Behind the empty public gestures of the British and EU governments concerning the Zionist holocaust in Gaza lies system and money.
Neil Broatch is an independent researcher. Who’s also written on the consequences of psychiatric drug treatment and served on the board of a charity focussed on changing mental health treatment.
In the run-up to Britain’s last general election, concerns that the provision of arms to Israel may make government officials complicit in genocide, led to demands for it to publish the legal advice given to ministers on continuing arms sales to Israel. The issue was highlighted by the fact that before taking office David Lammy MP called on the government to publish its legal advice concering Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law. This was following comments from Alicia Kearns MP that officials had privately assessed that Israel was not in compliance with IHL.
Despite open letters from civil servants and lawyers and judges detailing grounds to assess “grave violations of international law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide.” The incoming foreign secretary would then decline to publish the advice. This was in line with a consistent pattern of decision making – indicating a lack of seriousness concerning Britain’s obligations under international humanitarian law (IHL), as one of its former ministers related.
However, the nature of the support consisted in more than a continuing transfer of parts. It extended to active cooperation between the militaries. As web marketer and former British defence secretary Grant Schapps would later emphasize, intelligence from Britain’s surveillance aircraft had guided hostage rescue operations – including the operation at Nusierat camp. Which resulted in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
One reason the government does not withhold supplies and assistance is likely because to do so would conflict with its undertakings in a Memorandum of Understanding, signed with Israel in November 2021; and probably also an agreement between the two militaries a year earlier.
What did that MoU commit to?
The full terms of these agreements are not on the public record. Given the government’s subsequent resistance to public pressure, I would venture that there were provisions to the effect that: the military and security partnership be shielded from any short-term political disruption – such as that might arise from public outrage against the conduct of the IDF – and in addition to this ‘depolitization’ of the relationship, that these arrangements also be sheilded from public scrutiny.
Such an understanding between the two national security state bureaucracies was probably already in place, implicitly at least. As the Telegraph noted in the run up to the 2019 General election; aside from the US, Israel’s intel agencies were Britain’s second largest partner in terms of intelligence sharing.
Both countries security appartuses were apparently concerned to avoid the prospect of a Corbyn led government; evidence of an outsize influence, largely beyond democratic scrutiny, of Israel on the UK policy environment.
Subsequently, Britain’s legacy media would be less forthcoming about this level of engagement. It preferred not to cover the role of RAF Akrotiri (on Cyprus) in providing surveillance overflights that can relay live ‘battlefield’ intel to the Israeli military. When a tabloid blustered in the days after October 7, that the SAS had been deployed to the base, the government issued a “D-Notice” to editors to avoid further mention of any such activity.
As with Britain’s role in overseeing the decade long war on Yemen, maintaining governmental opacity, and directing client media to look away, is essential for avoiding accountability.
Why does this state of affairs continue?
Israel is valued as a technologically advanced partner, with capabilities in AI, fintech, cyber-security, advanced weaponry, surveillance and population control. Rapidly developing and lucrative sectors that national security bureaucracies will be keen to have a guiding hand over. Bilateral economic partnership arrangements bridge the military and civilian sectors; with hi–tech sector firms becoming enmeshed into the military and security domain. Enabling Israel is effectively a baked-in feature of state-capture and a transnational corporate oligarchy.
Israel’s planners appear, long ago, to have undestood the value of having a multitude of international partners for its defence industry. As the campaigner Itay Mack noted a decade ago:
“The more countries are invested in such deals with Elbit and other Israel weapon companies, the less likely they are to oppose Israel diplomatically, because the big deals go through an Israeli state approval organ, and it is mostly states which by the weapons”
The diffuse supply chain for the F-35 provides a clear example. A government ordering the cessation of supply of parts to Israel, would then disrupt NATO’s F-35 programme. This would be and at odds with the UK and EU’s push for a ‘defence’ focused re-industrialisation – for the sake of fighting Russia.
Such extensively dispersed defence-industrial supply chains serve to lock-in host nations, as long as they’re ‘pragmatic’. So ensuring the Israelis lasting impunity. It may perhaps be a bad look for the political and media class in the west, and even for despotic ruling families in the Gulf, but Israel, by virtue of these extensive entanglements, is ‘too big to fail’.
In contrast, the Palestinians, as Mark Curtis wrote the other year, “are no strategic asset to Whitehall… they offer nothing to the British political elite. They are not geopolitical assets. They are simply human beings and therefore irrelevant to UK planners.”
The same calculus explains the EU council’s recent refusal to enact provisions, in its association agreement with Israel, for the event of a partner state contravening IHL. This reluctance, to place even token sanctions, will have disappointed campaigners, but it should surprise no-one. A guiding intent of the supranational architecture of ‘free-trade’ is, after all, to shield pro-corporate economic policies from any democratic will or accountability.
Any suspension of trading arrangements would risk disrupting the flow of weapon systems and technical support to the regime in Kiev. Israeli companies are involved directly, as well as indirectly through NATO’s procurements from them. Now both Israeli and British weapons manufacturers are partnering with Ukrainian firms in developing drone and counter-drone systems, to go up against the systems of the Russians and Iranians.
Even if a government were to bow to public pressure, there would probably be no shortage of parties willing to take its place as customers of Israel’s ‘security’ sector – with its “know-how and means for suppressing a population.” After a bit of hand-wringing for domestic audiences, government delegations will soon be keen to visit the stalls of Israeli firms at arms and ‘cyber-security’ conventions. “They come to see how we turn blood into money”, as Yoav Gallant once aptly summed-up the apparent business model. A model of innovation seemingly irresistable to those shielded from any legal or democratic accountability.
Be the first to comment