Will Burnham liberate Labour's Palestine policy from Starmer's dead hand ?

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Avi Shlaim

Mon, 07/20/2026 - 11:37

A substantive change would involve calling Israel’s actions a genocide, implementing trade sanctions, banning all arms sales to Israel and, last but not least, the repeal of the ban on Palestine Action

Andy Burnham speaks after being confirmed as the Labour Party's new leader and the country's next prime minister, during 'Labour’s Special Conference' in central London on 17 July, 2026 (AFP)

Former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s poor performance in the domestic political arena has undoubtedly played a part in his downfall only two years after his landslide victory in the 2024 general election.

But even his severest critics seem to agree that his performance on the world stage was of a much higher order.

Strong support for Ukraine in its war with Russia, a commitment to Nato, a reset of Britain’s relationship with the European Union, and refusal to be drawn into the American-Israeli war of aggression on Iran - though in reality, Britain is being dragged deeper into the conflict - are often quoted as examples of his successful handling of foreign policy.

Most fail, however, to mention one foreign policy area in which Starmer’s performance has been anything but praiseworthy: Israel-Palestine, specifically Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Starmer’s support for Zionism long preceded his rise to power.

In a February 2020 interview with the Jewish News during the race to replace then Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was known for his principled advocacy of Palestinian rights, Starmer declared "I support Zionism without qualification".

Starmer was previously a successful human rights lawyer who championed the rights of Iraqi civilians under British custody and advocated for greater protection for asylum seekers.

Yet, his support for Zionism, the official ideology of the State of Israel, has never been dependent on Israeli adherence to international law or respect for Palestinian human rights.

A hypocritical leader

As leader of the Labour Party and later prime minister, Starmer’s unconditional support for Israel and indifference to Palestinian rights persisted.

The Labour Party’s manifesto for the general election stated clearly that the party would "work alongside international partners to recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel".

Starmer was a fabricator and a fraud. Good riddance

It also described Palestinian statehood as the "inalienable right of the Palestinian people". Following Labour’s electoral victory and his rise to the premiership, Starmer stalled on fulfilling this pledge for as long as he possibly could.

The Hamas-led attack, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 251 others taken hostage, occurred when Starmer was leader of the opposition. This was roundly, and rightly, condemned as a terrorist attack because it was directed, at least in part, against civilians.

Israel’s response, however, involved multiple violations of international humanitarian law: the indiscriminate killing of civilians; the forcible displacement of civilians; the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure; deliberate damage to the educational and healthcare systems; cultural genocide; and the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

Against a backdrop of growing international condemnation of Israel for the horror it was inflicting on the people of Gaza, Starmer stood out in reasserting his stance. He kept repeating, almost parrot-like, that Israel has the "right to defend itself".

In an interview on LBC, he argued that this included the right to withhold water, food, and fuel from the people of Gaza.

As a former human rights lawyer, he would have known that this was illegal under international law. Yet he took ten days to qualify his remarks, during which the damage had already been done.

This statement infuriated many of the Labour Party’s Muslim and progressive voters who were astonished at the hypocrisy of their leader.

As prime minister, Starmer continued to demonstrate his staunch support for Israel in the face of discontent from the progressive wing of his party. This support took the form of supplying arms, intelligence cooperation, and diplomatic protection.

In September 2024, the government announced the suspension of around 30 export licences for items used by the Israeli army in its war on Gaza, but this amounted to less than a tenth of the total of approximately 350 licences.

The government also permitted the use of its bases, in the UK and in Cyprus, by Israeli and American aircraft carrying supplies for the war in Gaza. Between December 2023 and July 2025, the Royal Air Force conducted at least 606 reconnaissance flights over Gaza.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) maintained that these flights were solely to help locate Israeli hostages held by Hamas, yet the scale of the sorties made it obvious that the real purpose was to aid Israel’s military operations.

Britain’s complicity

Under Starmer, the UK continued to use its position as a permanent member of the UN Security Council to defeat resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking.

Like his Tory predecessors, Starmer tried to remain as close as possible to America’s blatantly pro-Israel position, not realising that the real "special relationship" was not between the US and the UK but between the US and Israel.

America used its veto four times to block resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza. Having previously abstained, Britain did not back a ceasefire until 21 November 2024, a year after the Israeli genocidal military offensive began.

All 14 other members of the Security Council also backed the ceasefire resolution, but it was defeated for the fourth time by the American veto.

It took Starmer far too long to be persuaded to vote for a ceasefire, drawing widespread criticism from within his own party for dilly-dallying and for his apparent indifference to the humanitarian catastrophe inflicted by Israel on Gaza.

The extent of Britain’s active support for Israel’s brutal war is exposed in full and incontrovertible detail in a book by Peter Oborne, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza.

Oborne shows that almost everything the British public was told about the conflict in Gaza was untrue. He also shows how the mainstream media assisted the government in deceiving the public.

Peaceful demonstrations in solidarity with the embattled Palestinians were smeared as antisemitic "hate marches".

Evidence collected by the Ministry of Defence about Israeli war crimes was withheld. Statistics about British arms supplies to Israel were manipulated to conceal their full extent and the close cooperation between the military establishments of the two countries.

Oborne’s data fully substantiates his charge of British complicity in the destruction of Gaza. Based on deep research and inside sources, this is a remarkable book about a remarkably sordid aspect of British foreign policy in the short-lived Starmer era.

Israel’s initial war aim was the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, but when this encountered Egyptian resistance, Israel began to perpetrate a genocide. The charge of genocide is hotly denied by Israel and its friends.

