Last week, David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, rose to his feet in the House of Commons and read out a statement condemning how the war in the Gaza Strip was being conducted by the Israeli government.
“Netanyahu’s government is planning to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the Strip to the south,” he said, “and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need.... The planned displacement of so many Gazans is morally unjustifiable, wholly disproportionate, and utterly counterproductive.
“We cannot stand by in the face of this new deterioration,” said Lammy. “Therefore, today I am announcing that we have suspended negotiations with this Israeli government on a new free trade agreement.... The Netanyahu government’s actions have made this necessary.”
Clearly, Britain’s Labour government has little sympathy with Israel’s Likud-led coalition. Nevertheless, it condemns Hamas’s bloodthirsty incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023. UK ministers, from the prime minister down, reiterate time and again their support for Israel’s right to defend itself, and continue to demand that Hamas release all the hostages it snatched during its pogrom.
Beyond this, however, there seems little, if any, empathy with the formidable problems that Israel faces, or with its efforts to deal with them.
Discrimination against Jews
The left wing of Britain’s Labour party is notoriously anti-Israel – a euphemism, many believe, for frank antisemitism. This was demonstrated during the five years the party was led by the radical Jeremy Corbyn (2015-2020). In May 2019 the Equality and Human Rights Commission, a body legally charged with promoting and enforcing the UK’s equality and nondiscrimination laws, launched a formal investigation into whether Labour had “unlawfully discriminated against, harassed, or victimized people because they are Jewish.”
The legacy Corbyn bequeathed to Sir Keir Starmer, who succeeded him as Labour leader and is now Britain’s prime minister, was the EHRC report, published in October 2020. In it the EHRC determined that the Labour Party had indeed been “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” against Jewish people. As a result, the party was legally obliged to draft an action plan to remedy the unlawful aspects of its governance.
But pro-Palestinian sentiment was too deeply embedded in the party for the leadership to ignore it. The manifesto on which Starmer’s Labour Party fought the July 2024 general election declared: “Palestinian statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people.” It went on to commit a future Labour government to recognize a Palestinian state “as a contribution to a renewed peace process which results in a two-state solution, with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state.”
Following the Hamas attack of October 7, Starmer stood shoulder to shoulder with then-UK prime minister Rishi Sunak, then-US president Joe Biden, and most Western political leaders in proclaiming Israel’s right to defend itself. His stance was not acceptable to two entities he faces on his own political terrain, and this remains his problem today. One is the powerful hard-left element within his party; the other is the strong Muslim presence in some traditionally Labour constituencies.
Four years ago there were some four million Muslims in the UK, representing about 6% of the population. The figures are almost certainly higher than that today, and in certain areas represent a significant proportion of the voting electorate.
Labour’s pro-Palestine component began to assert itself on October 7 itself, with scattered voices approving the Hamas attack. The collateral civilian deaths and casualties arising from the IDF campaign were enough for the party’s support for Israel to begin to slide.
The first test of electoral opinion
Then came the first test of electoral opinion in the UK since October 7. On May 2, 2024 local elections took place across the country. The results, no doubt to Starmer’s dismay, indicated that Labour’s position on the Israel-Hamas war had dented its support in Muslim areas. A BBC analysis found that in areas with a substantial Muslim presence, Labour’s share of the vote had slipped by 21% compared with the last time the seats were contested.
Ali Milani, chairman of Labour Muslim Network, said Labour’s positioning on Gaza “is going to have a serious electoral consequence.”
He was not wrong. In the general election in July 2024, which Labour won with a landslide, five independent pro-Palestine candidates unseated Labour incumbents in key constituencies. Four were Muslim; one was Jeremy Corbyn.
In the aftermath, Corbyn announced plans to form a parliamentary alliance with the four independent Muslim MPs. This permanent anti-Israel bloc in the House of Commons, supported by many radical Labour MPs, has resulted in increased advocacy for Palestinian rights and increased pressure on the UK’s foreign policy decisions related to the Middle East. It has contributed to the decision announced by Lammy to suspend the negotiations aimed at securing a comprehensive free trade agreement (FTA) between the UK and Israel.
As the UK left the EU, it signed a continuity agreement with Israel to ensure uninterrupted trade between the two countries. Coming into effect on January 1, 2021, it coincided with the end of the Brexit transition period and maintained the terms of the EU-Israel Association Agreement. On July 20, 2022, the UK and Israel embarked on the negotiations for an FTA. With both parties world leaders in hi-tech, the negotiators aimed particularly to enhance collaboration in technology, innovation, and digital services.
The talks were conducted against the backdrop of flourishing UK-Israel bilateral trade. There had been year-on-year growth from 2014 to 2018, when the figure reached $10.5 billion. Subsequently both Brexit and COVID caused the figure to fluctuate. The best estimate of UK-Israel bilateral trade in 2024 is $7.2b.
The suspension of negotiations for a UK-Israel FTA will not necessarily have a major impact in the short term. Trade between the UK and Israel will continue under the UK-Israel Trade and Partnership Agreement, concluded at the time of Brexit. Businesses will still be able to trade with relative certainty, and supply chains will remain intact. What might be affected is investor confidence.
If the suspension is maintained, however, the consequences for both parties could be significant. The half-formalized FTA aimed to modernize and expand the bilateral trade framework to cover areas such as digital trade, cybersecurity, med-tech, green energy, artificial intelligence, intellectual property rights, fintech, optics and lasers, aerospace and defense, sustainability, and government procurement.
Without the developmental boost that the FTA was calculated to provide, growth in these hi-tech areas, in which Israel is a world leader, will certainly slow down. The UK, no less than Israel, will lose out. And so will the world at large.
The writer is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. His latest book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.