Fraying Ties

The UK and Israel in difficult times

The piano of Oded Lifshitz, an 82 year old former journalist and peace activist. Kidnapped Nir Oz by Hamas and murdered in Gaza a few months later.

Jerusalem, that ancient crucible of faith and fury, has a way of stripping away pretensions. I should know, I’ve just returned from a whirlwind visit to the Holy Land, courtesy of an invitation from the Israeli embassy. It was meant to be a fact-finding jaunt, a chance to see the realities on the ground amid the ceaseless drumbeat of Levantine conflict. But as I wandered from the rocket-scarred Golan in the north to the shattered and bloodied kibbutzim of the south, one thought kept nagging at me, how on earth did the UK, once a steadfast ally, let relations with Israel collapse into this sorry mess? After all in the grand scheme of things, their fight After all their fight is, in many ways, our fight. A fight for enlightenment ideals, international norms, democracy and the rest. Surely we share the view of Germany’s Chanecllor Merz who pointed out after the attack on Iran that has crippled their nuclear weapon capacity that Israel was doing our “dirty work”.

It’s a tale of misplaced moralising, political opportunism, and a Labour government that’s more interested in virtue-signalling to its restive base here in the UK than clear sighted geopolitical realpolitik and standing by a key and trusted strategic partner. All this all crystallises in one awkward encounter back in 2024.

Picture the scene: the grand, echoing halls of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. It’s July 2024, and David Lammy, Britain’s freshly minted Foreign Secretary under Sir Keir Starmer’s new Labour regime, is facing off across a vast, polished table with Benjamin Netanyahu. Each man flanked by a phalanx of officials, the air thick with the weight of history and the acrid scent of ongoing war. Lammy, ever the performer, tries to set a chummy tone. He waxes lyrical about his multi-ethnic constituency in Tottenham, home to Muslims and Jews alike. According to Labour Friends of Israel, he even name-drops Stamford Hill as part of his patch, reader, it isn’t; that’s in neighbouring Hackney, Diane Abbott’s manor. A small slip, perhaps, but emblematic of the casual inaccuracies that plague Labour’s grasp on Jewish concerns.

Undeterred, Lammy piles on the credentials. He boasts of his time at Harvard, partially funded by Jewish lawyers, a nod, one supposes, to his cosmopolitan bona fides. And then, the clincher: he’s visited Auschwitz, that haunting symbol of humanity’s darkest hour, and vowed it must never happen again. Our source in the Israeli Foreign Ministry, a seasoned diplomat with a a facsimile smile, confided that the intent was clear: Lammy was laying the groundwork to say, “I get it. I understand Jewish pain, Jewish history. Some of my best friends are Jews.” It was classic politician’s patter, designed to soften the blow of what came next. Yet as dishonest as a manifesto tax pledge.

Because, of course, the faux bonhomie didn’t last. Lammy swiftly pivoted to lecturing Netanyahu on Israel’s “best interests.” Ceasefire now, he demanded, as if Jerusalem hadn’t been pleading for the release of hostages held by Hamas for months, as a precursor for a ceasefire.

He then ‘preached’ about international law, implying Israel was the scofflaw while conveniently ignoring the barbarity of October 7th, 2023, when Hamas terrorists surged across the Gaza border, murdering, looting, raping, and kidnapping in the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. To most Israelis, that day was already a grim reprise of Auschwitz: systematic evil unleashed on innocents. Lammy later laid a wreath at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, but it rang hollow. He didn’t grasp, and neither does Starmer’s Labour leadership, that for Israelis, the fight against Hamas isn’t optional; it’s existential.

Fast forward to my own trip last week, and the chasm between Britain’s rhetoric and Israel’s reality couldn’t be starker. Invited by the embassy to witness the frontlines, we started in the north, where the scars of Hezbollah’s aggression are fresh and raw. We visited the Golan Heights, that windswept plateau overlooking Syria and Lebanon. There, we were there to meet Druze families shattered by a Hezbollah rocket that slammed into a football field in Majdal Shams back in July 2024, killing 12 children at play. The missile, fired from a hill within site of the pitch, hit the bleachers, there was no time to get to the shelters. These weren’t abstract casualties; they were sons and daughters, futures snuffed out by an Iranian proxy’s precision strike. And the threat to the Druze, is not just in the Israeli controlled Golan, but in those villages still in Syria, where their syncretic religion is regarded as generational apostasy to the new, TV friendly, jihadist regime in Syria.

The Valley of Tears

From there, we gazed into the Valley of Tears, site of the brutal 1973 Yom Kippur War battles. A former IDF intelligence officer gave us a no-nonsense briefing on the evolving security nightmare. Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the al-Qaeda offshoot leader now rebranded as a “moderate” in Syria’s fractured landscape, looms large. He is Sunni and no friend to Iran, or for that natter Hezbollah, but the wholesale slaughter of Alawites and attacks on the Syrian Druze, is very worrying.The new Lebanese government, if you can call it that, is trying to rein in Hezbollah, but Iran is refunding and attemting to rearm its Shiite proxy again with over £1bn arriving since the brief but devastating war that ended in February. “This isn’t just our fight,” the officer told us as we looked towards Khan Arnabeh in Syria, currently without power or water, but with a population of 10,000. “It’s the West’s too. But your government acts like it’s a spectator sport.”

