The opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer is not offering any kind of corrective to the Conservatives' lockstep support for Israel.
His predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, a strong supporter of justice for the Palestinians, faced a relentless, years'-long, evidence-free campaign tarring him as presiding over an institutionally antisemitic party. Starmer has learnt that lesson. During his campaign for the Labour leadership, he declared himself a Zionist, subscribing to an ideology that in practice insists Israel has a right to usurp Palestinian land and colonise it.
Since then, he has ignored a vote by his own party conference to declare Israel an apartheid state and deny it arms to oppress Palestinians. He has also blurred a long-accepted distinction between anti-Zionism, opposition to Israel's oppression of Palestinians, and antisemitism, bigotry towards Jews.
Like Truss and Sunak, Starmer has unequivocally supported helping Ukrainians resist Russian aggression while denying that right to Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.
The truth, as illustrated by these bipartisan double standards, is that no UK party leader is prepared to found their foreign policy on genuine ethical principles or humanitarianism, whatever they claim.
Their kneejerk support for Israel follows from a recognition of global power dynamics. Western neocolonial interests are what sets the agenda in the oil-rich, conflict-prone Middle East, a region where the super-powerful lobbies of the fossil fuel industry and the arms manufacturers have so much at stake financially.
It is those narrow, cynical, elite interests that British governments serve, not some notion of the greater public good.
Which is why Israel knows it is free to pound Gaza whenever it chooses - with no consequences, except for the Palestinians facings its bombs.
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