Just Talk: A Tale of Two (Non) Ceasefires

Blair, Starmer, and Labour's Slide into the Void

Seventeen years ago, at the G8 Summit in St Petersburg on 17 July, 2006, the outside world inadvertently found itself eavesdropping on a conversation between two of the most powerful men in the world. The conversation took place during a lull in the summit, when Tony Blair and George Bush were overheard discussing the war in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah, because a mic had accidentally been left on.

The war was then into its fifth day, and Blair and Bush were discussing what they clearly regarded as an unwelcome possibility that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan might be about to call for a ceasefire. This resulted in the following exchange:

Blair I don't know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.

Bush I think Condi [US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice] is going to go pretty soon.

Blair But that's, that's, that's all that matters. But if you ... you see it will take some time to get that together.

Bush Yeah, yeah.

Blair But at least it gives people ...

Bush It's a process, I agree. I told her your offer to ...

Blair Well ... it's only if I mean ... you know. If she's got a ... or if she needs the ground prepared as it were ... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, as it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.

Bush You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over.

Blair Syria.

Bush Why?

Blair Because I think this is all part of the same thing

At the time the British press focused on the frat boy greeting ‘Yo Blair’ that Bush used to attract Blair’s attention, rather than his astonishingly cynical proposal to go to the Middle East and pretend to be a peace envoy, in order to extend the war.

Blair never got the opportunity to go to the Middle East and ‘just talk’. On 20 July, Kofi Annan called for a ceasefire in a speech to the United Nations Security Council. On 25 July Condoleeza Rice visited Lebanon and Jerusalem, where she and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire if it left Hezbollah in control of southern Lebanon.

When the war finally ended with a ceasefire on 14 August, Hezbollah was still in control of south Lebanon. By that time, Israel had carried out seven thousand airstrikes across the whole of Lebanon, against an array of targets that included airports, bridges, electrical facilities, ports, supermarkets, water treatment plants, gas stations, and residential areas, including the Dahiya district in Beirut - a Hezbollah stronghold.

In a 2008 policy paper, the Israeli general Gadi Eizenhot described what he called the ‘Dahiya doctrine’ as a template for future operations:

What happened in the Dahiya Quarter of Beirut in 2006, will happen in every village from which shots are fired on Israel. We will use disproportionate force against it and we will cause immense damage and destruction. From our point of view these are not civilian villages but military bases.

This ‘doctrine’ was clear at the time, and its military objective was also clear: to turn the Lebanese government and population against Hezbollah by visiting war on the civilian population. In his memoirs, Blair claims that the G8 Summit initially believed that ‘Hizbullah had it coming’, before ‘European opinion quickly solidified around the demand that the Israelis should stop’.

Blair, however, felt ‘it was wrong that there should be a unilateral cessation. It should be on both sides, and we couldn't expect Israel to stop unless the rockets stopped. But that was not how it seemed to most people.’

Not for the first time, Blair was being economical with the truth. A ceasefire cannot be a ceasefire if it is unilateral, and no one expected that. In his Security Council speech Kofi Annan criticized both Hezbollah’s ‘provocative attack’ on 12 July and the ‘excessive violence’ of Israel’s response to it.’ The eventual ceasefire on 14 August was agreed on by both sides.

Blair later acknowledged that the Israeli response was ‘at one level disproportionate’, and agreed that ‘ the deaths of so many innocent civilians, especially children, were completely wrong and unacceptable’. He also asked

how many families would mourn, how much bitterness would be generated, and how if you were an ordinary Lebanese caught up in this nightmare, you would just want to rage against the world. But I also worried about the risk of a Hezbollah ‘victory’, of a situation where they could calculate the provocation, pull Israel into retaliation and emerge as winners. I felt a unilateral cessation gave them that. I felt anything which left them in any doubt as to the calculation of risk next time round was a real and possible future threat.

Blair accepted Israel’s assessment of the ‘calculation of risk’, albeit with a heavy heart and much handwringing. And his proposal to go to the Middle East and ‘just talk’ was intended to give Israel time to continue its ‘disproportionate’ response. Blair later came to believe that this stance did him ‘more damage than anything since Iraq,’ and galvanised his backbenchers into pressuring him into leaving Downing Street.

All of which brings us to the current Labour leadership’s spectacularly inadequate response to the devastating violence in the Gaza Strip. As someone who - like millions of others - desperately wants to see the end of these terrible years of Tory misrule before society collapses altogether, even if a rightwing Labour government is the only viable option, it is deeply depressing to see the Labour leadership exhibiting the same cynicism that Blair showed seventeen years ago.

The circumstances are obviously different. Hamas’s savage pogrom/assault on 7 October was a far greater ‘provocation’ than Hezbollah’s border skirmish in 2006, and the Israeli response in Gaza has already caused a higher civilian death toll than in Lebanon, and may yet outstrip the casualties in any of Israel’s wars.

And yet it is astonishing how bad Labour have been in the face of these calamitous events. Until 7 October, Starmer and his team had been inching towards power, like participants in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, freezing whenever the government or a rightwing paper turned round and looked at them. It was hardly inspiring, but it had established Labour as a credible government, as the Tories continued to scrape new layers from the bottom of its own barrel. Starmer achieved this through a carefully-constructed veneer of grey-suited managerial competence that made even disillusioned Tory voters consider Labour as a viable option to their trainwreck government.

But there some issues that require political courage and principle, not managerialism, and the war in Gaza is one of them. And throughout the last horrifying few weeks, Starmer and his team have shown themselves to be as cowardly, unprincipled, and complicit in the catastrophe that is now unfolding as the government they hope to replace.

