How Britain’s Political Class Enabled Genocide In Gaza
From Rishi Sunak to Keir Starmer, Britain’s political class has supported Israel’s atrocities in Gaza to the hilt while attempting to supress protests against genocide on the home front. They’ll never be able to wash away the shame of complicity.
Most British people wanted a ceasefire in Gaza from the very start of Israel’s onslaught. But the mainstream media worked with the political class to smear those protesting against genocide, labelling them as antisemites, Hamas supporters, or terrorists. (Alberto Pezzali - WPA Pool / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Oliver Eagleton
Peter Oborne is one of Britain’s leading journalists and the author of books such as The Rise of Political Lying, The Triumph of the Political Class, and The Assault on Truth. He has twice received the award for Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards. But his scathingly critical views of British foreign policy in the Middle East have put him at odds with much of the mainstream media in Britain.
In his latest book, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, Oborne exposes the support of British governments under both Conservative and Labour prime ministers for Israel’s genocidal atrocities over the past two years. He also shows how support for the mass killing of Palestinian civilians is undermining democratic rights at home as the authorities try to clamp down on protest. Oliver Eagleton spoke to Oborne for Jacobin about Britain and Gaza.
Your new book documents Britain’s complicity in the Israeli war on Gaza. What does “complicity” mean in this context, and how has it evolved over the past two years?
On October 7, 2023, Hamas carried out a series of horrific atrocities. In their aftermath, it was natural that the world would feel sympathy for the innocent people who were killed. There was nothing wrong with this sympathy, but there was something deeply wrong with the support that Western states, including Britain, showed for Israel over the following weeks and months.
Britain has a historic responsibility for the creation of Israel and its current trajectory. When the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, went to Israel roughly two weeks after October 7, he would have been briefed about the nature of the Israeli reprisals on Gaza: indiscriminate attacks, hundreds of people dying daily, widespread destruction. He had both a moral and legal obligation to say, “Yes, a terrible event occurred, but you must not break international law or commit war crimes.”
Instead, both the Conservative government and the Labour opposition threw their weight behind Israel — or, more accurately, behind the United States. They would not break with the Biden administration and its policy in the Middle East, no matter the terrible events on the ground.
This created a situation of cross-party unity in the UK, in which some horrifying decisions were taken at the highest levels of the state that will be a permanent blot on the country’s reputation: undermining the International Court of Justice (ICJ), showing extraordinary hostility toward the International Criminal Court (ICC), continuing with arms sales to Israel, going along with the Israeli attack on United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and refusing to challenge unsubstantiated claims from the Israeli war cabinet that were used to justify the mass killings in Gaza.
Most British people wanted a ceasefire from the very start and felt that the only way to show their opposition to the government’s policy of arms sales and diplomatic support for Israel was to take to the streets. They held mass protests calling for the enforcement of international law and an end to the slaughter. But the mainstream media, rather than joining them in holding the government to account, worked with the political class to smear the protesters, labeling them antisemites, Hamas supporters, terrorists.
In the book, I examine this smear campaign in detail, including a shocking episode from February 2024 in which the Scottish National Party brought a motion to the House of Commons calling for an end to collective punishment of Palestinians. The Speaker of the House had a private meeting with Keir Starmer, and soon after he refused to allow the vote, on the basis that members of Parliament were under threat from protesters and that the motion could put them in harm’s way.
This fueled the narrative that supporters of Palestine were dangerous, linked with all manner of moral panics like Islamists and grooming gangs. And this in turn caused Islamophobia to surge, to the benefit of far-right populists like Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson. As such, the political space for dissent was almost entirely erased. The establishment tried to ensure that the country, as a whole, was lined up behind the Israeli war.
The book’s definition of complicity is quite capacious. It’s not only about Britain’s sale of fighter jet components or the enduring Anglo-Israeli military relationship. It’s about the country’s wider institutional landscape: the media, Parliament, the two-party system, the foreign policy establishment.
In this sense, Complicit fits with your previous work, which charts the gradual decline of British public life and the hollowing out of its civic structures. When, in your view, did this process begin? With New Labour?
I’m a conservative journalist, and this book is written from a conservative standpoint. I was brought up to believe Britain was a decent country. We helped build the postwar order: universal human rights, institutions like the United Nations, the Geneva Convention, the Nuremberg principles. These were major moral achievements by Britain and America. We were the “good guys” who resisted Nazism and the Soviet Union alike. That worldview made sense to me.
