Three former Supreme Court judges have joined calls for the UK to end weapons sales to Israel after seven aid workers were killed in an air strike in Gaza.
More than 600 legal experts wrote to Rishi Sunak, saying the UK risks breaking international law over a “plausible risk of genocide” in the Palestinian territory.
Canada, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have suspended arms exports to Israel in recent months and pressure is mounting on the UK to follow suit. In a YouGov poll carried out in late March 56% of UK adults were in favour of banning arms exports to Israel, with 17% saying they should continue.
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The 17-page letter, to which the former Supreme Court president Lady Hale was among the signatories, says the sale of arms and weapons systems to Israel “falls significantly short” of the government’s obligations under international law.
The UK has licensed arms to Israel worth over £574 million since 2008, when official country-level data was made available, according to pressure group Campaign Against Arms Trade. Britain supplies 15% of the value of the US-made F-35 fighter jets that have been used in Gaza.
British sales are “lower than those of other countries”, said the BBC, including Germany and Italy, and are “dwarfed by the billions supplied by its largest arms supplier, the United States”.
Nevertheless, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary under Tony Blair, said the UK must stop exporting arms there because of Israel’s “inhumane” actions in Gaza.
Speaking to the i news site, he said he was “exhausted by listening to the excuses of IDF spokespeople about how careful the IDF is when everyone knows, especially those of us who have had to deal with them, they are not careful”.
The UK’s arms export procedures give Israel the “benefit of the doubt”, said Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor of The Guardian. So as things stand, London is “rigging the game so that it can never be forced to admit there have been violations. It is truly a case of hear no evil, see no evil.”
Some Conservative MPs are pressing Sunak to act, “arguing these repeated pleas to Israel to kill fewer civilians don’t cut the mustard and never did”, said Politico’s London Playbook. Tory MP Crispin Blunt told Politico that cancelling arms exports is “the least of the measures the UK and others should be engaged in”.
Fellow Tory MP Bob Seely disagreed, advising against “virtue signalling or tutting”. He argued that “if we go off in a huff every time somebody does something we don’t like, we’re not going to have any friends in the world”.
Former home secretary Suella Braverman also rejected the idea of a ban, telling the BBC: “We owe it to Israel to stand with them.” Speaking during a visit to Israel, Braverman said: “I think that it would be a tragic shame if we were to walk away from our closest ally in this region.”
What next?
Straw has urged the foreign secretary, David Cameron, to use a Nato summit in Brussels this week to co-ordinate a Europe-wide ban on arming Israel.
But few expect this to happen. On Tuesday, Sunak said the UK has a “very careful” arms licensing regime, and defence industry sources told the i news site that they thought the UK would hold off on an arms embargo for the time being.
“While I understand and support the call for an embargo personally, some arms sales to Israel pose a deterrent to Iran,” said a source. So Sunak is unlikely to “do anything bar follow the US”, even though “the death of Britons makes that harder”.
Peter Ricketts, who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee during the Blair years, believes Washington may now reconsider its military links with Israel, said The Independent. “I think each time there is another of these horrors, they must be getting closer to the point where the Americans start putting some restrictions on their arms,” he said.
Meanwhile, “less controversial but still effective policies could be taken up” by the UK, said the i news site. These include considering a halt on “other security related exports, such as police hardware or CCTV-style equipment”, or the “access to UK markets for Israeli defence firms”.