Worrying signals on the Middle East from Britain’s new Labour government

A Labour government that backs continued funding for UNRWA, arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, and dialogue with the Iranian regime would amount to a major disappointment.

By Ben Cohen, JNS

It’s been only three weeks since Sir Keir Starmer was elected as Britain’s new prime minister in the Labour Party’s first general election triumph since 2005, but so much has happened in the aftermath—the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and the decision by U.S. President Joe Biden to bow out of the presidential contest in November, the speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Congress this week, among other episodes—that it feels like ancient history.

As the world’s attention has breathlessly switched to these and other matters, Starmer has been busy assembling his cabinet and figuring out his new government’s first priorities.

Aware of their poor electoral showings over the past two decades, the Labour Party and its organizers have wisely refrained from portraying the July 4 vote’s outcome as a foregone conclusion, even if the real shock would have been a Conservative victory given the deep unpopularity of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government.

It was an election, moreover, largely fought on domestic issues, and particularly, the crisis gripping the country’s National Health Service, which remains a bedrock of the social order carved out in Britain following World War II.

Dealing with those challenges will be the true test of whether or not Starmer succeeds.

Even so, foreign policy wasn’t entirely absent from the campaign.

The war in Gaza has been a lightning rod for the United Kingdom’s increasingly vocal Muslim community—about 500,000 of whom didn’t vote Labour, partly out of disgust with Starmer’s refusal to label the Israeli military’s operations as a “genocide.”

One of the tasks he faces now is how to win back those voters.

It’s a task complicated by the Labour Party’s recent history and Starmer’s own role in the torrid conflict over the antisemitism in its ranks.

From 2015 to 2020, the party was led by an antisemite from the far left, Jeremy Corbyn, whose term in the post was marred by successive scandals that resulted in the mass exodus of Jewish party members and a widespread refusal by British Jews to vote for the party—historically seen as their “natural home”—when Corbyn contested the 2019 election and lost decisively. After assuming the Labour leadership, Starmer, a centrist, set about purging the far-left.

That included Corbyn himself, who was suspended by Starmer in 2020 after he claimed that the scale of antisemitism in the party had been “dramatically overstated” and who was then banned from running as a Labour candidate in 2023 on the grounds that he was, in the estimation of the party’s executive, an electoral liability.

In the event, Corbyn ran as an independent candidate in this latest election, clinging on to the Islington North seat in London that he has represented since the early 1980s.

In several other constituencies, independents also edged out the Labour candidates, stressing their support for the Palestinians in those districts where Muslims constitute a significant proportion of the voter pool.

It wasn’t all gloomy on this front; perhaps the most satisfying result of the night was the ejection from parliament of George Galloway, a former Labour parliamentarian who has evolved into what can only be described as a “national socialist” from a seat he had won only a few months previously, bellowing “This is for Gaza!” after that earlier victory for good measure.

Galloway’s ouster on July 4 was a welcome sign that despite the chants of “We are all Palestinians” on pro-Hamas demonstrations, most British voters understand that Gaza is Gaza, and Britain is Britain.

Equally, though, the pro-Hamas chorus that has grown louder and more discordant since the Oct. 7 pogrom isn’t going away.

While many of the individuals who contributed to antisemitism during Corbyn’s tenure have been dealt with, their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict still enjoy widespread backing in the party, bolstered by the knowledge that the previous Conservative government was a reliable supporter of Israel.

When it comes to Starmer, there is no doubting his personal detestation of antisemitism and his determination to root it out of the Labour Party.

“Antisemitism is an evil and no political party that cultivates it deserves to hold power,” he remarked in 2020, before pledging that “the Labour Party is unrecognizable from 2019, and it will never go back.”

“Never” is, however, a dangerous word for a politician to utter. As it settles into office, Labour has already made three Middle East-related policy announcements that should be greeted with alarm.

This doesn’t mean that the party is returning to the dark days of Corbyn’s leadership, but it does suggest that the goal of stamping out antisemitism while being more sympathetic to Palestinian aspirations isn’t easily attainable.

One of the new government’s first acts was to reverse the Conservative decision to cease funding for UNRWA—the U.N. agency dedicated to the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees—after evidence emerged of UNRWA employees participating in the Oct. 7 atrocities in southern Israel.

That generated a response from Britain’s Jewish leadership, with the Board of Deputies gently chiding the Labour government by arguing that the evidence of UNRWA collaboration with Hamas terrorism “suggests to us that the Government would be wise to insist on much stricter oversight before resuming its annual funding of more than £30 million.”

Labour also backed down on a promise while in opposition to designate the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization—something the Conservatives had consistently refused to do.

No doubt seduced by the dangerous nonsense that Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezekshian, is a reformer, Foreign Secretary David Lammy dithered over the designation, saying: “We recognize there are real challenges from state-sponsored terrorist activity, and I want to look closely at those issues, and how the predecessor system works for states, as well as for specific terrorist organizations.”

Then, last week, the Labour government confirmed that it was dropping its predecessor’s objection to the pursuit of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, despite the Biden administration’s condemnation of this move at the time as “outrageous.”

The New York Times reported that these shifts in Middle East policy “show a government that is willing to pile more pressure on Mr. Netanyahu for Israel’s harsh military response in Gaza. It also shows that Mr. Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, is paying more heed to international legal institutions than the United States.”

A Labour government that backs continued funding for UNRWA, arrest warrants for Israeli leaders and dialogue with the Iranian regime would amount to a major disappointment.

The added danger is that Britain will veer along the path chosen by its European neighbors Spain and Ireland, both of whom have undermined the prospects of a peace process by recognizing a sovereign Palestinian state outside the framework of negotiations.

Starmer will no doubt face a demand from elements of his own party to do the same.

If he decides to recognize a Palestinian state instead of classifying such a decision as a red line he won’t cross outside of a comprehensive peace settlement, we will be entitled to wonder just how much the Labour Party really has changed.

anti-IsraelKeir StarmerLabourUK