Then came the invasion of Iraq. It was a shock that the British state would lie to wage an illegal war of aggression simply because it was decreed by America. Tony Blair’s actions were in stark opposition to those of previous prime ministers like Harold Wilson, for example, who refused to send troops to Vietnam. So yes, I think the “war on terror” was a turning point in which Britain under New Labour abandoned its principles and set this decline in motion.
Even a prime minister as pro-Israel as Margaret Thatcher was still willing to call out Israeli atrocities when warranted. Earlier Conservative leaders were capable of respecting human rights and recognizing Palestinian suffering, even if they had little time for the Palestinian cause.
Labour, for its part, has always had sympathies for Zionism because of its trade union links and the socialist influences on the early Israeli state — yet figures like Tony Benn consistently spoke up about Israel’s crimes, and many in the party reevaluated their views in light of incidents like the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre.
But when Blair came to power, he changed all this. The overriding aim of his leadership was to prove to the Americans that the British could be trusted, which meant turning the post-1997 government into the most pro-Israeli one in history. Keir Starmer is now taking that position to its logical conclusion.
In the book, you offer a few possible explanations for this complicity. One is the unique character of the Atlantic alliance and Britain’s subservience to the United States; another is the pro-Israel lobby, which has a significant influence on the two main Westminster parties.
Is your argument that these factors are distorting Britain’s sense of its own geopolitical priorities? Does its support for Israel contradict its own national interests?
Britain is acting against its own self-interest in the sense that it’s alienated much of the world through its blind support. Ultimately though, I’m less concerned with whether it’s in Britain’s interest and more with whether Britain has done the right thing.
It should weigh heavily on any British prime minister that our country helped create the state of Israel and, at the same time, made commitments to the people of Palestine to uphold their rights. By allowing Israel to do whatever it wants, we have betrayed this historic responsibility. We have also betrayed the values — fairness, honesty, decency — that we claim to represent.
Before I began researching this book, I hadn’t realized quite how malicious our role in earlier wars like Cast Lead and Protective Edge was. We were in lockstep with Washington and Tel Aviv, opposing any attempts to hold them accountable for their brutal attacks on civilian targets.
The same can be said of the Great March of Return in 2018, when Palestinians mounted a largely nonviolent protest movement to show the world what it was like to live in an open-air prison camp and were shot down en masse by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). In the book, I call it “the Sharpeville that wasn’t.”
On the international stage, Britain has repeatedly claimed to support a two-state solution while working behind the scenes to undermine it at every turn. In doing so, we helped to create the conditions for October 7 and what has happened since.
You mentioned earlier that the establishment’s position on Gaza has given a boost to figures like Farage and Robinson. We’ve seen this taken to an extreme recently, with Starmer describing pro-Palestine protests as “un-British” while trying to force Israeli football hooligans into Birmingham. Can you explain how the issue of Israel-Palestine related to the rise of Islamophobia in Britain?
The connection between Israel-Palestine and the rise of Islamophobia is fundamental. This is because Israeli propagandists, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, have placed Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis at the heart of the debate: what they call the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” is on one side; on the other side is Muslim barbarism. You can trace this dividing line all the way back to Pope Urban II’s hideous speech at the Council of Clermont that launched the Crusades.
In the book, I document how the political/media attacks on the pro-Palestinian marchers are framed in this way. The protesters are painted as supporters of Islamist terrorism who want to bring down Western civilization. In fact, the marchers are standing up for the very best of Western civilization, but that thought is far beyond the comprehension of government ministers and newspaper columnists.
The media is one of your principal targets in the book. But given that polls consistently show strong public support for Palestine among the British public, would you say that the media’s attempt to manufacture consent has failed? Perhaps the problem is less that the media have controlled the narrative and more that mass opinion has failed to translate into meaningful policy changes?
It’s true that much of public opinion has remained pro-peace — if not explicitly pro-Palestinian. But even so, I don’t think the media has failed in its attempt to shape the dominant narrative and obscure the actual reality. Its systemic refusal to report what was actually happening on the ground allowed Israel to get away with countless atrocities.
