A year on from Hamas’s attack on Israel, most of us can remember the anxiety and horror of the days afterwards as the images of human carnage and traumatised communities emerged.
My days were preoccupied with gathering interviews. I remember being on the fringe of the last pre-election Labour conference with David Lammy, then shadow foreign secretary, and asking him about Labour’s response to the crisis and the risks of an escalation of the situation in Gaza.
Lammy was at his most angrily eloquent on Israel’s right to defend itself as it saw fit. When I probed him on whether the manner of this response would carry risks in Gaza and the West Bank, he was adamant: this was Israel’s decision to make and, for good measure, if the UK were to be subjected to a similar scale of attack, we too would expect to respond with full force and expect support from allies.
That position has however morphed into something rather different and more confused. That is in part because a year of Israel’s gruesome bombardment, and criticism of its scorched-earth tactics in Gaza, have caused growing concern in Washington as well as the main European capitals.
But it also reflects a broader domestic schism between critics of Benjamin Netanyahu and those who grit their teeth at his government’s imperviousness to advice or criticism; the latter judge the risk of leaving Israel undefended against Iran and other hostile powers (including Russia) to be greater than the price of tolerating its conduct in Gaza.
The Starmer government’s response to this has been difference-splitting. It trumpeted a partial arms embargo only weeks ago, but in the wake of Iran’s reprisal attacks for Israel’s raids on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, this week the Prime Minister explained why he cannot support a wider arms embargo.
The problem with embarking on this path is that it gets hard to explain which arms are being exported and why, and in truth, the answer is more symbolic than impactful on any fighting.
For his part, Starmer speaks in code, often referring to the marshy territory of international legal arguments rather than speaking from a political or strategic instinct of his own.
But in the minds of ministers and MPs who now have power rather than simply the pulpit of Opposition, the pressures are not only about policy but a looming divide in public opinion.
A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times found that 44 per cent of Labour voters surveyed said their sympathies are now more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, while a mere 10 per cent said they were more sympathetic to the Israelis. Conservatives align more readily with Israel. Tory voters are almost twice as likely than their Labour counterparts to say that the UK should be more supportive towards Israel, by 23 per cent to 12 per cent.
A “Gaza effect” on Labour in an otherwise sweeping general election victory also shook key players and alerted No 10 to a fact which is unlikely to go away unless, as one of the ousted Labour MPs put it to me wryly, “Peace breaks out in the Middle East by the next election”. That seems unlikely.
It explains why the messaging of Labour’s position is sometimes at odds with the core position, which is a call for an “immediate” ceasefire it knows cannot be delivered at anything more than an interstice without hostage releases.
Seeing as the US administration, with far more considerable heft and Joe Biden’s hopes that a deal would happen before his successor is elected, has not made progress, the UK is stuck in the “murky middle”: upbraided by Israel and its key supporters in the US, while failing to satisfy the instinctive move in the party to supporting the Palestinian cause, which itself has caused tension with Jewish MPs and donors.
On the other side of the aisle, the calculation looks simpler – Conservative opinion veers much more sharply towards empathy with Israel’s situation.
Yet there is also a skew on the argument on the right – the candidates for the Conservative leadership have been in a bidding war on support for Israel. None of them have much reflected concern for the dreadful effects onthe people of Gaza or indeed Lebanon. The “old Tory” default setting of pro-Arabism in the elites and among the Tory left is markedly in retreat.
As Tories seek to clarify their purpose and spotlight difference with Labour, their default orientation is to lean more decisively towards Israel and away from the Palestinian right to self-determination, in part because the party has fewer potential voters with these sympathies – and in some quarters, driven by its Reform competitor and its own right wing, a more gut hostility to a cause embraced by the Muslim world (despite Palestinians being a mixture of faiths).
The net result is that the Conservatives and Labour (as well as the Lib Dems and SNP), are likely to become more divided as a complex situation worsens.
In truth, scope for Britain’s action is limited and aside from intelligence work, keeping good relations with allies in the region and extracting Britons from war zones, much of the next stage of this crisis lies outside our control. But that does not mean that its impacts on domestic politics don’t matter.
Sometimes, they matter even more. Where the scope for action is limited, a sense of helplessness and anger foments, and views and aversions become amplified. The Middle East’s boiling conflicts have a habit of heating up politics on the home front too.
Anne McElvoy is host of the Power Play podcast for POLITICO
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