Pro-Israel lobby group challenges Lammy’s feeble arms licence reduction
Government friends of genocide’s refusal to condemn array of Israeli war crimes leaves even tiny token gesture legally vulnerable
Keir Starmer’s and David Lammy’s fearfulness and complicity in Israel’s genocide have left even their feeble token gesture of suspending a tiny fraction of licences for UK arms exports to Israel facing legal challenge from pro-Israel lawyers.
Lammy and his boss had made a show of announcing the suspension of arms licences representing only eight percent of the total, claiming that the weapons in question were at risk(!) of being used in war crimes. But UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a group that forced a London hospital to remove a display of art by Palestinian children and tried to make Tower Hamlets council to order the removal of Palestinian flags put up by residents, has announced that it is to make a legal challenge to the ban because of the utter spinelessness of the way in which the Red Tory team did it.
UKLFI says it will apply for a judicial review of the suspension on the sick grounds that the government claims it is doing so because Israel is not allowing enough aid into Gaza – it is imposing famine – and because Israel is ‘allegedly’ abusing – in reality it torturing – Palestinian prisoners. But neither of those clear war crimes require the
important components which go into military aircraft including fighter aircraft, helicopters and drones, as well as items which facilitate ground targeting
that Lammy said he was suspending.
UKLFI openly uses lawfare to try to serve Israel’s interests – its operations director said in 2016 that the group exists to
[stand] for Israel, and doing that as effectively as we possibly can.
It tried recently – and failed – to have British-Palestinian surgeon struck off the medical register because of his support for Palestine, quoting social media posts that he either did not make or said had been mistranslated, a common tactic of the Zionist right and their allies against supporters of Palestinian human rights.
But in this case, their point stands up: Starmer and Lammy have stubbornly refused ever to state the obvious and call Israel’s daily bombing of schools, hospitals, homes, ambulances and aid workers, and its months-long mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, the war crimes that they undoubtedly are. By not giving that incontrovertible justification as the basis for the full arms ban that international law requires, they have left their spineless, inhumane gesture so wide open to legal challenge that a truck loaded with deadly missiles could be driven through it.
Perhaps intentionally, given their support for Israel’s genocide so far.
Ironically, this may well mean that Starmer’s government will be in court arguing both why they should be banning arms to Israel and should not be banning arms to Israel, because as lawyer Naks Bilal pointed out the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) is trying to force the government to fulfil its obligations under international law and to stop equipping the genocidal occupation regime entirely:
An utter betrayal by Starmer and Lammy that is rightly making them look weak and idiotic – but is costing the lives of innocents with every day that it continues.
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