In the midst of the Gaza genocide, foreign secretary David Lammy steps up to the Labour Party conference podium. He trained as a lawyer. He knows how to research. And he knows how to manipulate language to make things sound favourable for a client. Listening to his speech, you’d think Israel was his client.
Labour conference: ‘Putin, Putin, Putin, and poor little Israel’
When there’s an aggressor in a conflict, Lammy knows how to recognise it and clearly state its name. Numerous times.
Before speaking about Gaza, he highlighted “Putin’s full-scale invasion” of Ukraine, emphasising that:
If the West does not demonstrate it can outlast Putin, it does not only threaten Ukraine’s democracy, it threatens us all. We need to show Putin that Britain and its allies are not going anywhere. …
And we need to send another message to Vladimir Putin. ‘Your interference in our democracy, promoting disinformation and encouraging disorder…, must end.’ …
We are taking action against Russian disinformation… to take on Putin’s lies
Clear message. ‘Big bad Putin is the source of all evil. DANGER, DANGER. We must stop him.’
Not quite an analysis of how the capitalist chaos of the 1990s in Russia helped to bring him to power, or how NATO’s expansion eastwards and the pro-Western 2014 coup in Ukraine sparked tensions that diplomats with political will could have easily fixed in the years leading up to Russia’s 2022 invasion. But it proved Lammy was capable of identifying the person or country responsible for an action. There could be no doubt that he held Russia responsible for the damage and bloodshed in Ukraine.
If he was playing prosecution on Russia’s crimes in Ukraine, however, he was undeniably playing defence on Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
Who killed the Palestinians in Gaza, Lammy? Who made it ‘hell on earth’?
Considering Lammy’s apparent dislike of context and nuance, we wouldn’t expect him to go into the decades-long history of Israeli colonialism in Palestine. That would take a bit too long. But he could at least acknowledge that Israel has massacred thousands of children in Gaza, right?
Well, apparently not. For Lammy, the Israeli apartheid state is not the war criminal. It’s the victim.
He began by remembering “the horrific news” last year that “Hamas terrorists had murdered around 1200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 others”. And he continued, without mentioning the word “Israel”, by saying:
What has followed those atrocities is a horrific war. Tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children killed and injured. Their homes turned to rubble, leaving Gaza a vision of hell on earth.
When Hamas killed, it was an atrocity, murder, and terror. And they held clear responsibility. But when Israel did it, it was just ‘killed’ and ‘injured’. And it was unclear who was responsible.
This is a failure to acknowledge Israeli responsibility for ‘the killing of women and children, and the turning of homes into rubble and Gaza into a hell on earth’. For Lammy, it apparently wasn’t the conscious decision of a colonial power that receives arms and money from the West. It just happened. Israeli Occupation Forces had achieved in months what neither Putin nor Hamas had in years – to kill over 12,000 children. But it seems that didn’t merit a clear condemnation of Israel from Lammy:
Staggering. The number of children reported killed in just over 4 months in #Gaza is higher than the number of children killed in 4 years of wars around the world combined.
This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.#ceasefireNow for the… pic.twitter.com/tYwSNHecpy
— Philippe Lazzarini (@UNLazzarini) March 12, 2024
So apparently, Israel is the victim. Putin and Iran are the aggressors.
Lammy hadn’t finished letting Israel off the hook yet, though, during his Labour conference speech. He mentioned again the Israelis (not the Palestinians) “cruelly held captive”. And he added that “Israel faces threats from all angles, with Iran and its proxies seeking to wipe Israel off the map”. So not Israel actually, literally, taking steps to wipe Gaza off the map. Not Israeli politicians speaking of doing the same to Lebanon. But Iran.
To round off his Labour conference speech, of course, he also had to mention Putin again, stressing:
Iran is not only destabilizing the Middle East, but providing support to Putin’s barbaric war.
In short, big bad enemies pushed the West’s poor little colonial ally Israel into genociding Palestinians. It didn’t want to. It just happened. And the West’s enemies, conveniently, are to blame for everything.
You’d hope any proper court of law would see through such a shoddy argument. But apparently, that’s the kind of argument the Labour Party makes now under Keir Starmer and David Lammy:
Featured image via Sky News – YouTube
