Over the past 15 months, the British government has helped facilitate over 100,000 deaths in Gaza through arms shipments and diplomatic backing of Israel. Yet after U.S. President Donald Trump announced a plan this week for America to take over Gaza and displace its population, British Prime Minister Keir Steimer responded that Palestinians “must be allowed home, they must be allowed to rebuild.”
This inconsistent approach — in which Palestinian human rights are simultaneously ignored and invoked for political positioning — is indicative of the British government’s century-long relationship with Israel and Palestine.
In 1917, amid the broader context of World War I and the increasing prominence of the Zionist movement, the British government pledged to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
To carry out this mission, Britain facilitated the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, causing the Jewish population to rise from 9% of the total population to 27% between 1922 and 1935. That’s despite the fact that the British had already promised Palestine to Arabs as an independent state.
In a statement known as the Balfour Declaration, the British government asserted that it would use “their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
In these statements, the British government explicitly supported the Zionist movement, while simultaneously making a pledge to protect the existing Arab population. For over a century since, Britain has continued to try to thread this needle despite its inherent paradox.
Indeed, World Zionist Congress leader Leo Motzkin had already made Zionism’s motivations abundantly clear in 1917, saying, “Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country.”
Following World War I, the League of Nations granted Britain a mandate to govern Palestine. Under British administration, policies initially facilitated significant Jewish migration to the region. However, through the 1939 White Paper, Britain restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 over five years.
Zionist groups rejected this decision, organizing illegal immigration efforts — between 1939 and 1948, approximately 118,228 Jews entered Palestine, many through illegal means — and carrying out terrorist acts to oppose British policy. In 1946, the Zionist militant group Irgun bombed the British headquarters in Jerusalem. This attack remains the highest death toll of British nationals in any terrorist attack, with 96 nationals being killed.
Facing rising demands from both Zionist and Arab factions, the British decided to withdraw in 1947 and turned the issue over to the United Nations. As the U.N. partition plan was implemented, violence, massacres and conflict imposed on Palestinians soon became the norm within the region.
These developments were deeply intensified by the Holocaust and World War II, which also exacerbated tensions within the region.
Diplomacy and strategy
After officially withdrawing their mandate in 1948, the U.K. avoided further conflicts and deemed Palestine as costly and unimportant in its wider pursuits of maintaining a base of influence and economic control in the Middle East.
Following the withdrawal, the U.K. shifted focus to a broader Middle Eastern foreign policy and has since oscillated between a “diplomatic” and “strategic” orientation. Through this strategic approach, the U.K. reinforces its ideological sympathy for Israel and its pro-U.S. orientation. This relationship has cultivated a narrative of Israel as a democratic nation, ostensibly free from responsibility for regional conflict, and it establishes a positive relationship between the U.K. and Israel.
“Rather than just being a trade partner and enabling this huge war machine, the U.K. immediately comes to the defence of Israel,” Sharri Plonski, a senior lecturer in international politics at Queen Mary University of London, explains to Analyst News.
“The first step is to say, ‘We condemn Hamas, Israel has the right to self-defence, and it has the right to do this,’ which is embedded in every layer [of their defence].”
At the same time, this diplomatic orientation seeks to foster a positive relationship with powerful Arab nations and presents a “sympathy” for the Palestinian position. The U.K. officially views Israel as a disruptive force, undermining Western perceptions in the Middle East and straining ties with Arab nations.
Plonski says the trade and arms relationship between the U.K. and Israel is secondary in comparison to the strategic ideological orientation. By continuously professing Israel’s misdeeds under the guise of liberal values, this strategic method enables smoother trade, arms deals and economic exchanges.
“Although they are significant trading partners, it is more about the liberal legitimacy that the U.K. offer[s] Israel and how it constantly goes back to their early friendship and proudness about Balfour,” Plonski says.
The strategic approach ultimately elevates Israel into the global economy by creating an artificial legitimacy based in Western nations’ political agenda. Through this narrative and ideological framework, Israel has a strong, unshakeable foothold within the international domain. “Israel has done an excellent marketing job, in terms of making themselves substantial and becoming a neo-liberal global economy,” Plonski adds.
