Keir Starmer's moral failure

04 Aug, 2025

On Tuesday 29 July the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced that the UK would formally recognise a Palestinian state in September unless Israel met a number of conditions, including agreeing a ceasefire and committing to a two-state solution.

In a post on Instagram, Emily Damari, a dual British-Israeli citizen who was shot and held captive by Hamas for 471 days, wrote:

“Prime Minister Starmer is not standing on the right side of history. Had he been in power during World War II, would he have advocated recognition for Nazi control of occupied countries like Holland, France or Poland? This is not diplomacy – it is a moral failure. Shame on you, prime minister.

As a Dual British-Israeli citizen who survived 471 days in Hamas captivity, I am deeply saddened by your decision to recognise Palestinian statehood. This move does not advance peace—it risks rewarding terror. It sends a dangerous message: that violence earns legitimacy.

I agree with Damari. Starmer is indeed responsible of abject moral failure for his empty posturing while an occupying power, Israel actually, has systematically been acting with genocidal intent and violating its obligation under the 1907 Hague Regulations and/or the 1949 Fourth Geneva convention (see here for a summary).

Starmer moral failure on Gaza is chronic. In an infamous interview with LBC on 11 October 2023 he could not bring himself to say that Israel had no legal right to cut power and water supply to Gaza. A human rights lawyer, he has consistently refused to call out Israel's blatant violation of international law, impose sanctions or suspend UK arm sales. This despite their use in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity¹: the indiscriminate killing and forced displacement of civilians, the targeting of journalists and health workers, the bulldozing of homes, the purposeful and systematic destruction of the health-care infrastructure, all the way to deliberate mass starvation, the shooting of hundreds of civilians queuing for purposefully insufficient food rations and the banning of civilian access to the sea.

Starmer's threat to recognise the Palestinian state at a future date, at a time when the people of Gaza are facing deliberate mass starvation, is a callous display of performance politics and cynicism. Even an unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, as promised by France, would do nothing to alleviate the current situation and would just be a distraction, as forcefully argued in Hussein Agha and Robert Malley'a opinion piece. Starmer's conditioning the UK recognition on Israel's failure to agree on a ceasefire is no useful addition. If anything, it gives both Hamas and Israel veto power over the outcome. In a, by now typical, show of political stupidity Starmer is playing lawyerly mind games with his party and the UK public in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe. History, and most likely the UK electorate, will not be kind to him.

This at a time when large numbers of scholars of the Holocaust and genocide, among them Omer Bartov one of the world leading experts, Israeli (B’Tselem, PHRI) and international (Amnesty, MSF) human rights organizations and a former Israeli attorney general unanimously denounce that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. When high-profile Israeli public figures call for crippling sanctions on Israel to stop the humanitarian crisis.

In Europe, the continent in which the Holocaust was consummated, the UK government is not alone in its failure to act. Germany and Italy, the second and third largest arms supplier to Israel, as well as Bulgaria, Czechia and Hungary have steamrolled EU attempts to impose sanctions on Israel.

During WWII the only way for countries to stop the evil of the Holocaust was to enter the war. The cost of acting to stop the evil that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is much lower. Our failure to act is a moral stain on the Western world and its political leaders.

If This is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz), Primo Levi's testimony of his experience as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, begins with a poem with no title. He will republish it later in a collection of poems under the title 'Shema', Judaism most famous prayer. The poem, an intimation to never forget what man has done to man, ends with a biblical curse upon anyone who fails to uphold its command.

Failing to act in the face of evil is much worse than forgetting...

Shema

You who live safe
In your warm houses, 
You who find warm food
And friendly faces upon your return home:
Consider if this is a man,
Who labours in the mud, 
Who knows no peace, 
Who fights for a crust of bread, 
Who dies by a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair or name,
Without the strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold,
Like a frog in winter. 
Consider that his has been:
I command these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts, 
When at home, when in the street, 
When going to bed, when getting up;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble, 
Illness strike you down, 
Your offspring turn their faces from you.