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As UK and EU leaders try to find their bearings in the face of Donald Trump, there is one main point on which many agree: Ukraine cannot be sacrificed to Vladimir Putin and his murderous campaign to destroy the integrity of a European state. But the other thing which, implicitly, almost all leaders agree on is – that Gaza can be sacrificed to Israel’s Trump-endorsed genocidal war.
This contradiction is the Achilles heel of the current attempts to found a new European foreign and defence policy, and no one embodies it more clearly than
Sir Keir Starmer. The British prime minister, considerably discredited at home after barely eight months in office, has found in Ukraine a cause to restore his moral integrity, his European credentials and, he hopes, his electoral credibility. Yet for the former human rights lawyer, Gaza is the stain that never ceases to blight.
A decade ago, in another career, Starmer appeared before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to argue Croatia’s genocide case against Serbia, describing the 1991 destruction of the city of Vukovar, in which over 1,000 civilians died, in terms that clearly fit the much greater destruction of Gaza today: “not an armed conflict directed at military objectives, but a radically disproportionate attack, deliberately intended to devastate the town and its civilian population”.
Even as Labour leader, Starmer tweeted in 2021: “Genocide can never be met with indifference, impunity or inaction”. And this January, in a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day, he proclaimed: “It is on all of us to make ‘never again’ mean what it says: Never again”.
Yet it was clear that this did not include Palestine: he completely failed to mention Gaza and the same day his foreign secretary, David Lammy, author of many similar pieties, held a reception together with the Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, a brazen propagandist for the attack on the strip’s civilians.
Last week, as Israel’s assault, emboldened by Trump, returned to levels of killing last seen in late 2023, Lammy finally ventured a clear statement that it was in breach of international humanitarian law. But even this was too much for Starmer, and the minister, under the pretence of a clarification, had to make unclear what he had previously clarified: following his leader’s line, Israel was only “at risk” of a breach.
This transparent cover-up of Israel’s crimes occurred a full fourteen months after the ICJ ruled that there was a real and imminent risk of “irreparable prejudice to the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention”, months that have been filled with killing, destruction and starvation as Israel has ignored the Court’s instructions.
The Court has not made a full judgement on the case that Israel has committed genocide, but the legal duty of the UK and other European states to act to “prevent” it was triggered by that first judgment in January 2024, if not earlier. Starmer and his colleagues have now been in breach for a long, long time, not only for failing to halt Israel’s campaign but also for the UK’s active complicity in it.
The International Court of Justice on Gaza: ‘Good, but Not Good Enough’
The compromise ruling from the ICJ in the Hague could slow the violence against Gaza’s citizens, but catastrophe still looms
Gaza, Ukraine and Trump: A Single Challenge
It should not be necessary to explain to a lawyer why compliance with the law is desirable. But Starmer is now a politician, so it is to the political case that we must turn. He has assembled, together with France’s president Emmanuel Macron, incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk and EU leader Ursula von der Leyen, a “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine in the face of its threatened abandonment by Trump. They seek to mobilise their peoples to oppose Putin and to support large increases in defence spending.
The case for Ukraine is strong. It is a victim of naked imperial aggression, gross attacks on its civilians and brutal occupation in several regions. One might almost describe its plight as unprecedented, at least in recent times, except that there is an ongoing precedent, Palestine, where Israel has long inflicted the kind of terror that Russia causes in Ukraine. And Mariupol, where Russia razed a whole city to the ground in 2022, killing thousands of civilians and expelling more, was a foretaste of what Israel has done to Gaza almost every day since 2023.
Yet Europe’s new determination to stand by Ukraine, invoking international law, fails to find an echo when it comes to Gaza. Many of its leaders, far from opposing Trump on this, join him in supporting Israel. European states have been the prime supporters of the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for serial war crimes and crimes against humanity, with its judges alleging “a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population” – a possible harbinger of genocide charges – when they issued their arrest warrants. But the German and Polish governments went out of their way to welcome visits by the indicted war criminal Netanyahu, even as they banned the indicted war criminal Putin.
Thus it is not only the UK, whose air force flies regular surveillance flights over Gaza (in conjunction with Israel) from its base in Cyprus, that is providing support for the ongoing genocide. Germany sells Israel almost a third of its arms and gives it unwavering diplomatic backing. And many European states protect Israel’s atrocities from serious opposition, repressing pro-Palestinian protest, tarring it “antisemitic” and promoting anti-Palestinian racism, much as the USA has done since the start of the war. This continues even now, although it is clear that the repression of Palestinians has become the cutting edge of Trump’s far-right authoritarianism.