You know those trade sanctions that Ed Miliband is about to slap on Israel? Well, last night, according to Bloomberg, British diplomats were quietly telling the Americans something rather different: that the measures are largely symbolic, and that nothing of substance will change in our trade or security relationship with Jerusalem.
That tells you everything you need to know about this government: contradictory messages to different people on the same day. This isn’t about running the country responsibly, in the national interest; it is about managing optics, appeasing its own backbenchers and wavering progressive voters on the one hand, and managing the demands of reality on the other.
This is all part of the “comprehensive reset” with Israel that the foreign secretary promised parliament last month. According to a Labour MP – who spoke to the Telegraph anonymously – these measures were intended to reassure “muppet” backbenchers who were “freaked out” by email campaigns from Gaza activists and the Greens threatening to steal their seats.
Meanwhile, we now know that a diplomatic operation has been running behind closed doors to reassure the White House that the reset is purely cosmetic, amid fears in Downing Street that this could be Andy Burnham’s first serious Trumpian crisis. The prime minister reportedly telephoned the president on Monday afternoon in a desperate attempt to soften the blow. Good luck with that.
However, with Keir Starmer’s old seat of Holborn and St Pancras facing a by-election soon, in which the Greens will pull out all the stops, the danger is real. The government may be sitting on a working majority of 166, but if that seat falls away from Labour, it will be widely seen as writing on the wall, and morale in the party will plummet.
Yet the left aren’t stupid. If our relationship with Israel carries on as before, they will be even more enraged than they are at the moment. Officials have privately conceded that traders may be able to re-label goods to get round the restrictions. Does anybody think that this practice will escape the gimlet eye of Britain’s increasing number of antisemites?
A gesture, in other words, is only symbolic in the hands of the person making it. Everybody else is entitled to take it seriously; the government’s failure to grasp this, and to understand the magnitude of the potential fallout, is confirmation that we are indeed ruled by muppets.
Consider the banks. There is no such thing as a smart sanction, as Tom Keatinge of Rusi has observed, any more than there is a smart bomb.
Israel has one financial system rather than two, and British compliance officers have little incentive to spend long hours disentangling Israeli-linked transactions to determine whether they are lawful. That is how a symbolic measure can turn into a comprehensive boycott, imposed by risk departments in Canary Wharf rather than by ministers in Whitehall, and it is precisely what the Gaza fanatics are hoping for.
Principles surrendered to ideologues, in other words, have a habit of not staying put. British Jews, meanwhile, are enduring record levels of antisemitic incidents. Our communal leaders have warned Andy Burnham that untargeted measures would license a broader campaign against them. For all the government’s claims to be interested in protecting British Jews, the muck will land on our heads regardless.
That’s only the beginning. The lovely Itamar Ben-Gvir has already demanded that the Falklands be recognised as Argentine territory, which is about as helpful as a cup of cold sick. When Trump, who is nothing if not mercurial, was recently asked about the islands, he replied that he “reviews every position”, hardly the ringing guarantee this country has relied upon since 1982. One thing is all but certain, however: Britain will face being barred from involvement in Gaza peacebuilding. After all, the Dutch were frozen out for less.
Settler violence is real, of course, and it is contemptible, and Israel should prosecute a great deal more of it than it does. Building on E1 is needlessly provocative, designed in large part with the upcoming election in mind and far-right votes up for grabs.
Yet there is a particular species of foolishness in a policy engineered to be too feeble to achieve anything and too provocative to pass under the radar. Ministers may assure Washington that the whole thing is merely theatre, and they may well believe it. But they are playing with fire, and going on current evidence, these muppets are about to burn a lot of stuff down.
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