In a week we’ve seen British politicians, who have held the Israeli line throughout the past 20 months, demanding recognition of a Palestinian state, along with mainstream media finally showing outrage at concentration camp-like images of emaciated children. Even foreign secretary David Lammy was insisting he had suspended arms sales that ‘can be used in Gaza’, and that the government was not ‘in any way complicit in a breach of international humanitarian law.’
Nope, he didn’t say all arms sales to Israel.
Perhaps, as part of the media’s slow but discernible shift away from the manufactured consent towards the horrors of Gaza that even the Daily Express is condemning, Radio 4 World At One (WATO) ran an interview with Tim Ripley, the editor of the defence news website Defence Eye, about those arms sales and the measures Lammy could take if he really did want to stop Israel’s deliberate starving of Palestinian civilians.
This might possibly have been the first time the BBC had dipped a toe into the murky waters of UK arms sales to Israel since Netanyahu launched his genocide.
Presenter Jonny Dymond opened by suggesting that while any British arms sales to Israel are ‘too many for some’, they are in fact ‘pretty small beer’ – just over £18 million worth in 2023 out of a total of £14.5 billion in that year, according to the Ministry of Defence. We’ve heard the same line from union officials whose members work in the defence sector, that their contribution to Israel’s weaponry is a ‘drop in the ocean’.
Our movement’s response is simple: there shouldn’t be even a drop.
Dymond added that the MoD had stressed fewer than five Israeli Defence Force personnel were enrolled here in ‘non-combat military courses’ which, they insisted, underlines the UK’s critical compliance with international humanitarian law.
No. If true then it underlines a cynical preparedness to sail close to the wind on such law.
Tim Ripley was pretty frank in his responses. While it would be necessary to go back to the 1960s to when Britain last sold ‘complete weapons systems’ to Israel, in the shape of Centurion tanks, we are nonetheless a ‘major supplier of components that go into American equipment that is then sold to Israel’ – primarily for the F-35 fighter planes used operationally in Gaza.
This is of course a fact our movement has long known, exposed and campaigned against, but it may have been news to many WATO listeners not used to such discussion in a BBC news interview without a customary denial or refusal to disclose from a minister or general.
Dymond moved on to what other steps the government could take in terms of what we buy from Israel. This sounded like the BBC getting dangerously close to actively discussing BDS.
‘There are several steps available to further escalate signs of their displeasure at Israel,’ Ripley replied. ‘We are a major importer of Israeli military equipment. That is a very significant part of Israeli defence exports.
‘Most of the equipment we buy from Israel is from companies that are owned by the Israeli state. With some of them, the shares are controlled by the Israeli finance minister, who is an individual sanctioned by the British government. By curtailing, by withdrawing from future contracts or cancelling current contracts we would reduce the profits of these companies and the amount they can contribute to the Israeli state budget and their war effort.’
Dymond warmed to this theme, wanting to know if anything could be done by way of visits to the UK by Israeli officials. There is little evidence of the BBC reporting the secret visit of Israel’s foreign secretary Gideon Sa’ar to London for a meeting with Lammy in April, during which he was deliberately protected by the state from arrest by his status under international law, or the affront to international law the visit represented.
Ripley stated the facts as we know them: ‘As part of the cooperation with Israel that’s grown over the past 20 years, the number of visits by Israeli military officials, officers, military officers, intelligence figures to Israel and vice-versa is quite significant but [stopping them] would only be symbolic.
‘A more high profile thing would be following in the footsteps of the French, who banned Israeli companies from displaying their products at the Paris airshow in June, in September there is a major international arms fair in London called DSEI where several Israeli companies are due to exhibit. So placing limits on what they can do at that show, or banning them would be a further escalation of Britain’s displeasure at the Israeli government.’
I assumed Jonny Dymond would end things there, but he moved on to what is possibly the most appalling complicity in genocide by the British government that we know of – the spy flights from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.
Dymond: ‘We know through flight trackers that RAF planes are pretty regularly entering Israeli airspace and we would presume, looking at, what is going on in Gaza. The foreign secretary was adamant today that none of that information was making its way back to Israel and assisting Israel…’
Ripley interrupted: ‘He may be right to say none of that specific intelligence from those planes is given to the Israelis. But in any kind of intelligence operation you do not give even your allies a benefit without getting something in return. So even if these planes don’t give the specific information they collect over Gaza, there must be some sort of quid pro quo with the Israelis. Why would they let our planes fly over the country unless they were getting something from it?’
Quid pro quo indeed.
And finally, there was what to do with British citizens who signed up with the IDF. Should the UK follow the Belgium authorities in questioning them about their activities in the war in Gaza?
‘We have a thing in the UK called the foreign enlistment act which is designed to inhibit British citizens taking part in foreign wars. If the British government so wished it could use that against these reservists and stop them commuting to the war in Gaza.’
Commuting to war? Commuting to genocide more like. A genocide which the suddenly appalled and hand-wringing foreign secretary, with his mild-mannered measures of rebuke, supported in-step by the BBC, could have stopped long before it started.