Successive British governments – both Tory and Labour – must bear their share of the blame for the current Israel/US/Iran war.
All the evidence shows, quite clearly, that the key initiator of the war was Israel.
Indeed, a quarter of a century ago, Israel’s current leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, was caught on camera explaining just how easy it was (and tragically still is) for Israel to manipulate America. “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily,” he boasted.
But why, in Britain, are the Labour and Tory parties partly also to blame for the current war?
They are not the main culprits – but, without doubt, both political parties (and indeed many other UK politicians) have contributed to the political circumstances which have led to the current war.
So why do I say that?
The answer is disturbingly simple. It’s because successive UK administrations (and other western governments) have led Israel to sincerely believe that the West will never do anything really serious to try to stop Israel from doing anything.
For decades, the West (including the UK) has sadly done absolutely nothing to seriously incentivize Israel to bring the occupation of the West Bank to an end. Neither has it done anything to seriously encourage Israel to stop illegally building settlements on occupied Palestinian West Bank land).
Likewise, it never even attempted to exert real economic and political pressure on Israel to seriously negotiate a genuinely fair ‘two state’ solution.
In 2018 and 2019, when Israeli snipers murdered more than 220 Palestinian demonstrators on the Gazan side of the Israel/Gaza border, the UK government merely describe the loss of life as ‘tragic’ and expressed concern about Israel’s ‘large volume of live fire’. But Britain and indeed other Western countries actually did absolutely nothing that might have seriously encouraged Israel to cease its live fire against demonstrators who were not even on Israeli territory. Britain did not even want a UN enquiry.
Then during the Gaza war (which started in 2023) the UK government was, to say the least, relatively muted in its condemnation of Israel’s slaughter of over 80,000 Palestinians.
Britain quite rightly very robustly condemned Hamas 7 October 2023 attacks against Israel (which cost 1200 Israeli lives) – but has never really robustly condemned Israel’s slaughter of 80,000 Gazans since then. Top UK politicians have tended to condemn the suffering of the Gazans, rather than the actions of the Israeli government and the Israeli army which were responsible for that suffering. Sanctions against Israel have been weak in the extreme (only around 10% of UK arms export licences to Israel have been suspended – and other measures have been even weaker).
So it’s absolutely no surprise that the current Israeli government has concluded that the West, including Britain, was unlikely to do anything to seriously oppose Israel and America’s current war.
At worst, the Israeli government assumes that the British government and other western administrations will huff and will puff – but never do anything more. That, in effect, has contributed to giving Netanyahu a green light to start the current conflict – a conflict that, at the end of the day, is likely to be bad news for Israel, for the Middle East, for America, for the UK and for the rest of the world.
What’s more, Israel’s main ally, Donald Trump, also knows that the world is not going to robustly and actively oppose the war.
Indeed the UK government is de facto actively encouraging America and Israel in the current conflict by allowing US warplanes to use UK-run bases and by sending senior UK military personnel to Washington to help Trump develop plans to oppose Iran in the Strait of Hormuz.
If we really want to see peace and justice in the Middle East (and global economic and political prosperity and stability), the West must cease being complicit in ill-advised wars and appalling injustice.
The West must learn to not continue making the same horrific mistakes that were made in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.
