The Guardian reported this week a source from within the Foreign Office confirming what anyone paying close attention already knew.

By last February, according to the source, Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, had received official advice that Israel was using British arms components to commit war crimes in Gaza. Cameron sat on that information for many months, concealing it from the House of Commons and the British public, while Israel continued to butcher tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

Several points need making about the information provided to the Guardian:

1. The source says that the advice to Cameron on Israeli war crimes was “so obvious” it could not have been misunderstood by him or anyone else in the previous government. Given that the new Labour government has been similarly advised, forcing it to partially suspend arms sales, one conclusion only is possible: Cameron is complicit in Israel’s war crimes. The International Criminal Court must immediately investigate him. Its British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, needs to issue an arrest warrant for Cameron as soon as possible. No ifs or buts.

2. Now in government, Labour has a legal duty to make clear the timeline of the advice Cameron received – and who else received it – to help the ICC in its prosecution of the former Foreign Secretary and other British officials for complicity in Israel’s atrocities.

3. The current furore being kicked up over Labour’s suspension of a tiny fraction of arm sales to Israel needs to be put firmly in context. David Lammy, Cameron’s successor, is keen to evade any risk of complicity charges himself. Leaders of the previous government are denouncing his decision on arms sales only because it exposes their own complicity in war crimes. Their outrage is desperate arse-covering – something the media ought to be highlighting but isn’t.

4. Labour needs to explain why, according to the source, the advice it has published has apparently been watered down from the advice Cameron received. As a result, Lammy has suspended 30 of 350 arms contracts with Israel – or 8 per cent of the total. He has avoided suspending the British components most likely to be assisting Israel in its war crimes: those used in Israel’s F-35 jets, made in the US.

Why? Because that would incur the full wrath of the Biden administration. He and the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, dare not take on Washington.

In other words, Lammy’s decision has not only exposed the complicity of Cameron and the previous Tory leadership in Israeli war crimes. It also exposes Lammy and Starmer’s complicity. Put bluntly, following this week’s announcement, they are now 8 per cent less complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity than Cameron and the Tories were.

5. There has been lots of fake indignation from Israel and its lobbyists, especially in Britain’s Jewish community, about how offensive it is that the government should announce its suspension of a small fraction of arms sales to support Israel’s genocide in Gaza the day six Israeli hostages were buried.

The chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, for example, is incensed that the UK is limiting its arming of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, saying it “beggars belief”. He is thereby calling for the UK to trash international law, and ignore its own officials’ advice that Israel risks using British weapons to commit war crimes. He is demanding that the UK facilitate genocide.

The British Board of Deputies, which claims to represent British Jews, has retweeted Mirvis’ comment. The Board’s president has been all over the airwaves similarly decryingLammy’s decision.

Israel would, of course, have always found some reason to be appalled at the timing. There is an obviously far more important consideration than the bogus “sensitivities” of Israel and genocide apologists like Rabbi Mirvis. Each day the UK government delays banning all arms to Israel – not just a small percentage – more Palestinians in Gaza die and the more Britain contributes to Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But equally to the point: according to the rules Starmer imposed on the Labour party – that Britain’s Jewish leaders get to define what offends Jews and what amounts to antisemitism, especially on issues concerning Israel – the Labour government is now, judged by those standards, antisemitic. You can’t have one set of rules for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left, and another for Starmer and the Labour right.

Or rather you can. That is precisely the game the entire British establishment has been playing for the past seven years. A game that has facilitated Israel’s genocide in Gaza even more than the sales of British weapons to Israel.

6. Many have dismissed the significance of recent rulings against Israel from the International Court of Justice – that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza and that its decades of occupation are illegal and a form of apartheid – as well as moves from the International Criminal Court to arrest Netanyahu as a war criminal.

Here we see how mistaken that approach is. Those legal decisions have set the two wings of the British establishment – the Tories and the Starmerite Labour right – at loggerheads. Both are now desperate in their different ways to distance themselves from charges of complicity.

The rulings have also opened up a potential rift with Washington. The State Department spokesman has been shown having to frantically justify why the US is not banning its own arms sales.

