https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/05/too-lammy-too-late

As British establishment opinion begins to turn against Israel, the hypocrisy shown by government figures like Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who long defended Israeli brutality, is both ironic and infuriating.

Earlier this month the foreign secretary, David Lammy, described Israel’s latest assault on Gaza as ‘intolerable’ and ‘monstrous’ in Parliament. Noting his apparent pain — ‘as a lifelong friend of Israel’ — at having to issue such a statement, he decried the futility of military strategy in recovering the Israeli hostages and defeating Hamas. He condemned the Netanyahu government and labelled the far-right Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich an ‘extremist’. Leaning over the aisle for emphasis, he admonished his Tory counterpart, Priti Patel, for being insufficiently critical of Israel. Lammy announced: ‘We are crystal clear: what is happening is morally wrong, unjustifiable, and it needs to stop.’

Anyone observing the words and actions of the Labour Party over the last nineteen months — in both opposition and government — is likely to have experienced some cognitive dissonance upon hearing such comments. In Lammy’s Tottenham constituency, where I live, he has repeatedly ignored residents’ concerns about his support for Israel, only rarely appearing at heavily stage-managed local events, and cancelling many others. Most of Lammy’s Westminster speech could have accurately applied to Israel’s behaviour at almost any point since it launched its brutal and wildly disproportionate onslaught in October 2023. 

So why the sudden change of tone? How did Lammy — and the Labour hierarchy more generally — come to stand so belatedly in opposition to Israeli brutality, after nearly two years of condoning, apologising, and flip-flopping on the war in Gaza?

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But while the condemnation of Israel’s behaviour may be a watershed, the lack of concrete action to oppose the Israeli genocide is far more significant. Any serious response would include, at the very least, a full arms embargo, massive diplomatic pressure, and a refugee resettlement scheme for displaced Palestinians.

But perhaps more Machiavellian motivations are behind the continuing shifts and ambiguities in the Lammyite line on Israel. Pausing talks on a future trade deal leaves the UK’s existing trading relationship with Israel intact. As several backbenchers have noted, there is a logical chasm between the government’s newfound revulsion at Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its continued material support for those operations. While some arms export licences were suspended in September 2024, the three months that followed saw the sale of more military equipment than the total approved by the Tory government between 2020 and 2023. The UK has continued to supply 15 percent of the components to the global pool of F-35 fighter jets used to lethal effect in Gaza — a position defended in court only a few days before Lammy’s tub-thumping speech, essentially arguing that those exports trumped the duty to prevent genocide.

On the same day as the high court hearing, Maria Eagle, Minister of State for Defence Procurement, spoke at an event for Israel’s Independence Day — commemorated by Palestinians as Nakba Day — during which she celebrated the RAF’s surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. The government maintains that these flights, operating out of the RAF’s Cyprus base, are solely used for intelligence relating to the recovery of Israeli hostages, but it has rebuffed parliamentary inquiries into their exact purpose. Action on Armed Violence has reported at least 518 surveillance flights since December 2023, including 24 in the two weeks before Israel’s attack on Nuseirat refugee camp in June 2024, which killed 274 Palestinians.

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Original article at https://tribunemag.co.uk/2025/05/too-lammy-too-late