“This is the deliberate extermination of the people of Gaza: missile by missile, bullet by bullet, calorie by calorie.”
By Steve Witherden MP
It’s official: a United Nations commission of inquiry has said there are reasonable grounds to term Israel’s war against the Palestinian people a genocide.
For many, it seemed hard to believe that the indiscriminate bombing of one of the most densely populated areas on earth – expressly as an act of collective punishment against another people – could be anything but.
This is the deliberate extermination of the people of Gaza: missile by missile, bullet by bullet, calorie by calorie. At least 70% of the strip’s buildings have been levelled. When confronted with statistics like this, it is difficult to see Israel’s conduct as anything but systematic brutality.
And so with this “direct evidence of genocidal intent” we cross yet another line in the sand without the government taking real punitive action.
In office, I have used my backbench platform to call for concrete action from the government, by holding an adjournment debate on arms exports, raising concerns over the treatment of detained Palestinian women and girls, coordinating cross-party letters, and challenging Ministers directly in the Commons.
Outside of Parliament, I have attended silent Gaza vigils in Llanidloes and Machynlleth, spoke at meetings of my local Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch in Newtown, led a march to the UK Labour conference in Liverpool, and addressed demonstrators outside the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno.
While I welcomed the sanctioning of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the suspension of trade talks, the banning of a limited number of arms export licenses, and efforts at multilateral condemnation, there is so much more that the UK Government could do. It has moved far too slowly, trapped by its sycophancy to an American administration that provided Israel with a blueprint of an ethnically cleansed Gaza.
Britain’s international influence is nowhere near what it was in 1994, let alone in 1948, when the Attlee administration vacated the Mandate. But it does not count for nothing. We are the world’s sixth largest economy. We remain a member of the UN Security Council. We remain integral to European security.
Most importantly, we supply the crucial fighter jet components that allow Israel to conduct its genocide of the Palestinian people. They are roughly 15% British-made. This is the unavoidably dark truth – without British arms export licenses, the jets could not fly, they could not drop their bombs, they could not create the single largest cohort of child amputees anywhere on earth.
While the only person who could decisively stop the genocidal onslaught is Donald Trump, this does not mean that we should sit back and do nothing, resigning ourselves to impotence.
If the government’s meek protestations achieve nothing, then why not stand for international law? Why not stand for basic human rights? Why not stand for that which fundamentally underpins the democratic world – the rule of law – both at home and abroad? Why not use whatever influence our soft power still buys to argue for an international law-based order that we helped to create?
Standing by this Israeli government has destroyed whatever moral high ground this country could claim as an open and democratic society. Even if the government will not sacrifice short-term foreign policy interests by refusing to arm a genocide, it must understand that it is cutting our long-term influence on the world stage off at the knees.
We should say in no uncertain terms that if Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant travelled to the UK, we would hand them over to the International Criminal Court, in accordance with our own obligations to international law. We should impose sanctions on Israel over its illegal settlement of the West Bank. We should have full transparency about exactly what weapons we provide to Israel. We should then ban all arms export licenses and launch an investigation of our role in enabling the slaughter.
It has been two years. Whatever we do now, this genocide will be a dark stain in the history of our country. But we must do everything we can to end our supportive role in this inhuman war of extermination.
- Join Steve with Palestine’s Ambassador and other speakers at a public event during Labour Party Conference: Palestine – the Defining Issue of Our Time. 4.30pm Saturday, September 27. Register here.
- Steve Witherden is the MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X and Bluesky.
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