What Did You Expect, Starmer?

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

 

The British political establishment is shocked, shocked, that Palestine Action activists would be acquitted by a jury on the grounds that although they admitted to breaking into an Israeli company’s factory and destroying property while injuring police, their cause was righteous.

 

As I wrote last week, six Gaza leftists were apparently found not guilty under the principle of “jury equity,” in which Brits were told that jurors may acquit the accused because of the virtue of their intentions. It was a remarkable moment, one that overnight put the British legal system in disarray. Hating Jews was now a legitimate legal defense even for violence—one Palestine activist smashed a cop’s spine with a sledgehammer. Because it was a jury trial, the problem cannot be fixed institutionally: courts can give jurors direction but they cannot guarantee it will be followed. A populist outpouring of Jew-hatred threatens to undo generations of liberal democracy.

 

Prosecutors are reportedly seeking a retrial, though the “precise basis” is unclear. There will be a hearing on the matter February 18.

 

The British establishment is without doubt correct that this trial is a catastrophe for the legitimacy of the country’s legal system. I don’t blame them for trying, within legal bounds of course, to find a way to put this rancid toothpaste back in the tube.

 

But I have to ask: What did they expect?

 

You can yell “Criticism of Israel isn’t anti-Semitism” until you are blue in the face, but if you force on your population the lie that the Jewish state is guilty of exceptional evils, they are going to see a green light for exceptional resistance.

 

Though Israel not only never had a policy of starvation in Gaza but also never caused the oft-predicted “famines,” Hamas’s own policies made food scarcity in the enclave a regular concern. Hamas hoarded food supplies, stole from civilians, killed civilians trying to get food, and hijacked aid convoys. Nonetheless, Prime Minister Keir Starmer blamed Israel. “The suffering and starvation unfolding in Gaza is unspeakable and indefensible,” he’d said, adding that his government was searching for ways to get Israel to “change course.”

 

It was much the same when Starmer would seek to be evenhanded. In one statement, he made clear which side is responsible for which outrages: “The appalling scenes in Gaza are unrelenting. The continued captivity of hostages, the starvation and denial of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people, the increasing violence from extremist settler groups, and Israel’s disproportionate military escalation in Gaza are all indefensible.”

 

Unrelenting and appalling—and aside from the hostages, all Israel’s fault in Starmer’s mind.

 

When Israel instituted an aid system that cut Hamas out of the loop and got food directly to Gazans, Hamas routinely tried to undercut that new system with attacks and propaganda. Yet Foreign Minister David Lammy’s characterization of this system was certifiably insane. Rather than criticize the limits of the new system and reinforce the need for it to scale up operations to feed more Gazans, Lammy said: “The new Israeli aid system is inhumane, dangerous, and it is depriving Gazans of human dignity. It is a grotesque spectacle, wreaking a terrible human cost.”

 

It was, in fact, none of those things. But calling food distribution “inhumane” and a “grotesque spectacle” reinforced the libel that Israel was using those food distribution sites to streamline its killing of defenseless Gazan civilians.

 

Again, one can see suffering and call for its alleviation. That is not what Starmer or Lammy were doing. They were painting Israeli troops as demonic enemies of humanity.

 

They were convincing the British public that anything done in opposition to Israel’s actions could be considered righteous resistance against a global menace. It’s a wonder that David Lammy didn’t ransack Elbit Systems himself.

 

Meanwhile, Starmer and Lammy’s Labour Party conference adopted a motion holding that Israel was indeed guilty of committing genocide. Starmer’s cabinet rejected the specific “genocide” accusation, but the nation’s governing party had made clear where it stood as a collective.

 

These are but a few of the examples of such rhetorical extremism on the part of Starmer, his government, and his party over the course of the war. The one time that Starmer chose to sound Churchillian about something, Israel was cast in the role of the Nazis.

 

So spare me. Spare me the gasps and the tut-tutting and lips-pursing about the British public internalizing the raging propaganda fed to them by their government over the course of two years. In their minds the Palestine Action verdict was nothing less than the fulfillment of their patriotic duty. More important than whether they will be retried in a court of law is whether Starmer and the Labour leadership can make it possible for that court of law to deliver justice. I won’t hold my breath.