Journalist Humeyra Pamuk questioned State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on why the US has not followed the UK's decision to suspend arms sales to Israel over concerns about potential violations of international law. pic.twitter.com/mujwDyblgZ

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 4, 2024

Admittedly, these are only small fissures in the western system of oligarchy. But those fissures are weaknesses – weaknesses that those who care about human rights, care about international law, care about stopping a genocide, and care about saving their own humanity can exploit. We have few opportunities. We need to grasp every single one of them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Mish Rahman, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee, summed up the mood by professing embarrassment “about my affiliation with Labour” in light of the party’s response to the killings in Gaza.  “It was hard even to tell members of my own extended family to go and knock on doors to tell people to vote for a party that originally gave Israel carte blanche in its response to the horrific 7 October attacks.”

The election itself saw Labour suffer losses among British Muslims, which has dropped as a share between 2019 and 2024.  The loss of Leicester South, held by Shadow Paymaster Jon Ashworth, to independent Shockat Adam, was emblematic.  (The seat has a Muslim population close to 30%.)  The trend was also evident in such otherwise safe Labour strongholds as the seats of Dewsbury and Batley and Birmingham Perry Barr, both with a prominent bloc of Muslim voters.  Combing through the Starmer landslide, one could still find instances of Labour’s electoral bruising.

To offer some mild reassurance to the disgruntled, notably regarding arms sales to Israel, the UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy promised to revisit the policy, editing it, as it were, to see if it stood the test of international humanitarian law.

On September 2, Lammy told fellow parliamentarians “with regret” that the assessment he had received left him “unable to conclude anything other than that for certain UK arms exports to Israel, there does exist a clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”

In doing so, he announced that Britain would be suspending 30 of its 350 arms export licenses with Israel. “We recognise, of course, Israel’s need to defend itself against security threats, but we are deeply worried by the methods that Israel’s employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly.”

The measure was one of the weakest imaginable, an example of high-tide gesture politics, paltry in effort, and paltry in effect.  Few gains will be noticed from this change in policy, not least because 30 out of 350 is fractionally embarrassing.  Furthermore, UK arms exports to Israel account for less than 1% of the total arms Israel received.  As a point of comparison, UK arms sales to Israel in 2022 totalled £42 million.  The offering from the United States dwarfs that contribution, annually totalling $US3.8 billion (£2.9 billion).

This very lack of effect was explicitly noted by the minister, begging the question as to what any genuine change might have entailed.  The government, he assured the House, still supported Israel’s right to self-defence.  Had the share of UK weapons to Israel been much larger, would such self-defence still have been justifiably prosecuted with such viciousness?

It is certainly telling what the suspension policy on exports spared.  While the new policy covers various components for military aircraft and vehicles, the F-35 fighters, which have been used with especially murderous effect by the Israeli Air Force, are exempted.  This, explained Defence Secretary John Healey on BBC Breakfast, was “a deliberate and important carve out for these modern fighter jets.”

The rationale is thick with splendid hypocrisy.  Because the support of the F-35 is a global program spanning multiple partners, the UK’s role in it had to be preserved, irrespective of what the fighters were actually used for.  “These are not just jets that the UK or Israel use,” reasoned Healey, “it’s 20 countries and around 1,000 of these jets around the world and the UK makes important, critical components for all those jets that go into a global pool.”

Like an undergraduate student failing to master an all too challenging paper, Healey offers the exoneration that cowardice supplies in readiness.  It was “hard to distinguish those [parts] that may go into Israeli jets and secondly this is a global supply chain with the UK a vital part of that supply chain”.  To disrupt the supply of such parts would, essentially, “risk the operation of fighter jets that are central to our own UK security, that of our allies and of NATO.”

Another knotty point was the legal or ethical value one could ultimately attribute to the decision.  Lammy was adamant that the policy revision was not intended, in any way, to cast aspersions against Israel’s conduct of the war, despite an assessment suggesting otherwise.  “This is a forward looking evaluation, not a determination of guilt, and it does not prejudge any future determinations by the competent courts.”  This routine garbling ignored the assessment’s references to the inordinate number of civilian deaths, the sheer extent of the destruction in Gaza, and “credible claims” that Palestinian detainees had been mistreated.

This latest gesture of tokenistic principle on the part of the UK government elevates impotence to the level of doctrine.  Lammy and Healey were merely taking a line Starmer has courted with numbing consistency: that of the craven, the insignificantly disruptive and the painfully cautious.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.