Over the last three years, Britain sold £3.1 billion of weapons to Qatar, the world’s foremost sponsor of Sunni jihadism and the principal benefactor of Hamas. It sold £1.9 billion’s worth to Saudi Arabia, which has been engaged in a bloody war in Yemen that has not, shall we say, been fought entirely according to democratic norms.
Turkey, which has crushed the Kurds once again with less concern for human rights than one might hope, received £799 million in British arms. The United Arab Emirates, often viewed as a dictatorship in Whitehall, purchased a £416 million cache, while the Egyptian police state was able to buy a £318 million arsenal as it continued its flirtation with Islamism and enthusiasm for corruption.
By contrast, Israel, the Middle East’s sole democracy and the only power to respect the rights of women and minorities, which is locked in an existential struggle against the forces of jihadism that menace us all, bought £83 million of British arms, a sum that constitutes just 1% of its total weapons purchases.
Yet it is the Jewish state that attracted David Lammy’s criticism yesterday, as he announced that he was suspending 30 arms export licences to Jerusalem amid misinformation that it has been prosecuting the war in Gaza to excess. …
You wouldn’t know it from your television. You wouldn’t know it from social media or the progressive ideologues that dominate so many of our institutions. But you would know it if you considered the facts properly and weighed British arms sales to Israel against those to that list of autocracies provided above (not including the United States).
Given Labour’s massive majority, which frees it to govern without concern for special interest groups, this suspension of 30 arms export licences will surely prove an ill-judged blip, to be rectified when wiser heads prevail.
