General Basyuk (second from right) with Netanyahu and Gallant – both wanted by the ICC. (Photo: GPO)
Why is it only Declassified seeking to hold to account General Basyuk, who oversaw Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, as he meets UK officials?
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Last week, Declassified UK carried out one of the fundamental duties of journalism. Its reporter Alex Morris sought to hold accountable a war crimes suspect evading justice. And not just any suspect.
Morris doorstepped Major General Oded Basyuk as he led an Israeli military delegation through the streets of London in meetings with the Ministry of Defence and the Royal United Services Institute, a UK “security think-tank” with close ties to the British government.
Basyuk, sometimes spelt Basiuk, heads the Israeli military’s operations directorate, whose responsibilities have included the development of the military strategy that guided Israel’s brutal 15-month assault on Gaza.
The International Court of Justice ruled a year ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza. Israel has effectively been on trial ever since.
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Further, Britain’s universal jurisdiction laws mean serious crimes can be prosecuted in the UK wherever they occurred, and separately from the ICC. A private application for his arrest could have been issued while he was here.
The only plausible answer is that the government of Keir Starmer gave him a gold-plated assurance that he would not be arrested under any circumstances during his visit.
That is precisely what happened back in November when Israel’s now-outgoing military chief of staff, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, visited Britain to meet officials from the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office.
Starmer’s government issued Halevi with diplomatic immunity – a so-called “special mission certificate” – that blocked any possibility of legal redress against him.
As a signatory to the Rome Statute, it should be noted, Britain is legally obliged to enforce an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, though it has equivocated about whether in practice it would carry out an arrest of either Netanyahu or Gallant, if put to the test.
The UK has been an active participant in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza for the last 15 months, a new report published by the British Palestinian Committee (BPC) reveals today.
The 22-page document entitled ‘British military collaboration with Israel’ says: “The UK has not simply failed to meet its third-party responsibilities to uphold international law, including its duty to prevent genocide, but has been an active participant in Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza for the last 15 months.”
Cataloguing evidence of the “many layers of collaboration between the UK and Israel in this genocidal project”, the report details the UK’s active involvement in the Israeli arms industry, British provisions of logistical support and weapons transfers to the Israeli military, British protection of Israel’s military infrastructure, direct military intervention from the UK in Yemen to support Israel’s goals and repeated, ongoing intelligence provision from the UK to Israel via surveillance flights.
BPC Director, Dr Sara Husseini, said: “This report shows that UK complicity in Israel’s crimes goes far beyond arms sales.”
Highlighting the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s ruling that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to “plausible genocide”, Husseini added: “As the world looked on in horror, Israel continued its genocidal aggression in Gaza for a further 12 months. The UK has provided active military assistance to Israel throughout.”
This, she continued, implicates “its institutions and officials in the gravest breaches of international law.”
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
UK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWREGenocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpA
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, MP John McDonnell (front, fourth from left) and Khalid Abdalla (front row third from right) join people taking part in a national march for Palestine on Whitehall in central London, January 20, 2025
PEACE campaigners vowed to “break the climate of fear” fed by intensified police repression in a weekend rally to defend protest rights.
Hundreds gathered in Bethnal Green’s Atrium to discuss the Metropolitan Police’s mass detentions of marchers, including the violent arrest of chief steward Chris Nineham, at a Palestine solidarity demonstration on January 18, and the subsequent decision to charge Mr Nineham, Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) director Ben Jamal and others with public order offences.
Mr Jamal said the policing that day was “an escalation of repression by the state against our movement.
“Very clearly in my view, the police sought to provoke scenes of disorder on the streets. They began arresting people very early for the crime of standing in the wrong bit of Whitehall at the wrong moment. They brought empty coaches to transport to police stations those they intended to arrest… despite the fact that every single one of our protests has been peaceful and has had a low rate of arrest.”
The PSC leader said police intended to create “a scene of chaos and disorder that would create the political climate to enable [Home Secretary] Yvette Cooper to go into Parliament and announce she was banning all future marches.
“They did not succeed… [because] this is a peaceful and disciplined movement.”
The Metropolitan Police deny having tried to provoke disorder and referred the Morning Star to a previous statement accusing marchers of “a deliberate effort, involving organisers of the demonstration,” to breach the conditions they had imposed on the march, which included blocking a protest outside the BBC.
A picture painted on the rubble of houses by a Palestinian artist who returned home after the cease-fire and hostage-prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel on January 20, 2025. (Photo by Mahmoud Bassam/Anadolu via Getty Images)
After Trump floated a plan to “clean out” Gaza, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “the idea of helping [Gazans] find other places to start new, better lives is a great idea.”
