Israel's renewed assault on Gaza has prompted international condemnation, but many of those critics will face their own

[malaise]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/20/judgment-israel-gaza-benjamin-netanyahu-enablers

Suddenly, something is shifting. Last week, a stunning parliamentary intervention was delivered by the Tory backbencher Kit Malthouse. In a question to Hamish Falconer, Labour’s Middle East minister, he noted that “it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the slaughter in Gaza”, adding that “crimes come daily”. Given Britain was signatory to various conventions imposing a “positive obligation to act to prevent genocide” and other crimes, Malthouse asked what advice the government had taken as to the liability of the prime minister, the foreign secretary, Falconer himself and previous ministers “when the reckoning comes”.

The idea of a “reckoning” is clearly playing on the minds of western politicians. Perhaps it is even keeping them up at night. This week, Britain joined France and Canada in denouncing the suffering in Gaza as “intolerable”, threatening an unspecified “concrete” response if Israel’s current onslaught into the Gaza Strip continues. Speaking in the Commons today, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, announced the UK was suspending trade talks with Israel, summoning its ambassador to the UK and imposing sanctions on a few extremist settlers. “The world is judging. History will judge them,” he said, in reference to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Lammy is right. But the problem for him is that this “judgment” will extend far beyond the direct perpetrators. It will also include Israel’s enablers.

The foreign secretary might have announced his measures with great pomp and gravity, but they amounted to tokenistic nonsense. Even David Cameron tried to go further a year ago when he was foreign secretary, before abandoning plans to directly sanction two senior Israeli government ministers, the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. With the international criminal court having issued arrest warrants against the Israeli leadership six months ago, panic is clearly breaking out in government. And yet it is still not doing all it can to stop Israel. Just last week, the UK was in court defending Britain’s continued export of F-35 fighter jet parts that end up in Israel.

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Many are complicit