Asked on 11 October, whether Israel had the right to cut off water and fuel to Palestinian civilians, Starmer replied that it did, while also insisting that ‘everything should be done within international law’. But Article 54 of Additional Protocol 1 of the 1977 Geneva Convention, clearly states

It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive.

International law also imposes specific obligations on the occupying power to protect the civilian population, and contrary to the way the situation in Gaza has often been portrayed, Israel still is the occupying power. At the most basic humanitarian level therefore, Starmer could have reiterated these obligations and insisted that Israel meet them. But it wasn’t until he faced mass resignations from Labour councils and criticisms from his own MPs, and realised that Labour might lose crucial votes, that he began to deny that he had said what he had said, and re-emphasize his commitment to international law.

Throughout these slippery twists and turns, Starmer has consistently rejected a ceasefire in much the same terms that Blair once did. In a speech to Chatham House he claimed that a ceasefire was not the ‘correct position’ because it would ‘freeze hostilities’ and therefore ‘embolden Hamas’ to carry out more attacks.

His team has followed the same template: condemn Hamas; lament Palestinian casualties, but blame them on Hamas; issue vague calls on Israel to observe international law while refusing to condemn Israel for any specific breaches of international law; call for humanitarian aid while refusing to condemn Israel for making it all but impossible to get humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip.

All these ingredients were present in a dreadful article by David Lammy in the Observer on Sunday, that could have been written by Blair in 2006:

I understand why so many are calling for a ceasefire now. We all want the bloodshed and suffering to end. But a ceasefire now would just embolden Hamas. They would still hold hundreds of innocent hostages. They would still fire rockets into Israel. And they would still have the capacity and determination to repeat the horrors of 7 October “again and again”, as a Hamas official boasted last week.

Like all those who make these points, Lammy fails to explain how the ‘bloodshed and suffering’ can stop without a ceasefire, or how these operations will free the hostages, or what the ultimate endgame of these operations is, or who will govern Gaza if Hamas is ‘destroyed.'

As for ‘emboldening’ Hamas, the belligerent statement by one Hamas official cannot be a justification for Israeli operations that have already gone way beyond any conventional understanding of military necessity. In Lebanon, Israel used the same persistent and dehumanising references to ‘terror operatives’, or terrorist ‘hubs’ and ‘infrastructure’ in order to justify an assault on the civilian population. Yet Labour politicians have accepted these terms, and continued to blame the Palestinian death toll on Hamas, or described it as a tragic and inevitable consequence of war.

David Blunkett - no surprise here - has accused Labour MPs calling for a ceasefire, of engaging in childish ‘gestures’ to ‘make themselves feel better.’ In a visit to UNRWA offices in Cairo, Lammy and Lisa Nandy could not even acknowledge that 70 UNRWA casualties in Gaza had been killed by Israel. Instead they were merely ‘tragic deaths’.

At times the cowardice of Labour frontbenchers has been breathtaking. Here is Nandy, with her trademark ‘concerned person’ frown, refusing to tell Victoria Derbyshire whether Israel has violating international law because to do that would be ‘grandstanding.’

Such contortions are painful to watch. Polly Toynbee and others have urged the Labour Party not to tear itself apart over Gaza, and Toynbee has criticised the party’s critics, on the grounds that Labour doesn’t have the power to change the situation on the ground. But this is a flimsy distraction. No one, not even Biden, has that power, by themselves alone. But that powerlessness should not stop the main opposition party and potential future government from adopting a principled position, and sticking to it.

No one expects anything close to that from this shambles of a government. But it matters when the main opposition party, in the country more responsible than any other for the Palestinian tragedy, wrings its hands and does nothing, while a key ally kills ten thousand Palestinians in a month. It matters when Labour demands that Israel doesn’t breach international law as a generic position, without actually daring to say specifically if it actually has breached international law.

There are many reasons why Labour behaves like this; the funding it receives from pro-Israel organisations and individuals; its paralysis in the face of criticisms that equate support for the Palestinian cause with antisemitism; Zionist sympathies within the party; its historic willingness to do whatever the United States demands; the sheer amateurishness and inexperience of its top team as far as foreign policy is concerned.

But faced with a crisis of this magnitude, that requires political leadership and moral courage, Labour has shown neither. Faced with demands for a ceasefire from the United Nations, from charities, and from an international grassroots movement of solidarity with the people of Gaza that also permeates its own potential constituencies, its leaders have retreated into the familiar default position of supporting Israel in whatever it does.

No one can be remotely surprised when the utterly gormless head prefect Sunak tells Netanyahu ‘we want you to win’. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Labour wants that too, even if has no more idea what winning means than he does. For all their humanitarian rhetoric, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that its leaders are prepared to accept whatever Israel needs to do to achieve that, while also seeking ways to reduce any potentially negative domestic political consequences.

Labour cannot stop what is happening in Gaza by itself. But it could call for both sides to observe a ceasefire and for Hamas to return its hostages. This is what a joint letter from UN humanitarian agencies and international charities called for on Monday. Labour should be supporting that. Instead, like Blair, it has chosen sophistry, prevarication and handwringing, while Israel sates its vengeance and unleashes unprecedented carnage on a defenceless population.

Lammy’s letter yesterday criticising Israeli settlers in the West Bank doesn’t change that. It’s easy to criticise settlers, and it feels, after the last month, like a headline-grabbing initiative for domestic political consumption.

In other words, like Blair, Labour has chosen to ‘just talk.’ And like Blair, Labour will pay a political price for its duplicity, as the ground shifts beneath its feet, and it will thoroughly deserve to.