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The new UK government’s anti-Israel policy is a disgrace

Lammy’s enthusiasm for targeting Israel should not come as a surprise, given his long-standing sympathy for Islamist extremists.

By Con Coughlin, Gatestone Institute

The pretence that the UK’s new Labour government has moved away from the blatant anti-Semitism that was rife under its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has been brutally exposed by the actions of David Lammy, the party’s new Foreign Secretary.

Prior to his appointment to one of the British government’s key positions in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s new administration, Lammy had made his name as a Left-wing firebrand.

Having first come to prominence within the Labour movement for his campaigning on racial equality issues, he became closely associated with hard-Left members of the Labour Party, including both Corbyn and former London mayor Ken Livingstone.

It was during Corbyn’s stint as Labour leader that his party faced constant accusations of anti-Semitism.

A damning report produced by the Jewish Labour Movement in 2019 said the party harboured “endemic, institutional anti-Semitism” and that there was “overwhelming evidence that anti-Semitic conduct is pervasive at all levels of the party.”

It stated that Corbyn himself “has repeatedly associated with, sympathised with and engaged in anti-Semitism.”

The following year an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found Labour responsible for three breaches of the Equality Act:

Political interference in anti-Semitism complaints, failure to provide adequate training to those handling anti-Semitism complaints and harassment, including the use of anti-Semitic tropes and suggesting that complaints of anti-Semitism were fake or smears.

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The commission concluded that the evidence pointed to a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it.

Corbyn’s failure to accept the commission’s findings led to his suspension from the Labour Party, and being banned from standing as a Labour candidate in July’s general election.

He instead contested and won his London seat as an independent, and has now formed a so-called “Independent Alliance” with four other pro-Gaza MPs elected in July’s election.

Meanwhile, Ken Livingstone, another former ally of Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, was banned from the Labour Party in 2016 for “bringing the party into disrepute” after arguing that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler supported Zionism.

Having been a close political ally of two prominent Labour politicians accused of anti-Semitism, it is hardly surprising therefore that two of Lammy’s first initiatives since his appointment as Labour’s new foreign secretary in July have been aimed at discrediting Israel.

His first act was to withdraw the British government’s official objection to attempts to persuade the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on war crimes charges.

Under the previous Conservative Party government of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the UK had opposed the move on the grounds that, as Sunak commented, it was “deeply unhelpful”, and that “there was no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defence and the terrorist group Hamas. It is wrong to conflate and equivocate between those two different entities.”

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In one of his first acts as Foreign Secretary, though, Lammy reversed Britain’s stand, saying that it would now support the initiative to arrest the Israeli PM, a move that resulted in Netanyahu refusing to meet the British envoy when he visited Israel in August for an update on ceasefire negotiations.

At the same time, Lammy confirmed that the UK was to restore its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for supporting Palestinian refugees, after support for the organisation was withdrawn by a number of countries — including the US — over claims its staffers were directly involved in the October 7 attacks carried out by Iranian-backed Hamas terrorists against Israel.

Lammy has now added to his anti-Israel stance by suspending a number of UK arms contracts to Israel, a decision that was announced on the same day that Israel buried the latest group of hostages to be murdered by Hamas terrorists, a decision that was denounced by Netanyahu as “shameful”.

Lammy’s enthusiasm for targeting Israel should not come as a surprise, given his long-standing sympathy for Islamist extremists.

As a junior minister in Tony Blair’s government in 2006, for example, the Harvard-educated Lammy called for the British media to provide a platform for them to air their “poisonous” views.

His appeal came shortly after a cell of al-Qaeda terrorists had carried out their worst terrorist attack against the UK with the London bombings in July 2005, murdering 72 innocent commuters and wounding more than 700.

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More recently, at an event during the UK’s recent general election campaign, Lammy confirmed that Labour would recognise Palestine as a state if they were to form the next government, presumably indifferent as to whether or not the state was still terrorist.

While Lammy’s anti-Israel policies will undoubtedly appeal to the Labour’s Party’s hard-Left, they are also likely to place Starmer’s government on a collision course with Washington, which has concluded there are no grounds for suspending arms deals with Israel, and that the creation of Palestinian state, as agreed in the Oslo Accords, is contingent on successful peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Responding to Lammy’s decision to suspend arms sales to Israel, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed that, despite exhaustive investigation, the US had not reached “any final determinations” about Israel’s alleged violations of humanitarian law during the Gaza conflict — Lammy’s main argument for justifying his decision.

Lammy’s blatant anti-Israel agenda will also place the UK’s long-standing strategic alliance with Israel under intense strain.

Having worked closely on a number of vital security issues, such as Iran’s nuclear programme and the threat posed by Islamist terrorists, the Israeli government will be disinclined to maintain cooperation with the UK’s new Labour government so long as Lammy remains foreign secretary.