The UK has suspended 30 arms export licences to Israel following a review under the new Labour government which found that British-made weapons may have been used in the violation of international humanitarian law in Gaza.
Arms campaigners and rights advocates who have pressed for a full suspension of arms sales to Israel for months welcomed the decision, but criticised the continued export of F-35 fighter jet components which one called “a workhorse of Israel’s brutal bombing campaign”.
The announcement cames hours before two organisations which have challenged the UK government in the High Court over the continued exports were set to pursue fresh legal action in an attempt to force the exports to stop immediately.
Lawyers with the UK-based Global Legan Action Network (Glan) and the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq said they told the government last week of their intent to request an emergency order and had planned to do this at a Tuesday morning hearing.
Anna Stavrianakis, director of research and strategy at UK-based Shadow World Investigations and professor of international relations at the University of Sussex, told Middle East Eye that without the suspension of the F-35 components, the statement “seems more like an attempt to mollify critics than a meaningful restriction on Israel’s ability to commit genocide”.
New Labour politicians have a massive debt to Israeli-linked Jewish Groups in the UK for the Anti-Semitism slander campaign against Corbyn and the Labour Party during his leadership that lost Labour an election and brought him down as leader of the party to be replaced by a New Labour leader (who promptly started a pogrom against Leftwingers in the party).
Of course, as is tradition in England (and because in the recent elections they lost 10 Parliament seats to people who campaigned as independents exactly because of New Labour’s pro-Zionist “No Genocide is too great” policies), they’re doing a bit public opinion management with a loudly announced measure that de facto does nothing.
If there’s one thing that over a decade of living in Britain has taught me was to always look behind the curtain when it comes to grand very public gestures by the local politicians, the more the noise they make about their “great measure” the more the need to dig out the part of the story they’re not telling people about.