Mick Hartley

Jake Wallis Simons on the hypocrisy of the government's Israel arms ban:

Over the last three years, Britain sold £3.1bn of weapons to Qatar, the world’s foremost sponsor of Sunni jihadism and the principal benefactor of Hamas. It sold £1.9bn’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 £799m in British arms. The United Arab Emirates, often viewed as a dictatorship in Whitehall, purchased a £416m cache, while the Egyptian police state was able to buy a £318m 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 £83m 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”.

Nicely understated. More of a disgrace, I'd say – but absolutely no surprise from Lammy.