The West’s Crass Response to the Hostage Executions

By Seth Mandel

Monday, September 02, 2024

 

You may think you’re having a tough day, given the mourning and the sadness permeating the Jewish world after a weekend of heartbreak. But spare a thought for Keir Starmer. He is the prime minister of Great Britain and yet not a single senior advisor of his remembered that today was his birthday.

 

“Regrettably, I think we all forgot to wish him a happy birthday at the 8:30 [meeting] this morning,” his spokesman told the Guardian. But the paper found a silver lining: “all was not lost when the prime minister turned 62 on Monday—as he revealed that his daughter was picking up a new Siberian kitten to bring to the family’s new home.”

 

Wonderful. Congratulations on your cat.

 

Meanwhile, arguably worse than forgetting the prime minister’s birthday is forgetting which side you are on in the great global struggle between democracy and authoritarian terror. Sir Keir’s government has done that today as well.

 

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has made official what was long rumored: he announced the government would be suspending London’s approval of certain arms exports to Israel. As I wrote in July upon the first rumblings of this policy change, suspending UK arms licenses is to some degree symbolic because the government itself does not export the weapons to Israel and the licenses do not account for much of Israel’s supply, in the grand scheme of things.

 

But symbolic moves against allies at war can have real consequences. As if to prove my point, the UK has chosen to announce its gift to Hamas immediately after the terror group executed American and Israeli hostages.

 

While the UK is suspending some arms for Israel, it had already renewed aid to Hamas’s favorite front organization. The UK had suspended its contributions to UNRWA, the UN agency that has been coopted thoroughly by Hamas and which shares some of its infrastructure with Hamas and many of whose employees also work for Hamas. Aid to UNRWA is primarily filtered through Hamas and does not reach the Palestinian people, but it does enrich and enable the survival of a genocidal terror regime. When it was revealed that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 mass slaughter, a few countries temporarily withheld funds, Britain among them.

 

That was recently reversed. Nothing about UNRWA has been reformed, but the new UK government is sensitive to public pressure on Israel. And the sector of the British public that is pro-Hamas comprises voters the Labor Party fears it cannot live without. So Hamas, through its unofficial subsidiary, will again be funded by the UK.

 

Today’s announcement that a few dozen export licenses to Israel will be suspended will not be the death of Israel but the timing represents a shockingly crass bit of anti-diplomacy from an increasingly amateurish and morally bankrupt gang of politicians who must be the source of endless laughs in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran—the latter of whom is a direct beneficiary of Starmer and Lammy’s new Israel policy.

 

As was the case after October 7, it is important to watch how people respond to recent events. President Biden’s response wasn’t terribly encouraging either. He chose today to call out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not giving in to every new Hamas demand that crops up months after Netanyahu already agreed to the ceasefire deal. The president’s stompy behavior is a signal to Hamas to keep upping the ante, which will make a deal more difficult to reach, because American policy is apparently geared more toward the collapse of the Israeli government than the collapse of Hamas.

 

But Biden’s terse statement was more than we got out of Vice President Kamala Harris, who ran from the press today with headphones on. (Presumably she was listening to the Commentary daily podcast.)

 

Here’s a question for this class of Western leaders: Have they done anything since Saturday that would encourage Hamas to change its behavior? The answer is pretty clearly no. Have they done anything that would encourage Hamas to keep doing exactly what it is doing? The answer is pretty clearly yes.

 

The Biden-Harris-Starmer-Lammy squad is approaching a terrifying level of unseriousness at best and depravity at worst. Israelis may be the ones paying the price at the moment, but everyone—friend and foe alike—is watching this farce and planning accordingly.