Over the past three years, Britain has sold £3.1 billion worth of arms to Qatar, the world’s leading sponsor of Sunni jihadism and a key supporter of Hamas. It sold £1.9 billion worth to Saudi Arabia, which is engaged in a bloody war in Yemen which, shall we say, is not being fought entirely according to democratic standards.
Turkey, which has once again crushed the Kurds with as little concern for human rights as one might hope, has received £799 million in British arms. The United Arab Emirates, often seen as a dictatorship in Whitehall, bought £416 million worth of cash, while Egypt’s police state was able to buy £318 million worth of weapons as it continued to flirt with Islamism and corruption.
By contrast, Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and the only power to respect the rights of women and minorities, locked in an existential struggle against the forces of jihadism that threaten us all, bought £83 million of British arms, a sum. Which is only 1 percent of its total arms purchases.
Yet it is the Jewish state that attracted criticism from David Lammy yesterday, Because it announced it was suspending 30 arms export licenses to Jerusalem. Amid misinformation that it is waging too much of a war in Gaza.
In terms of both kit and intelligence sharing, the Israeli-British security partnership – enshrined in the 2020 Bilateral Military Cooperation Agreement – is as beneficial to London as it is to Jerusalem. Arguably, it has benefited us more.
Britain’s Watchkeeper surveillance UAV, based on Israel’s Hermes 450 drone, has saved countless British lives in Afghanistan. British soldiers have trained on Salisbury Plain with Israel’s state-of-the-art Rhino Mobile Command and Control Centre.
Mutual aid has been enjoyed for decades. In 2015, Israeli intelligence helped the Metropolitan Police discover a bomb factory in northwest London, complete with three tons of ammonium nitrate hidden in disposable ice packs.
Former Mossad deputy director Ram Ben-Barak told me that the 2007 Israeli airstrike on a secret Syrian nuclear reactor was the result of intelligence from British spies. Without it, Bashar al-Assad would have fought his civil war with nuclear weapons as well as chemical weapons. Our shared values and interests matter. What will happen to them now?
I am writing this from Tel Aviv, where few Israelis noticed Lemmy’s announcement yesterday. They can be forgiven for their carelessness; Funerals of six hostages driven underground by Hamas was taking place, a development that destroyed Israel’s precious store of hope and plunged the already grieving country deeper into mourning. Britain’s Jewish Leadership Council described as “disappointing” the timing of the foreign secretary’s move to isolate Israel on a day of national mourning.
One of the purposes of my visit to Israel is to observe first-hand the lengths to which the IDF goes to protect civilian life in Gaza. Even if one takes Hamas’s casualty figures at face value and matches them with Israel’s assessment of the number of terrorists killed, it produces a ratio of combatant-to-civilian casualties that easily surpasses the track records of both Britain and the United States.
Yesterday, a veteran American intelligence officer who served in the campaign against the Islamic State told me how little attention the Western-Iraqi coalition pays to civilians in Mosul. In his estimation, 60 civilians were killed for every combatant in that war.
“We are dropping 2,000lb JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) on single sniper positions under both Trump and Biden,” he admitted. How many British weapons have been sold to Americans in the last three years? Answer: £2bn in total. And the RAF was involved in the Mosul campaign.
What does the government think? Does the Foreign Secretary really want to invite scrutiny of every international recipient of British arms?
Part of the problem is that while Israel is very good at waging war, it is nowhere near as effective when it comes to public relations. On that front, even as its leaders stare into the abyss of destruction, Hamas has been out and out victorious.
The facts, however, are indisputable. Even given Gaza’s unique challenges—an enemy strategy of human sacrifice, an underground terrorist city, an enemy that doesn’t mind dying—the Jewish state is fighting a cleaner war than has been fought anywhere else in the world.
You wouldn’t know it from your television. You wouldn’t know it from social media or the progressive ideologies that dominate many of our institutions. But if you properly consider the facts and weigh up British arms sales to Israel (including the United States) against the list of despotisms given above you will know.
Given Labour’s overwhelming majority, That frees him to rule without concern for special interest groups30 This suspension of arms export licenses will certainly prove an ill-advised decision, which can be rectified when wiser heads prevail.
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