. The good people of Israel need help, and now.
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