Speaking to reporters Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he would like to see most of the population of war-torn Gaza be relocated to Jordan and Egypt, a plan that a number of observers said was tantamount to ethnic cleansing. Trump made the remarks the same day that he lifted a Biden-era hold on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.
“I’d like Egypt to take people. And I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump said, according to the Financial Times. “You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.” Gaza’s population was 2.2 million in 2023.
“‘Clean out’ is barely even a euphemism. This is ethnic cleansing, call it what it is,” wrote Assal Rad, the author of a book on modern Iran, on X, reacting to an Associated Press article about Trump’s comments.
The independent reporter Talia Jane wrote: “What’s it called when you clean out an ethnic group from a region.”
“He’s just openly endorsing/encouraging ethnic cleansing,” wrote the journalist Mehdi Hasan on Saturday. Others chimed in with similar remarks.
Trump’s comments were made nearly a week after a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect, halting 15 months of war that was triggered by a Hamas deadly attack on Israel in October, 2023 and which left tens of thousands of Palestinians dead, according to local health officials.
Homes, shelter, and infrastructure has also been largely decimated in the Gaza Strip by Israel’s military campaign there. Trump said that Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change,” per CNN.
“What the occupation has failed to achieve through its criminal bombardment and genocide in Gaza will not be implemented through political pressures,” said independent Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, according to CNN. “The conspiracy of ethnic cleansing will not succeed in Gaza or the West Bank.”
Trump also told reporters that he had already discussed the idea to relocate Gazans with King Abdullah of Jordan on Saturday. He said he planned to bring up the plan during a Sunday phone call with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah A-Sisi.
Trump’s proposal would be a departure from the United States’ official position of forging a negotiated “two state solution” for Israel and Palestine, although some say that the United States’ policies towards the region, including the nearly unqualified support for Israel during its campaign in Gaza, have undercut that goal.
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich endorsed Trump’s remarks, according to CNN, saying “the idea of helping [Gazans] find other places to start new, better lives is a great idea.”
Nazi soldiers separate Hungarian Jews on the ramp at Auschwitz-II-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland, May/June 1944, during the final phase of the Holocaust
HOLOCAUST Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army, is one of the most solemn days in the labour movement calendar.
The industrialised effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Roma and Sinti, alongside others the fascists deemed unworthy of life like gay, disabled or mentally ill people, remains the most systematic and calculated genocide in history. It must never be denied or downplayed.
Yet the meaning of Holocaust Memorial Day is increasingly obscured. Partly this is due to the rewriting of history.
Holocaust relativism presents the Nazis’ programme of racist mass murder as just one among many crimes of “totalitarianism,” postulating a false equivalence between Nazi Germany and the country which played the biggest part in its defeat, the Soviet Union.
The result is an equivocation between those who ran the death camps and those who liberated them — something masked in much British media discourse by referring vaguely to Auschwitz’s liberation by “the Allies” rather than the Soviets.
The removal of context allows the memory of the Holocaust to be deployed cynically by Britain’s rulers too.
The UN resolution establishing Holocaust Memorial Day is clear that its message is a universal one: “The Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning… of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” It also “condemns without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief.”
This text calls on us to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to all instances of racist persecution and all genocides.
It is disregarded by a British government which will not call out the Islamophobia of the far-right rioters who attacked mosques last summer, and which has been complicit in an assault on the people of Gaza recognised as a genocide by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and as plausibly amounting to one by the International Court of Justice.
Indeed, the memory of the Holocaust is misused to shield the state of Israel from accountability for its acts of war and ethnic cleansing, and it will be interesting to see which British politicians have the courage to condemn Donald Trump’s call this weekend to “clean out” “probably a million-and-a-half people” from Gaza to facilitate its colonisation by Israel.
So far removed are some self-appointed authorities from the reality of the Holocaust as a product of fascism and war that the Anti-Defamation League, quick to accuse Palestine solidarity campaigners of anti-semitism, could only admit to an “awkward hand gesture” when confronted by evidence of a fascist salute by Trump ally and tech tycoon Elon Musk.
Both anti-semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes are on the rise. Confronting that means returning to the real lessons of the Holocaust, as thousands will do at local trade union and political meetings this week, though our government will not.
That does not mean depoliticising it. The Holocaust was political, emerging from the ideology of fascism. When we say “never again,” we must commit ourselves to anti-fascism — which is sadly once again an urgent political cause.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
dizzy: While Musk is correct that Germans should not feel guilt about their ancestors’ actions that’s not reason to erase history, to ignore facts and reality. He is a Neo-Fascist supporting Neo-Fascism.
