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Byline Times is an independent, reader-funded investigative newspaper, outside of the system of the established press, reporting on ‘what the papers don’t say’ – without fear or favour.
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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.
Gaza’s Last Stand? The Dangers of a Second Nakba
Israel may see Hamas’ offensive as a chance to change the ‘strategic reality’ of the region – which could lead to a wider conflagration
It is as though Europe was arming Russia, not Ukraine, and repressing solidarity with its victims. It is the kind of approach that Europeans object to when it comes from Trump himself – but Europe’s support for Israel is an insidious Trumpism of its own, compromising its “resistance” to America’s would-be dictator. And this bodes poorly for the prospects of political mobilisation against Putin. As leaders cocoon liberal values in a European bubble, prizing Ukrainian over Palestinian lives, defending Europeans from an imperial power in the East but not our near-neighbours in the Middle East from similar colonial aggression, many can see the racism at work.
It is not only leaders and publics in the Global South who can smell Europe’s hypocrisy. Many in the West can too, and their votes count. Trump’s victory was narrow, and Joe Biden’s embrace of Israel, continued by Kamala Harris who barred pro-Palestinian Democrats from addressing her convention, may have driven away enough liberal-left and Muslim voters in the swing states to have cost the election. Similarly, Starmer’s 2023 remarks endorsing cutting off water and electricity to Gaza led to large Labour losses to pro-Palestinian candidates in 2024, almost costing Wes Streeting his seat.
Starmer seems determined to ignore these warnings, believing instead that continuing to chase right-wing voters will keep him in power, and that Ukraine gives him a wedge issue against Nigel Farage. Yet experts have long argued that given a choice between the two, right-wing voters will prefer the original rather than the copy and many of them aren’t worried about Putin. On the other hand, many who do care about Ukraine also care about Gaza, and in a tighter election, Starmer will need to stop them peeling off to the Greens and Independents who are standing up for Gaza, or to the Liberal Democrats.
A European alliance against the new Trump-Putin axis cannot ignore the damage that Western support for Israel’s genocide is doing to liberal democracy within the continent as well as on a world scale. Since in the UK and many other countries, the traditional centre-right is hollowed out and largely contaminated, effective electoral coalitions will be able to maintain the firewall against the far right only by uniting the centre with the increasingly pro-Palestinian left.
Israel, Gaza and the Spectre of Genocide
Israel appears to be seeking collective punishment for Hamas atrocities, and this is not self-defense under international law
The Role of the Press and Intellectuals
The mainstream media’s embrace of Israel, with its tendency to equate concern for Palestinian lives with antisemitism and support for Hamas, has been a major reason why centre-left politicians have failed to stand up for Gaza. It is not only the BBC, but also liberal-left outlets like The Guardian, which have been compromised by this deceitful pro-Israeli ideology, and it has often been left to independent publications to challenge it.
Byline Times was possibly the first in Britain to raise the alarm, publishing my warning of Israeli genocide just six days after 7 October 2023 and has widely covered it ever since. Indeed, my piece was one of the first in the world, together with an article published by a fellow genocide scholar in the USA which appeared on the same day.
These claims, regarded with scepticism at the time, have now become the common sense of the international human rights community, authoritatively elaborated by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese as well as in the judgements of the ICJ.
Yet for the most part, the centre-left press and even many cogent critics of the new far-right authoritarianism continue to marginalise Gaza, following Starmer in treating Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine as the main danger and his extreme pro-Israel policies as a sideshow.
If we are to build a broad consensus in Europe against Trump, we need to bring Palestine into equal focus with Ukraine. The reasons why the centre-left has allowed Israel so much leeway, not only for repression but even for genocide, will need to be part of that conversation.