The sickening truth behind Keir Starmer’s joke at Gaza heckler's expense
After a bumpy week or two, Britain’s new Prime Minister must have boarded his flight to New York, earlier this week, feeling that he had plenty of reasons to be cheerful. The mood at the Labour party conference in Liverpool was broadly upbeat, the media were beginning to move on from the embarrassing winter fuel payment and donations rows of recent weeks; and now, Sir Keir was heading off to the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly, ready to play the serious statesman on the world stage.
Yet despite all these positive political signals, the Labour gathering in Liverpool had its uneasy moments; and most chilling of all was the incident during the Prime Minister’s speech, as he briefly mentioned his children, when a pleasant-looking young delegate stood up and shouted, “What about the children of Gaza?” Instead of responding as a statesman should – by welcoming the heckler’s concern, and talking about efforts at the UN this week to achieve ceasefires – Sir Keir simply watched as as the young man was bundled out of the hall, and then cracked a joke about how he seemed to think he was at the party conference of 2019; the implication being that concern about the slaughter in Gaza was the preserve of a long-defeated Corbynite left, and could now be treated as a mere distraction.
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Now of course, the Labour leader was responding in the moment to an unexpected and doubtless irritating intervention. Yet there is no overstating the extent to which a response like this – from a Prime Minister who would never think of joking in relation to historic examples of genocide – signals to an increasingly sceptical and rebellious global community that Palestinian lives are not valued as Western lives are; and that when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the rule of international law, so often invoked by the West in condemning the actions of others, simply does not apply.
The scale of the slaughter and destruction in Gaza is not in dispute. Since the Hamas attack of October 7 last year – in which more than 1,100 Israelis citizens were kllled, and 200 taken hostage – some 41,000 people are believed to have been killed as a result of Israeli military action in Gaza, 16,000 of them children. Many of Gaza’s cities have been reduced to rubble, with mosques, schools, universities, and hospitals targeted for destruction; supplies of water and food have been cut off or reduced to bare survival levels, and 90 per cent of Gaza’s population of two million is now classed as internally displaced.
Netanyahu government’s indefensible conduct
The suffering is incalculable; yet still, major Western powers persist in supplying almost unlimited armaments to the Israeli armed forces, as the Netanyahu government pursues this massively disproportionate response to the October 7 attacks, and ruthlessly expands the conflict. As I write, the Israeli government has just announced its complete rejection of a new ceasefire deal with Hezbollah in Lebanon, brokered by the United States and France; yet all the while, those same Western powers stand feebly by, expressing concern at the violence they have enabled, and demanding negotiations and ceasefires, with little or no result.
Historically, of course, it’s possible to trace how this increasingly untenable situation has arisen, and its deep underlying causes. What the events of the last year have done, though, is to push the historic deal between the West and the Israeli state towards breaking point. The conduct of the Netanyahu government, in Gaza and elsewhere, is indefensible in terms of international law and basic human rights; and Western governments are increasingly faced with the choice of acknowledging that fact, and withdrawing their support, or forfeiting all credibility as serious defenders of a rule-governed international order.
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Some Western nations are now fully awake to the dangers posed by this blatant display of double standards – not least to vulnerable allies such as Ukraine, whose entire war effort depends on the idea that international law matters, and should be observed. Ireland and Spain, for example, have now condemned Israel’s actions, and asserted the rights of the Palestinian people. Germany this week announced a complete suspension of arms exports to Israel. Ten current EU members plus Norway now recognise Palestine as a sovereign state; and on a map, the countries that do not recognise it look increasingly like some Orwellian vision of a still-powerful but declining West, besieged by an expanding new world order.
And right at the heart of this inflexion-point in global history, alongside politicians like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, stands the new UK Prime Minister, the human rights lawyer who could not bring himself to say, last October, that it was a crime against humanity to cut off water and food supplies to the entire population of Gaza. All three of these leaders fully understand why some kind of rule-based international order is essential. All three struggle to name Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a prime example of a brutal breach of that order, which must be ended by stopping the supply of arms.
Western double standards
And all three, I would guess, understand in their more candid moments that what is at stake, if they fail to end this slaughter, is not only their own credibility, and the standing and clout of their countries in a global community that has had enough of Western double standards, but the long-term fate of those elements of the postwar world order of which humanity as a whole can be most justly proud.
Those include, of course, the very concept of universal human rights itself, embodied in the UN Charter, an ideal which must now find new defenders, and Western politicians wise enough to become their allies, if it is not to be swept away in a tide of rage against the hypocrisy of those who always claimed to care most for those values – but who finally chose to betray them, once too often.
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