Token cut in British arms exports a smokescreen for aiding genocide

Asa Winstanley Activism and BDS Beat 6 September 2024

Amid a global wave of repression against Palestine solidarity activists, the British government this week announced it would be suspending a small number of licenses for arms exports to Israel.

But the token measure, announced on Monday by foreign minister David Lammy, amounts to less than 9 percent of British arms export licenses to Israel.

And, as I argued on The Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday, the move was more of a smokescreen for British complicity in genocide than anything else.

Britain is a leading partner in the genocide, as the arrest and draconian bail conditions of Sarah Wilkinson last week shows. Wilkinson is a prominent activist and social media poster on Palestinian rights.

You can watch the full segment and discussion in the video above.

Considering Israel’s openly declared intent to carry out a genocide in Gaza since 7 October – and the probable death toll of some 200,000 people bombed, shot, burned and starved to death by the Zionist regime since then – Lammy’s speech in the British parliament announcing the measures was nothing less than outrageous softpeddling.

He bizarrely said only that there was a “risk” that the arms for which the licenses are now suspended “might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law” (my emphasis).

Lammy explained that out of the 350 licenses Britain grants to allow arms exports to Israel’s genocidal regime, only “around 30” would be suspended.

The Guardian reported that British military exports to Israel amounted to $55 million in 2022.

The minister explicitly clarified that the biggest component of Britain’s support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza would carry on as normal. Some 79 British companies supply parts for the F-35 bomber jets currently being used to help annihilate Gaza and they can keep doing so.

Arms trade expert Anna Stavrianakis, a professor at the University of Sussex, said Britain was still complicit with Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

And this is only a temporary suspension of even this pitifully small number of arms export licenses, not an arms embargo. Several previous British governments have carried out similar tokenistic exercises only to reverse them at a later date when campaigning had died down.

In his speech Lammy was at pains to point out that the decision was “not an arms embargo” and that the measure would not have “a material impact on Israel’s security.”

Lammy clarified that he still strongly supports Israel. He even called himself a “liberal progressive Zionist” and parroted typical Israeli regime talking points about its non-existent “right to exist and defend itself.”

The subtext of the speech was very clear: David Lammy and the rest of the British regime are still strongly supporting Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip – an exterminationist campaign which is now threatening to engulf the West Bank too.

Like most of the rest of the British government’s key ministers, Lammy is a supporter of Labour Friends of Israel and is in the pocket of the UK’s Israel lobby.

That – along with its subservience to Washington DC – is why the British government is highly unlikely to ever enact a real arms embargo on Israel.

One of Lammy’s first visits abroad after he was appointed to his post on 5 July was to occupied Palestine to meet with Israel’s genocidal leaders.

He met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Israel’s supposedly “centrist” president Isaac Herzog – a man so racist that he made clear in October last year that the “entire nation” of Palestinians was the target of the genocidal campaign in Gaza.

The only reason the Labour government has enacted even this token measure is to stave off the medium-to-long-term threat to Labour’s electoral prospects from the left.

Remember that in July’s election, Labour lost four of its seats to new, independent lawmakers who campaigned mostly on the issue of ending the genocide in Gaza – and came within a hair’s breadth of losing two others.

Combined with expelled former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn (who won his seat back as an independent) that makes up a small bloc of five in the British parliament challenging Labour from the left.

The Green Party also won three new seats (although two of these were taken from Conservatives).

Corbyn and the other four independent members of parliament (MPs) who campaigned on ending the genocide – Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan, Iqbal Mohamed and Shockat Adam – announced this week they had formed a new parliamentary grouping named the Independent Alliance.

In a statement the alliance called for a “total arms embargo” and said that it was “beyond shameful” that it had taken the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians for the government to admit to a “risk” of British arms being used in Israeli war crimes.

Wave of repression

At the same time that the British regime was ensuring it would continue to support Israel’s genocide militarily, it sent an even clearer message that it would continue to do the bidding of America and Israel.

Britain’s shadowy political police force – the so-called “anti-terror” squad – unleashed a new wave of repression against Palestine solidarity activists and journalists..

It comes as Israeli-genocide-allied governments in the West – as well as Israel itself – cracked down on solidarity with Palestinians.

French nurse Imane Maarifi – who spent 15 days treating wounded victims of Israel’s genocide at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza – was arrested at her home in front of her family.

In the West Bank, 26-year-old International Solidarity Movement peace activist Aysenur Eygi became the latest US citizen to be killed by Israeli forces in the face of total indifference (and with active military support) from the US government.

In Britain, journalist and streamer Richard Medhurst, as well as high-profile activist Sarah Wilkinson were both arrested and interrogated by the “anti-terror” police, and both had their phones and other digital equipment seized.

Medhurst was detained, while traveling into the country last month, while Wilkinson’s home was ransacked last week. She was only released after the imposition of draconian bail conditions.

Wilkinson’s experience was particularly insidious, as she recounted in an interview on The Crispin Flintoff Show, which you can watch in full in the video below:

Similar repressive raids were carried out in December against the prominent Palestine solidarity activists Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign as well as author and contributor to The Electronic Intifada Tony Greenstein.

Greenstein’s devices were confiscated and he was banned by bail conditions from posting on X (formerly Twitter). However, he is now happily posting again on the platform after his lawyers successfully challenged the bail condition in court.

Wilkinson’s bail conditions are far more stringent, and seem to prohibit her from taking part in modern society whatsoever, as they prohibit her from using a phone or computer.

Furthermore, according to her full account as given on The Crispin Flintoff Show, the police did not single out a particular tweet that was supposedly against the law, but rather a whole year of her posts to the platform.

The general secretary of Britain’s National Union of Journalists, together with the general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, wrote to Matt Jukes, head of “counter-terror” policing to ask for an urgent meeting about the situation, which they said “risks a chilling effect on journalists fearing arrest for carrying out their work.”

They said that the arrest of Richard Medhurst last month had “shocked both journalists based in the UK and those around the world” and that “actions by police in an apparent crackdown on genuine journalistic activity” are “significant cause for concern over efforts to stifle press freedom.”

The wave of repression is especially targeted at Palestine Action, a group directly involved in disrupting the business conducted by Israeli arms firms in Britain.

The same day as Wilkinson’s arrest on 29 August, police announced they were charging Richard Barnard, a co-founder of Palestine Action, under the so-called Terrorism Act over a speech he gave in October last year supporting Palestinian resistance.

The British regime is clearly engaged in a series of sweeping and calculated measures to suppress the increasingly popular movement to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

It’s time we got answers as to why.

This article is an updated and expanded version of the livestream segment in the video above.

Correction to livestream segment video: I misstated the year that British arms sales to Israel amounted to $55 million as 2023. In fact, The Guardian reported this as the figure for 2022, as is correctly stated in this article.

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Asa Winstanley

Asa Winstanley's picture

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London. He is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada and co-host of our podcast.

He is author of the bestselling book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2023).