Keir Starmer and David Lammy in Montreal, Canada
How do you prevent a state from carrying out genocidal attacks, when its leaders regularly show disregard for international law and the courts that seek to uphold it?
This was the question that the International Court of Justice asked all countries when it affirmed in January that, as third parties, they had a duty to prevent genocide from taking place in Gaza.
Diplomatic pressure, humanitarian aid and the cutting off of weapons supplies might reasonably qualify as action – and the new Labour Government has at least tried some of these tactics: but its next action was harder to explain.
Last week, the Government announced a list of countries it would seek to prioritise for stronger trade ties – and Israel, a country under investigation for genocide, was among them.
Prior to this, it seemed the new Government was making some slow but important steps on Gaza. It overturned the shameful decision of its Conservative predecessor to suspend funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the key aid delivery body operating in Gaza, and confirmed it will end its challenge to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli leaders Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy is also reportedly considering placing a partial arms embargo on Israel, although Labour last week delayed any announcement on this.
But if these measures might put a degree more pressure on Israel, this Government’s renewed commitment to strengthening bilateral trade with the country is a step in the opposite direction.
The UK appears to be compartmentalising its response to Israel’s war crimes, as if the bombing of hospitals, deliberate starvation of civilians, and razing of entire neighbourhoods was just a disappointing but ultimately anomalous spell of bad behaviour, minor enough to put aside. It’s effectively saying: sure, Israel deserves pulling up on some of its actions, but this shouldn’t spoil an otherwise healthy friendship.
If that wasn’t bad enough, wait until you see what the UK’s future trade relationship with Israel could look like. Labour’s approach to trade talks remains to be seen, but if it looks anything like the UK’s ‘2030 Roadmap’ for bilateral relations developed by the Conservative Government, it is likely to mean increased cooperation with sectors of the Israeli economy involved in human rights and international humanitarian law violations.
The UK-Israel ‘2030 Roadmap’ agreed under Rishi Sunak’s Government paved the way for cooperation not only militarily but also on security, science and technology. If this doesn’t immediately ring alarm bells, consider the evidence collected by human rights groups which finds that parts of these sectors have become inexorably intertwined with the military.
Israel’s technology sector has long been involved in well-documented violations of Palestinian human rights, with advanced technologies used for Orwellian levels of surveillance and control.
Tested under Israel’s military rule of the West Bank, where Palestinians’ rights to privacy are repressed, many of these technologies are then exported abroad, often to countries with similarly awful human rights records. Amnesty International has further documented how Israeli tech companies sell spyware to hack the phones and computers of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers.
Most recently, during Israel’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza, its military has deployed new AI technology to build huge lists of kill targets – an operation which a former Israeli intelligence official has referred to as a “mass assassination factory”.
As the civilian death toll reaches unprecedented levels, the same official noted that Israel’s AI system places “emphasis on quantity not quality” in its data.
In the US, Google employees have expressed concern that their company’s huge data storage and processing contract, provided jointly with Amazon, is supporting AI-related atrocities. Even beyond these sectors, huge parts of Israel’s economy are structured around making the illegal occupation sustainable.
So what should the UK be doing instead? A few days after the Government’s trade announcement, a group of independent UN human rights experts called for Israel not only to be placed under an arms embargo, but to face targeted trade sanctions. If the Government won’t go this far, then suspending the existing myriad trade preferences allowed to Israeli companies, and breaking off any trade talks as long as Israel’s human rights violations continue, would at least be a start.
Some might argue the UK’s carefully nurtured ties with Israel are what allows it to exert pressure on its ally. The previous foreign secretary David Cameron made a similar point when he argued that suspending arms sales to Israel would give Britain “less leverage, rather than more”. But there’s no point in having leverage if you never use it. Committing further support and cooperation amid daily massacres simply looks like blind support.
Might a withdrawal of economic cooperation with Israel also hurt the UK economically? Even asking the question feels like presenting a perverse set of priorities, but the Government’s own figures suggest that even if the economics of such a decision were factored in, they wouldn’t weigh heavily. Trade with Israel represents less than 0.5% of British exports. A move to withdraw the UK’s economy from close relations with Israel would send a clear message while barely causing an economic ripple.
The ICJ has suggested that the UK may have an even greater duty to act than others. When opening its genocide investigation into Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the court stated countries with strong political links to Israel have a “greater duty to use their influence” to prevent it from happening, and that states should make use of means likely to have a deterrent effect.
The UK has a long record of cosying up to dictatorships and human rights abusers when politically and economically convenient, so a degree of pessimism about the UK’s potential actions is warranted. But the Labour Government is clearly trying to draw a line between itself and its predecessor – including repeatedly affirming the legitimacy of international legal institutions including the ICJ.
To stop the onslaught on Gaza it will be necessary for more countries than just the UK to take action. But as millions of Palestinians live on the edge of famine, made homeless by Israel’s assault and exposed to growing disease epidemics, the new Government’s trade plans don’t look much like a deterrent against more Israeli war crimes. If anything, it seems as if the UK is rewarding them.
Tim Bierley is a campaigner at Global Justice Now