For example, the BBC never explained Israel’s Dahiya doctrine — sanctioning the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure — which is essential to understanding the scale of devastation in Gaza. Nor has it properly reported the circumstances of October 7, instead of simply repeating various lurid accounts that have since been proven false. I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel and Palestine since then, and I’ve seen firsthand how the Israeli newspapers — the Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, +972 Magazine — are much more honest about what happened than Britain’s Times or Telegraph.
Moreover, the media portrayal of protesters as fringe extremists or even terrorists has been very powerful. It made many people feel afraid to associate with the movement, even if they privately agreed with it. When the biggest tabloids and broadsheets go out of their way to discredit people who try to tell the truth about what was happening, that has a chilling effect. It has enabled what we’re seeing now: the government’s attempts to ban Palestine protests outright and outlaw certain slogans.
Toward the end of the book, you discuss the US-Israeli plans for the “clear out” of Gaza, which may now be playing out with Trump’s misnamed “peace plan.” What was Britain’s role, if any, in the latter? And what are the chances that the deal will hold
There is no deal. This was a stitch-up between the United States and Israel, partners in what most experts have determined is a genocide. Donald Trump is a convicted felon, and Netanyahu is wanted for alleged war crimes. There is a strong case that Tony Blair, who seems to be Britain’s representative in all this, should have stood trial for war crimes. The presence of Blair as part of the solution and the absence of a serious Palestinian voice tells us all we want to know.
We now have a ceasefire, during which about two hundred Palestinians have already been killed, or should I say murdered, by Israel. Had it been the other way round and Hamas killed two hundred Israelis, there would be headlines everywhere and grave denunciations of Hamas for breaking the ceasefire. That is the way the Western media/political system works.
To answer your substantive question, though, the Israeli assault on the occupied territory continues. In the West Bank, the scale of Israeli violence has intensified in a terrifying way, while in Gaza it has abated but not ended. I have seen nothing that persuades me that Israel has abandoned its long-term, overriding objective of the eradication of an autonomous Palestinian presence in Gaza and the West Bank.
Yet Israel is looking increasingly isolated as a result. In my recent conversations with Palestinians in Jerusalem, they all said they feel Israel is finished — not as a political entity, for the time being, but morally. Its legitimacy is gone.
How will the country cope with having committed these crimes, especially given its own history? And how will the world respond? The comparison with South Africa is instructive. The great postwar moral struggles were South Africa and Palestine. The first eventually found justice while the second did not.
Having abandoned its former allies who were upholding apartheid in South Africa, the West sided with Israel as it became an increasingly brutal apartheid state. In so doing, Britain and America, along with much of Europe, have betrayed the international postwar order. It will now fall to others to maintain or rebuild it, because we have relinquished that authority. That could be a major global shift.
Of the different actors who have abetted the genocide — journalists, cabinet ministers, lobbyists, arms dealers — you write, “I expect you all think you’ll get away with it. You have in the past. But the world may be starting to change.” What kind of change might be on the horizon?
There are mechanisms for prosecuting war criminals and those who enable them. One of the most shocking developments — again, barely covered by the media — is the recent state-led attacks on those mechanisms, including the ICC.
The chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has no bank account; he’s under sanctions, as are many of his colleagues. The court is facing intense hostility from the United States, and the UK has refused to defend it. When he was foreign secretary, David Cameron reportedly tried to bully Khan to get him to fall in line and refrain from issuing arrest warrants for senior Israeli ministers.
Then there was the ICJ’s provisional ruling that warned that genocide may be taking place. From that moment, every country was put on notice. Under the Genocide Convention, they had a legal duty to act to prevent this barbarous crime.
Yet Britain and almost every other Western country have failed to enforce the ICJ’s orders. They did not demand that Israel comply, despite three separate provisional rulings. So there has been this concerted attempt to shield Israel and its accomplices from the consequences of their actions.
And yet I still believe there will be consequences. British and American officials may eventually face Interpol red notices or legal action in other jurisdictions. While the British attorney general would never approve such prosecutions, at least not under a Labour or Tory or Reform government, I’ve spoken to people at the ICC who are exploring alternative routes to justice.
They have the support of many countries around the world who are horrified by the Israeli war and the West’s complicity. So the center of power, moral and institutional, might be changing. And those who right now seem above accountability might someday have to face it.