Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza – a review

JVL Introduction

Peter Oborne’s long-awaited study of British complicity in the destruction of Gaza is a searing indictment of the politicians who allowed it to happen and the media who went cravenly along with the lies and distortions that made it possible.

Andrew Hornung reviews it here for JVL.

You can order the book from the publisher here.

RK

Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza

by Peter Oborne, O/R Books, 342pp.

Reviewed by Andrew Hornung

“Complicit” is the rare case of a book which combines sound analysis, meticulously detailed reporting and notable passion. It is a condemnation driven by a sense of injustice and – for the moment – perhaps also impotence. And possibly a burning sense of betrayal: after all, Peter Oborne spent the bulk of his professional life as a journalist, writing almost exclusively for right-wing titles, the Telegraph, the Mail, Express and Spectator.

Now he quite literally damns these papers along with the BBC. Indeed, the book ends with a litany of excoriations of figures in the British political and media world:

“Damn you Keir Starmer, Damn you Rishi Sunak, Damn you Lammy, Cameron, Cleverly. A second damn for Lammy for shaking Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloodstained hand. Damn you Mitchell and Falconer, the bag carriers. Damn you Lindsay Hoyle, Commons speaker who wrecked a ceasefire motion and got Starmer off the hook…”

The imprecations continue: they include the former Archbishop of Canterbury

“for refusing to meet a Bethlehem pastor” because he had “shared a platform with Jeremy Corbyn”, “the moral cowards of the BBC…Damn the atrocity deniers. Damn those who treated Palestinians as less than human…Damn the ‘clash of civilisation’ barbarians. Damn the Great Replacement conspiracists. Damn the neoconservatives…Damn the extreme right for your bigotry and racism. Damn you Nigel Farage. Damn you Tommy Robinson. Damn you Douglas Murray…. Damn you Priti Patel. Damn you Kemi Badenoch… Damn the self-appointed guardians of public discourse who smeared those who marched for peace as terror supporters. Damn Suella Braverman. Damn Yvette Cooper…Damn the supporters of Israel who turned the charge of antisemitism, one of the great evils of human history, into a cheap propaganda weapon to cover for Israeli crimes…”

But this is not an indiscriminate grudge-driven attack: these condemnations are supported by detailed evidence and given nuance by Oborne’s ready admission of honourable exceptions. Not only does Oborne carefully reference his evidence, he even quotes counter-opinions and attempted rebuttals. Apart from anything else, this is a plea for honest journalism.

All this evidence is marshalled to give a picture of British – particularly Labour’s – complicity in today’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. The complicity over Gaza is, of course, only the latest, most gruesome, flagrantly cynical expression of a fundamental Atlanticist policy stance that unites the parties representing the interests of US-led imperialism. It is a stance masquerading as an independent foreign policy but one that is servile to the US except on some European issues. This is the lynchpin of UK complicity in the Gaza war crimes.

In the Middle East both Labour and Tory governments stand for the crushing of Palestinian resistance, the defence – indeed arming – of Israel and the support of reactionary Arab regimes. These governments support the US – whether under Obama, Biden or Trump – in doing everything possible to keep oil flowing one way and arms exports the other. That’s the picture whatever the voice-over.

Oborne takes this as a starting point, but his book is not a geopolitical analysis, nor a chronicle of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians nor a diplomatic history: it is an account of how Britain’s servile and brutal position is justified to the electorate in a relatively open, let’s say “democratic”, society.

Beyond the compliant consensus of the main traditional all-UK political parties, such a justification requires a servile press and tame broadcasting service committed to the state’s core positions, creating and bolstering a “common sense understanding” – false to the core – of the Israel/Palestine conflict. It also requires an array of non-governmental, apparently independent entities and civil society advocacy organisations committed to all or most of those positions. In this context Oborne looks at the role of Conservative Friends of Israel, British Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), lobbyists (including the Israeli Embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, prominent individuals and some pro-Israel campaigns – all together a snarling pack of attack dogs, all posing as guardians against antisemitism.