With this interchange between a diplomatic and strategic outlook, a clear contradiction arises.
The U.K. recognises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as “occupied territory” under Israeli military occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967, in accordance with the U.N. fourth Geneva Convention. At the same time, Britain does not recognise Palestine as a state, saying, “The UK will recognise a Palestinian state at a time when it best serves the objective of peace. Bilateral recognition in itself cannot end the occupation.”
The recognition of occupation implies an acknowledgement of Palestinian territorial rights and Israel as an occupying power. The refusal to actually acknowledge and protect this right is illustrative of the contradicting approaches the U.K. has historically taken in the region.
As Husam Zomlot said, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the U.K., remarked last year: “There is such inconsistency in the U.K. policy that I…no longer understand if you ask me ‘What is the U.K. policy vis-a-vis Palestine?’ I don’t know. Inconsistent, contradictory.”
Britain’s current approach
Facing mounting criticism and legal efforts, Israeli allies may quietly recognize the fragility of the liberal legitimacy enabling Israel to commit egregious war crimes without accountability. But so far, the U.K. continues its approach of endorsing this legitimacy while promoting a veneer of concern for Palestinian human rights.
In a recent speech before the U.N. General Assembly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer – a former human rights lawyer — stated that “we must stand up for international law” and “make the institutions of peace fit for purpose.” These words suggest a commitment to peace and supporting the infrastructure of international law. But his government’s actions instead show a clear bias toward defending and enabling Israel’s violations of international law.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, finding that there are reasonable grounds to believe that each has committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.
Then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called this arrest warrant “deeply unhelpful”, arguing that “there is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self-defence” and the actions of Hamas.
Meanwhile, while the new Labour government says it respects the ICC and its decisions, it makes the same argument as its predecessors that there is “no moral equivalence between Israel, a democracy, and Hamas and Hezbollah.” The current government has also emphasized that it would be up to the domestic court to approve this arrest warrant, and then up to the police to arrest Netanyahu.
As many commentators have noted, this reluctance to back the ICC’s decision contrasts sharply with the U.K.’s response to Vladimir Putin. Like so many other major world leaders, Starmer praised the ICC’s pursuit of Putin for “barbaric actions in Ukraine”; meanwhile with Netanyahu, the government shifts responsibility to the courts and police, selectively applying international law to maintain its relationship with Israel while distancing itself from future decisions.
Even without the ICC decision, one might expect the U.K. to impose significant sanctions on Israel, given the numerous U.N. and Security Council resolutions and reports from hundreds of human rights organizations. Yet the U.K. continues to downplay these, just as it does the biggest international court in the world. British governments across the political spectrum not only disregard international law concerning Israel, but also continue to support, supply and escalate the destructive impact of Israel’s actions.
Last September, the U.K. made the decision to “partially block arms” to Israel in an attempt to show that they respect international law as “the weapons could be used in Gaza to violate international law”. However, the U.K. only suspended 30 out of 350 weapons export licences to Israel, and continued to emphasise that they are a “staunch ally” of Israel. Of the 320 weapons that are still supplied to Israel, the U.K. continues to send spy planes for Israel to gather intelligence within Gaza, making it directly complicit in genocide.
It’s clear that the strategic narrative promoted to the public by the U.K. government gives them a self-constructed license to support Israel with arms. Since 2000, both the U.S. and U.K. have focused on alienating and labelling those who criticize Israel’s actions as racist and antisemitic. But given that America has now emerged as the key player in this conflict, would it even have any meaningful impact if the U.K. were to stop arms and place sanctions on Israel?
At the very least, Plonski argues, the U.K. has a moral and legal duty to act.
“Even if they are not the big player, they have the responsibility not to act and enable genocide,” she says. “They are part of it and are deeply in the trench of this. The more countries and communities that divest from this, the better the chance to reach a ceasefire and end the colonial apartheid.”
With the U.K. increasingly offering vague responses to international legal decisions and taking minimal, ineffective actions to halt arms shipments to Israel, the government may be preparing to cover its tracks in anticipation of future public and legal scrutiny. But any attempts to conceal this track will forever be tainted by the blood of thousands.
