David Lammy has made an embarrassing mistake

The Foreign Secretary’s decision will surely prove to be an ill-judged blip, soon to be reversed

Over the last three years, Britain sold £3.1 billion of weapons to Qatar, the world’s foremost sponsor of Sunni jihadism and the principal benefactor of Hamas. It sold £1.9 billion’s worth to Saudi Arabia, which has been engaged in a bloody war in Yemen that has not, shall we say, been fought entirely according to democratic norms.
Turkey, which has crushed the Kurds once again with less concern for human rights than one might hope, received £799 million in British arms. The United Arab Emirates, often viewed as a dictatorship in Whitehall, purchased a £416 million cache, while the Egyptian police state was able to buy a £318 million arsenal as it continued its flirtation with Islamism and enthusiasm for corruption.
By contrast, Israel, the Middle East’s sole democracy and the only power to respect the rights of women and minorities, which is locked in an existential struggle against the forces of jihadism that menace us all, bought £83 million of British arms, a sum that constitutes just 1 per cent of its total weapons purchases.
Yet it is the Jewish state that attracted David Lammy’s criticism yesterday, as he announced that he was suspending 30 arms export licences to Jerusalem amid misinformation that it has been prosecuting the war in Gaza to excess.
Both in terms of kit and intelligence sharing, the Israeli-British security partnership – as enshrined in the 2020 bilateral military cooperation agreement – has been of at least as much benefit to London as Jerusalem. Arguably, it has benefited us more.
Britain’s Watchkeeper surveillance UAVs, based on Israel’s Hermes 450 drone, have saved countless British lives in Afghanistan. British troops have trained on Salisbury Plain with Israel’s cutting-edge Rhino mobile command and control centre.
Mutual assistance has been enjoyed for decades. In 2015, Israeli intelligence helped the Metropolitan police discover a bomb factory in northwest London, complete with three tonnes of ammonium nitrate hidden in disposable ice packs.
Mossad’s former deputy director, Ram Ben-Barak, told me that an Israeli air strike on Syria’s secret nuclear reactor in 2007 was the result of intelligence from British spies. Without it, Bashar al-Assad may have fought his civil war with nuclear weapons as well as chemical ones. Our shared values and interests are significant. What will become of them now?
I am writing this from Tel Aviv, where few Israelis noticed the Lammy announcement yesterday. They could be forgiven for their inattention; the funerals of the six hostages who were executed underground by Hamas were taking place, a development that sapped Israel’s precious store of hope and cast the already anguished country into further depths of mourning. The quirk of timing that led the foreign secretary to single out Israel on a day of national grief was described by Britain’s Jewish Leadership council as “disappointing”.
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 the Hamas casualty figures at face value and matches them with Israel’s assessment of the number of terrorists killed, it produces a combatant-to-civilian casualty ratio that easily outshines the track records of both Britain and the United States.
Yesterday, a veteran American intelligence officer who served in the campaign against Islamic State told me how little consideration the western-Iraqi coalition gave to civilians in Mosul. In his estimation, that battle killed 60 civilians for every combatant.
“We have been dropping 2,000lb JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) on single sniper positions under both Trump and Biden,” he confessed. How many British arms have been sold to the Americans over the last three years? Answer: a total of £2bn. And the RAF was involved in the Mosul campaign.
What is the government thinking? Does the foreign secretary really want to invite scrutiny of every international recipient of British weapons?
Part of the problem is that although Israel is very good at war-fighting, it is nowhere near as effective when it comes to public relations. On that front, even as its leaders peer into the abyss of destruction, Hamas has been the out-and-out winner.
The facts, however, are undeniable. Even given the unique challenges of Gaza – the enemy strategy of human sacrifice, the underground terror city, the foe that doesn’t mind dying – the Jewish state is fighting a cleaner war than has ever been waged anywhere in the world.
You wouldn’t know it from your television. You wouldn’t know it from social media or the progressive ideologues that dominate so many of our institutions. But you would know it if you considered the facts properly and weighed British arms sales to Israel against those to that list of autocracies provided above (not including the United States).
Given Labour’s massive majority, which frees it to govern without concern for special interest groups, this suspension of 30 arms export licences will surely prove an ill-judged blip, to be rectified when wiser heads prevail.