Heading far south (or in Israeli terms about 4hrs drive away, the horror deepened. In the kibbutz of Nir Oz, less than a mile from the Gaza border, We visited the ruins left by Hamas’s October 7th rampage. Bullet-riddled homes, charred playgrounds, it was a ghost town of terror. We met family whose loved ones were slaughtered or dragged into Gaza’s tunnels. One grandmother showed us photos and video’s of her family and friends, the old peacenik journalist’s piano, once playing joyful afternoon songs, now a charred tangle of strings. He, in his eighties, and a man who had often taken Gazan children to hospitals in Israel, was trussed, transported and kidnapped, only to die alone in Hamas’s terror tunnels.

Mazal

Then came the survivor from the Nova music festival: Mazal, a young woman, Ethiopian, 32, whose testimony was harrowing beyond words. She described the chaos as gunmen descended, slaughtering all they could see, chuck grenades under cars . She survived because the rifle butt slammed on the back of her head both stunned her, but also covered her in her own blood, making her possum play believable. “I hid under bodies,” she whispered, they were the bodies of her two best friends. “How can anyone call this ‘resistance’?” These weren’t collateral damage, hundreds of the 6000 plus invaders that morning had heard the music and they were drawn to the peace festival like hornets to a flame. They couldn’t believe their luck, such easy targets. These were deliberate atrocities, war aims etched in blood.

Yet, absorbing these stories, Britain’s stance felt like a betrayal. Over the past few years, from Boris Johnson’s pro-Israel tilt under the Conservatives to Labour’s chill since 2024, diplomatic relations have frayed to breaking point. The turning point? October 7th and Israel’s rightful response. The UK, alongside much of the West, (though not Trump’s America) has abandoned Israel, re-framing legitimate warfare through the lens of civilian casualties rather than strategic imperatives. Of course, there are civilian deaths in Gaza, tragic, unavoidable in urban combat. But civilian deaths in Gaza are part of Hamas’s tactical objective. It deliberately embeds itself in hospitals, schools, and mosques, sacrificing its own people as a cynical ploy to erode Israel’s resolve and international support. Their charter literally calls for genocide against Jews, yet the world fixates on “partisan statistics” from Hamas-run ministries, ignoring the moral chasm.

Consider the slaughter of medics in clinics, the abduction and murder of children, these are Hamas’s explicit tactics, not sad collateral like Israel’s strikes gone awry. The moral orders are worlds apart. But Labour? They’ve suspended arms exports to Israel (September 2024), halted trade talks (early 2025), and barred Israeli officials from UK defence conferences (August 2025). Starmer’s government has even recognised a Palestinian state unilaterally, despite warnings that it would empower extremists. Public attitudes in Britain, per YouGov polls in July 2025, show sympathy for Palestinians at twice the rate for Israelis, fuelled by biased media and campus activism. The BBC is now exposed as having made over 200 factual errors in its reporting of the Gaza conflict. One wouldn’t mind, except all the errors are in the same pro Hamas direction. This is not cock up, it is clear and devastating bias. And it is morally abhorrent.

And the risks? Post international recognition of the state of Palestine, imagine Hamas, victorious in potential West Bank elections, (they currently lead polling both in Gaza and the West Bank) plotting atrocities from East Jerusalem. Israel allowing that would be suicidal, whetting the blade aimed at their own necks. They know to their horrific cost, and surely we know, that if Hamas are not removed from the equation, then the result will be slaughter, deliberate, indiscriminate, slaughter of the innocents.

The UK’s support for Palestinian recognition must be rescinded; it’s a recipe for rewarding terror. Instead, Britain should proscribe the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’s ideological kin, root and branch. We must rediscover Israel as a reliable partner in science, medicine, (think joint tech ventures), trade (billions in mutual exchange), art (cultural exchanges that enrich both), and yes, strategic defence. Israel’s intelligence has thwarted countless threats to UK soil; alienating them weakens us against Iran and its proxies.

This collapse isn’t inevitable. Our visit revealed Israelis weary but resolute, yearning for allies who understand their plight, but blase about the moral posturing coming from the UK, France and other second rate nations.

Labour’s moral posturing, Lammy’s lectures, Starmer’s equivocations, have isolated Britain, straining ties with the US under a more pro-Israel administration post-2024 elections. As we flew home, overlooking the Mediterranean’s azure expanse, I pondered: Britain helped birth modern Israel via the Balfour Declaration, it was British Centurion tanks that defended Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Now, we’re abandoning her in her hour of need. For why, so that the current Government can try and stave off the rise of the Greens and Corbyn’s party, that and the Gaza independents. There is no moral argument to abandon Israel, merely the sordid electoral calculus of a morally bereft, and political risible Government.

It’s time to reverse course, before the frayed ties snap entirely.