If you want to understand why Starmer has changed his *tone* about Gaza – but not his actions – watch the short exchange below on this week’s BBC Question Time between an audience member and cabinet minister Heidi Alexander.
A woman berates the Labour government for still selling arms to Israel in the midst of a genocide.
Alexander mixes indignation and tearfulness in her reply, explaining how she’s finding it “as sickening and as harrowing as every single person in this audience seeing those images on TV of children wandering around rubble who are never going to find their parents and who are being starved to death.”
The woman in the audience gives the only correct response to this shameless, self-exculpating display. She shouts at Alexander: “Then do something!”
Incredibly, much of the rest of the audience responds quite differently, giving Alexander a round of applause.
But Alexander isn’t just like “every single person in the audience”. She doesn’t just have to watch these images every night, as we do. She’s in a government that has been directly assisting the war criminals in Tel Aviv for much of the past year.
She’s in a government shipping UK arms to Israel, as well as US and German weapons.
She’s in a government approving surveillance flights from an RAF base in Cyprus to help Israel bomb those children’s homes into rubble.
She’s in a government letting UK citizens go to Gaza to help carry out the genocide.
She’s in a government still trading with Israel.
She’s in a government refusing to recognize Palestine.
The list goes on and on of how Starmer’s government is actively colluding in Israel’s genocide.
If Alexander really feels so upset by the images out of Gaza, she can indeed “do something”. She can resign and make clear why she is resigning. She can bring pressure to bear on her own government in a way none of the rest of us can.
Instead she sheds crocodile tears – and, like fools, we applaud her.
Starmer understands that if he sounds upset, even as he actively helps Israel murder Palestinian children, the media will be able to write him out of these crimes against humanity and wash his hands of the blood of tens – probably hundreds – of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
And worst of all, too many of us will go right along with this grand deception.
If like Tony Blair, Starmer never pays a price for his international crimes, his successor will feel equally free to assist in, or carry out, future crimes against humanity. Starmer and his ministers need to be in the dock of the Hague. What they don’t need is our applause.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in Jonathan Cook’s Substack.
