Britain’s response to Israel’s war on Hamas is at a precarious point. The coming days will sorely test the resolve and agility of the UK’s response to a conflict, which is becoming a bitter dividing line within and between political parties, and that of a public watching fresh horrors in Gaza that follow the butchery of October’s Hamas assault on Israel.
Israeli air strikes have killed seven aid workers, three of whom were British, in a convoy organised by the World Central Kitchen to unload life-saving food supplies brought into Gazan ports. It is a horrible example of the “perfect storm” of things that can go awry in the fog and fury of war, with the addition of the deathly precision weaponry.
These civilian deaths graphically prove that the UK’s aims are becoming harder for the government to balance. It seeks to be a staunch ally of Israel, fighting a terrorist enemy in Hamas. It also wants to support a rare democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by autocratic regimes and outright enemies.
At the same time, against a background of growing political pressure across the parties and public concern about the vast toll of human suffering in Gaza, ministers have been at pains to amplify humanitarian concerns about the fate of non-combatants caught in the firing line.
At the crux of this dilemma sits Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary. His increasingly urgent warnings that Israel’s conduct of war is making life difficult for its allies is a sign of anxiety about how the conflict is unfolding.
He has gone further in tone and language than Rishi Sunak in calling for “urgent and transparent” answers about why the Israel Defence Force attacked an aid convoy – an incident the Israeli Defence Forces Chief of Staff has described as a tragic “misidentification” of a target in nighttime conditions.
This may turn out to be true – or partly so, in that the Israeli military clearly had information from an experienced aid organisation about its movements. Even if the incident was a huge blunder, Israel’s military will stand accused of fatal recklessness.
Either way, things can go badly wrong from here. Israel clearly feels that the demands by Lord Cameron for a very speedy inquiry are overstepping the boundaries of a country outside the conflict. One of its most senior diplomats, who has had historically good relations with the Conservatives and Cameron personally, vents fury at this “imperious tone”.
Speculative views are already hardening into perceived truths, which will in turn become accusations that this was a targeted attack.
That seems unlikely. There is not much mileage for the Netanyahu government attacking aid convoys just as relations with the Biden Administration have become more agitated.
At the same time, Cameron is underlining an obvious truth: that there is little point in countries increasing their efforts to help get famine-preventing aid to Palestinians if the organisations that deliver it feel so threatened that they feel obliged to pull out.
The keystone to changing facts on the ground is a shift in the operations of the war and their scope – and that is unlikely in the short term. The same goes for a change of leader in Israel, which, while more possible now, is only likely after an election, and that would take months.
Sound and fury on the UK’s home front will not wait on these developments. The pro-Palestinian weekend marches in London and other cities, which have caused the government much angst in how far to forbid tactics that feel intimidatory to many Jewish people, will resume with redoubled force. This is territory where Sunak is exposed, having promised to crack down on public exhibitions of “extremism”, but now knowing an outpouring of anger after the attacks is inevitable.
Cameron also has increasingly tricky territory to negotiate, in terms of how far he allows himself to be identified with more heated anti-Israel opinion of the sort expressed by Sir Alan Duncan, who has accused senior Tories of disregarding international law (a concept being bandied about rather liberally in this context).
On LBC today, Sir Alan said that the Conservative Friends of Israel group was “doing the bidding of Netanyahu”, and called for Lord Pickles and Lord Polak to be excluded from the Lords. In a later interview, he said Tory MPs – including Suella Braverman, Tom Tugendhat and Michael Gove – were failing to support international law by not condemning illegal settlements. He is now under investigation by the Conservative Party.
Sir Alan is a hothead on this matter, and has a longstanding affinity with more hardline “Arabist” views. But he has now embroiled the Tories in an argument about what constitutes a reasonable difference of opinion over Israel – and what counts as an attack on government policy – so loaded that he risks exclusion from the party.
Duncan is a man of the Cameron era in power and is perceived as his trusted ally. So while Sir Keir Starmer has worried greatly about dividing lines in Labour on this subject, that rift now threatens to run through the Conservative Party too. It is further spurred by the hardening of legal opinion that Israel may be running close to the line in its tactics, possibly opening it to future International Criminal Court proceedings.
For what it is worth – and having covered a bit too much fog of war in other conflicts – the grim truth of air strikes and drone attacks is that whatever their broader purpose or justification, they generally end up causing civilian casualties, because the margin of error is so small and the risks so high. Cameron also knows this, because it caused him anguish in the Libya intervention and as a US ally in Afghanistan.
Whatever the Israeli investigation concludes, it will harden battle lines between those who give Israel the benefit of the doubt, and those who will demand more stringent responses or who simply feel less sure now on this score than they did a few months ago. I doubt it will end in any material change to the UK’s military commitment.
But it is a symbol of a deeper quandary for Sunak and Cameron: when does the commitment to “whatever it takes” to defeat Hamas militarily turn into a warning that what it is taking may have already gone too far? Much depends on the answer to that amid the grief and anger of the sombre days ahead.
Anne McElvoy hosts the Power Play podcast for POLITICO
David Cameron is at the crux of the Government’s Israel dilemma
19
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04.04.2024
Britain’s response to Israel’s war on Hamas is at a precarious point. The coming days will sorely test the resolve and agility of the UK’s response to a conflict, which is becoming a bitter dividing line within and between political parties, and that of a public watching fresh horrors in Gaza that follow the butchery of October’s Hamas assault on Israel.
Israeli air strikes have killed seven aid workers, three of whom were British, in a convoy organised by the World Central Kitchen to unload life-saving food supplies brought into Gazan ports. It is a horrible example of the “perfect storm” of things that can go awry in the fog and fury of war, with the addition of the deathly precision weaponry.
These civilian deaths graphically prove that the UK’s aims are becoming harder for the government to balance. It seeks to be a staunch ally of Israel, fighting a terrorist enemy in Hamas. It also wants to support a rare democracy in the Middle East, surrounded by autocratic regimes and outright enemies.
At the same time, against a background of growing political pressure across the parties and public concern about the vast toll of human suffering in Gaza, ministers have been at pains to amplify humanitarian concerns about the fate of non-combatants caught in the firing line.
At the crux of this dilemma sits Lord Cameron, the Foreign Secretary. His increasingly urgent warnings that Israel’s conduct of war is making life difficult for its allies is a sign of anxiety about how the conflict is unfolding.
He has gone further in tone and language than Rishi Sunak in calling for........
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