How western media helped turn Israel's genocide into 'fake news'

But the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague found on 26 January 2024 that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered Israel to take a series of measures to stop it.

Israel, as is its wont, ignored the ruling. On 16 September 2025, a UN commission concluded that Israel was, in fact, guilty of genocide.

A resolution passed by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) states that Israel's conduct meets the legal definition as laid out in the UN convention on genocide.

Under this convention, the UK has a legal duty to do all it can to prevent and to punish genocide, including a comprehensive ban on the sale of arms to the offending party.

By arguing that Israel was not committing genocide, Starmer tried to wriggle out of the obligation to put pressure on his ally to end it. He also equivocated about executing the arrest warrant that the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Pressure from below

One of the consequences of the growing public revulsion at Israel’s war crimes, was pressure from below on Western governments to recognise Palestine’s right to statehood. A number of European governments did so, including Ireland, Spain, Norway, and Slovenia.

On 21 September 2025, after months of pressure, including from his own cabinet ministers, Starmer eventually agreed to recognise Palestine.

In a letter to Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, he announced the formal decision to recognise "the State of Palestine as a sovereign and independent state".

The terms in which this recognition was granted reeked of colonial double-standards and arrogance. "I am conscious of the historical role that the United Kingdom has played in the Middle East," wrote Starmer.

"In 1917, Britain supported the principle of a national home for the Jewish people…. In making this decision today, I reaffirm the United Kingdom’s commitment to a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, and our enduring support for a two-state solution in which Palestinians and Israelis live side by side in peace and security.”

The reference is, of course, to the notorious Balfour Declaration, often described as Britain’s "original sin" in the Middle East. This was a classic colonial document which completely ignored the rights and aspirations of the native population.

In 1917, the Jews comprised 10 percent of the population of Palestine while the Arabs comprised 90 percent. Yet Britain chose to recognise the right of the minority to national self-determination and to deny it to the majority.

To add insult to injury, the declaration referred to 90 percent of the population as "the non-Jewish communities in Palestine", as if only Jews counted.

The British recognition of the Palestinian right to statehood in 2025 was thus too little, and 108 years too late.

Britain should have recognised the Palestinian right to statehood in their patrimony back in 1917 when they constituted an absolute majority. Yet, the cornerstone of the British Mandate for Palestine was to deny democracy until the Jews became the majority.

This was only achieved during the 1948 war as a result of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 750,000 Arabs were made refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is what in Arabic is called the Nakba, meaning catastrophe. The Nakba is not a one-off event; it is an ongoing process that reached its most cruel climax in Gaza.

Like his five Tory predecessors, Starmer stubbornly refused to admit any British responsibility for the Palestinian tragedy. He presents himself as a champion of international law and the rule-based international order, yet his claims to moral authority ring utterly hollow given his record on the Palestinian issue.

One of his government’s most outrageous measures to suppress pro-Palestinian protest in this country was to redesignate "Palestine Action", a direct-action group, as a terrorist organisation.

The penalty for supporting a terrorist organisation is up to 14 years in prison.

The absurdity of this piece of legislation was made plain when 2,700 demonstrators, mostly old-age-pensioners, were arrested and charged for carrying placards that said:"I oppose genocide; I support Palestine Action".

Burnham shift: More tactical than moral

Britain’s history in Palestine sits at the heart of a 400-page legal petition submitted by a group of elderly Palestinians, led by Munib al-Masri, a 92-year-old philanthropist from Nablus, under the banner "Britain Owes Palestine".

Drafted by leading human rights lawyers and three academics (of whom I am one), it documents in minute detail Britain's unlawful conduct during the Mandate period.

True, a great deal has happened since then.

Here's what Burnham must do if he really wants to reset Labour's Palestine policy

Yet, the petition argues that today’s devastation in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank is rooted in Britain’s multiple violations of international law in the period between 1917 and 1948.

It demands an apology from the UK for its historical wrongs in Palestine.

Munib al-Masri, his grandson Munib who was shot and paralysed by an Israeli soldier, the lawyer Victor Kattan, and I submitted the hefty petition to 10 Downing Street on 10 September 2025.

A cross-party coalition of 45 MPs and peers urged Starmer to respond to the petition. Nine months on, the Government has said nothing.

The response from Starmer’s 10 Downing Street was a stony silence. That silence is itself a form of complicity in British crimes against the Palestinian people from 1917 to the present.

On Monday, Andy Burnham has replaced Starmer as leader of the Labour Party and prime minister. He has apologised for the Labour government’s initial response to Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, arguing that it should have called for a ceasefire earlier and put more pressure on Israel.

The Labour Party "didn’t get it right" and needs to do better under his leadership, he said. This admission signalled a potentially significant shift in the UK’s approach to the Middle East.

Burnham was in effect saying that he would listen more closely to the grassroots than Starmer did and that his support for Israel would not be unconditional.

Burnham’s motive for the slight policy shift is probably more tactical and electoral than moral. He recognises the deep anguish on the left of the Labour Party over the destruction of the Gaza Strip.

He knows, from opinion polls, that two-thirds of Labour voters who switched to the Green Party in the 2024 election said that the party’s position on the destruction of Gaza was a factor.

Burnham hopes to win back Labour voters with an apology for the party’s initial response to the crisis in Gaza and a promise to put more pressure on the Israeli government.

One can only hope that, under the new management, the change in Labour’s policy on Israel-Palestine will not be merely tonal but substantive.

The real question remains: will Andy Burnham have the courage to liberate the Labour Party’s policy on Palestine from the dead hand of Sir Keir Starmer?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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