On Sunday, after Hezbollah bombed northern Israel, the IDF struck the terrorist group’s headquarters in Beirut. Iran responded by launching missiles at the Jewish state, and the Israeli military then struck targets in Iran.
The UK’s response to this series of events came from Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper. “The resumption of conflict between Iran and Israel is in no one’s interest. Both sides must show restraint and de-escalate immediately,” she said. “Negotiations must continue towards the lasting settlement that we all need, for peace and stability in the region, and for the full restoration of global trade.”
This call for de-escalation may appear balanced, but it obscures a fundamental reality: it was Iran that chose to escalate by launching missiles at Israeli population centres. Four civilian homes were hit, though thankfully no one was killed. Israel responded by targeting military and strategic sites.
The same tendency to assign equal blame was evident only days earlier in Cooper’s response to Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Significantly, Iran would later point to that conflict as the reason for its attack on Israel. Cooper lamented that “Israel’s military escalation in Lebanon has killed and displaced civilians, destroyed infrastructure, and eroded space for diplomacy. It must end.”
Civilian suffering is always tragic and deserves acknowledgement, yet there has been remarkably little emphasis on the fact that Hezbollah initiated the conflict, or on its long-standing practice of embedding military assets within civilian areas. Nor has sufficient attention been paid to the displaced Israeli civilians, the homes damaged or destroyed by Hezbollah attacks, and the prolonged disruption and insecurity imposed on northern Israel.
As to the foreign secretary’s claim that Israel’s actions had reduced the space for diplomacy, the evidence points in the opposite direction.
Only days after her remarks, Israel and Lebanon agreed on a potentially significant deal as part of ongoing direct talks made possible only because of Israeli military pressure on Hezbollah. For decades, Hezbollah has acted as Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, exercising enormous influence over Lebanon’s political and security institutions. By significantly weakening the Shia terror group, Israel has helped restore a degree of Lebanese sovereignty, enabling the government to enter into negotiations with Israel despite the opposition of Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.
Cooper rightly said that “Hezbollah must end attacks on Israel and disarm”, but it is difficult to see how statements from foreign capitals alone could achieve this.
The persistent blurring of responsibility in official British statements is puzzling given that Iran’s leadership is committed to Israel’s destruction and has spent years building what it proudly describes as a regional “axis of resistance”, stretching from Lebanon and Gaza to Yemen and beyond.
If British statements have any practical effect, this habit of false equivalence risks encouraging precisely the actors threatening the “peace and stability” the foreign secretary invokes, while straining relations with an ally whose security concerns Britain professes to take seriously.
Nor are such statements likely to impress Britain’s Gulf allies. They know who has armed militias across the Middle East, attacked their countries and sponsored proxy warfare from Yemen to Lebanon. They know that the principal threat to regional stability is not Israeli self-defence but Iranian expansionism.
Sir Keir Starmer has said since the start of the conflict that this is not Britain’s war, and neither Israel nor the US has asked Britain to join it. But while Britain is not militarily involved, that does not require it to adopt a position of strategic neutrality about the outcome.
It is firmly in Britain’s interests that Iran’s ability to destabilise the region is diminished, that its nuclear ambitions are thwarted and that Hezbollah’s grip on Lebanon is broken or at least weakened. It is also in Britain’s interests to confront a regime that the security services have identified as plotting attacks on UK soil.
A foreign policy guided by realism should have no difficulty recognising these facts. Britain need not endorse every Israeli action, but it should be clear-eyed and outspoken about who is driving this conflict and whose defeat would make both the Middle East and Britain safer.
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