Labour’s shameful surrender to the anti-Israel mob

We are being governed by a load of muppets. That is not my judgement, but that of an anonymous Labour MP, who told the Telegraph that the UK prime minister has been forced into sanctioning Israel by ‘muppet’ MPs who are ‘freaked out’ by email campaigns from Gaza activists and are worried about the anti-Israel Green Party stealing their seats.

Andy Burnham and his foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, will today announce a ban on goods and some services from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, among other sanctions on the Jewish State. The move is part of what Miliband has described as a ‘comprehensive resetting’ of the UK’s relations with Israel.

That is where we have got to in 2026. Britain now makes foreign policy to appease the most contemptible fringes of the far left. With a majority of 157, you’d have thought that the Labour government would not need to bend to these ‘freaked out’ backbenchers. But no.

With Sir Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras up for grabs in the coming weeks, and with the Greens as serious contenders, Burnham cannot afford to relax. Such is the deplorable state of British politics on the left: national self-interest is happily thrown away in the hope of staving off electoral disaster.

Theobald of Cambridge won’t ring a lot of bells these days. But for many Jews – particularly British Jews – this is where almost 900 years of suffering begins. He was the iniquitous scoundrel who, in 1144 in Norwich, falsely claimed that a local boy, William, had been killed by the Jews as part of their malevolent rituals. This was the first recorded instance of the blood libel, the ‘baby killers’ calumny that has been levelled at the Jews so maliciously ever since. Reader, Theobald was Jewish. ‘The commission of the crime was no secret to me’, he lied, after converting to Christianity.

Which brings us back to Miliband. Last week, Britain’s most influential Jewish politician, straight from a meeting with unnamed figures who had been ‘on the ground’ in Gaza, released a video filled with lurid allegations against Israel and its ‘horrific’ actions in the Hamas-run territory. Surprise, surprise, infanticide formed the centrepiece. ‘You know, the stories that people were telling me, of medicines being blocked, children dying while waiting for vital life-saving treatment’, he drearily intoned.

This emotive little clip was designed to set the stage for Labour’s new, hostile set of British policies towards the only democracy in the Middle East. ‘We as a UK government… have got to act, and act more decisively than we have’, Miliband concluded.

Ostensibly, Britain’s coming trade embargo against Israel is a response to the bullying of Palestinians by Jewish extremists in the West Bank. As reprehensible as those people are, those carrying out such crimes against the Palestinians number in the low hundreds at best, out of a population of about 530,000 ‘settlers’ and 10million Israelis.

Should confronting these extremists really be Britain’s priority? The Palestinian side, meanwhile, is infested with jihadism, which threatens us here at home almost as much as the Israelis, in a region notably short on democracy.

Here are four of the main things the British public stands to lose from Labour’s reset:

First, economic advantage. Bilateral trade between the UK and Israel stood at £5.9 billion last year, with a healthy British surplus bringing in billions in profits to the economy and supporting many thousands of jobs.

Second, security. Mossad has saved innumerable British lives with tip-offs over the years, a fact that has been openly acknowledged by MI5 as well as by the Israelis. When the British Army’s Challenger 3 tanks enter service next year, they will come equipped with the Trophy active defence system, which is an Israeli product similar to a mini Iron Dome. The British Army’s Watchkeeper drone is also Israeli, built in Leicester by Elbit, whose British arm employs almost 700 people.

Third, tech. One in seven boxes of medicine issued in Britain is produced by Teva, an Israeli pharmaceutical company. The ‘capsule camera’ used by the NHS so that tens of thousands of patients can avoid colonoscopies each year was invented by an Israeli missile engineer.

Fourth, international standing. It is not just the Israelis who have threatened retaliation against this hostile move by potentially removing Britain from involvement in the reconstruction of Gaza – Donald Trump has threatened the same.

Even before today’s announcement, the American administration accused Britain of anti-Semitism in response to Miliband’s video. Should the notoriously mercurial Trump turn this rhetoric into policy, the UK could be very vulnerable indeed. Can our economy cope with draconian American tariffs? And what if the White House were to recognise Argentina’s claim on the Falklands, as some Israeli ministers are now urging it to do?

The supposed trigger for Burnham and Miliband’s sanctions is Israeli building on E1, a four-mile area that would adjoin the West Bank Jewish town of Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem proper. The UK says this settlement threatens the prospect of a ‘two-state solution’ – which, as Simon Sebag Montefiore put it when Andrew Fox and I interviewed him on our podcast, The Brink, is an idea that has been embraced with all the fervour of a new religion.

There’s no need to go into the matter in detail. Suffice to say that the Palestinians have rejected a state that would fulfil all their demands, not once but at least twice. In the first instance, during the talks at Camp David mediated by Bill Clinton in 2000, Palestinian president Yasser Arafat was offered 92 per cent of the West Bank, with Israeli land to make up the difference, plus Gaza and a capital in East Jerusalem. Roughly the same offer was tabled again by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.

Both were turned down. ‘I tell people what Arafat walked away from, and they, like, can’t believe it’, Clinton recently lamented. ‘You can’t complain 25 years later when the doors weren’t all still open and all the possibilities weren’t still there.’

Only you can, it seems, when your jihadi brethren curry the sympathies of the world – not least the British government – by carrying out the worst atrocities since the Holocaust on 7 October 2023, then flooding us with propaganda in which they pose as the victims. That is perhaps the most deplorable aspect of all this. In our foreign policy, which is now apparently controlled as much by Labour backbenchers as the Foreign Office, Britain is treating the Middle East’s only democracy as an enemy and the jihadis, tyrants and corrupt regimes as friends.

Why the obsessive focus on the faults of our allies rather than the far greater evils of our enemies? Truly, we are undoing ourselves. As some readers may recall, before the religion of the two-state solution – as well as the national self-loathing and other assorted liberal dogmas that now grip our political elites – we had something called Christianity. Although I can’t claim to be a believer myself, perhaps Miliband, Burnham and the others might benefit from meditating on Matthew 23:24, in which Christ criticises the hypocrisy of the Pharisees: ‘You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.’