As the book’s title makes clear, Oborne is concerned with Britain’s complicity with genocide. Not with tax evasion (as revealed in the Panama papers) or with arms sales (as in the defence of BEA), or sucking up to techno giants, but genocide and multiple war crimes. It would be wrong to see Oborne’s focus as no more than a device serving to demonstrate the true nature of a so-called democratic state. But alongside its central theme of the outrages perpetrated against the Palestinian people, the book does inevitably lift the lid on this cesspit of hypocrisy, subterfuge and cynicism that characterises the culture of British democracy (and no doubt other bourgeois democracies).

In a recent podcast on Media Confidential Peter Oborne was attacked – in a very polite manner, of course – for peddling a conspiracy theory. Was he saying that those he accuses were not only “complicit” but accomplices? Rightly Oborne vehemently rejected this characterisation of his book. His book does not allege the existence of an overall plan linking all the acts that gave effect to “Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza” (the book’s subtitle). Rather he demonstrates how even the horror of genocide can be enabled and justified by those pursuing the objectives of a “democratic” state.

A book of this kind is necessarily topical, in the sense that important background developments need to be referred to but cannot be dealt with in detail. When you report an earthquake, you can’t spend much time on a detailed account of tectonic plate theory. That said, a brief overview of how Britain’s colonialist past weighs heavily on the preferences and prejudices of the British public would not have been out of place. It is important to see that apart from during the brief period of conflict between the proto-state Zionist entity in Palestine and the British state the public here has been fed a diet of pro-settler, pro-imperialist, anti-Arab messaging and framing. This pro-Zionist stance was more marked in the Labour Party than the Tories. Indeed, it was particularly marked in the Labour Left and enshrined in the special position of the affiliated Israel advocacy group, Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) now bearing the mendacious title of Jewish Labour Movement. Post WW2 Labour was passionately anti-fascist and this sentiment was exploited to justify not only the establishment of Israel but its accompanying brutality and dispossessions. Arab governments were invariably presented not only as authoritarian and corrupt – not unreasonably in most cases – but hostile to British interests. Israel was presented as democratic, essentially European and progressive – Arabs as backward, incompetent and aggressive.

Readers of this review will probably also question Oborne’s choice to focus on the actions of the Conservative Friends of Israel rather than its Labour counterpart and the Jewish Labour Movement. It has, after all, been the latter two that have functioned as the poisoned spearhead of the anti-Corbyn and pro-Israel drive.

And while there is much valuable material offered on the war against Corbyn, it is not clear whether Oborne believes that discrediting Corbyn’s position on the Palestine question was the fundamental objective of the campaign to bring him down or essentially a means of mobilising a host of vicious pro-Israel wolves to isolate a leftist movement inimical to the interests of the ruling class as a whole.

Those following closely the events Oborne spotlights – the denial of parliamentary debate, the uncritical acceptance of Israeli propaganda, the partisan nature of press and broadcasting output – will have their “favourite” episodes, those incidents that made their blood come to a boil faster than others. Of course, Oborne can’t report them all: he chooses to examine closely a necessarily limited number, among them “October 7th in the British Media”, “Moral Panic in Westminster” (when Keir Starmer seems to have threatened the pathetic Lindsay Hoyle with withdrawal of support – in effect ending his career as Commons Speaker – if he allowed a debate on Gaza); and the absurd misframing by Sky News and enabled by Reuters of the MaccabiTel Aviv fans’ riot in Amsterdam.

Oborne also examines Israel’s response to South Africa’s case against it at the Internation Court of Justice.   Central points in Israel’s defence relate to the claim that civilian deaths were the result of Hamas using the population as “human shields, the assertion that there is sufficient food in Gaza, the notion that Israel’s military investigative bodies are a guarantee of legality, and the overall justification that Israel has a right to self-defence.

“The failure to critically scrutinise the Israeli claim of ‘human shielding’” he writes, “is one of the factors that has made Western politicians (and media) complicit in Israeli atrocities.”  He quotes Bill van Esveld, the regional associate director of Human Rights Watch, who confirmed ‘We don’t have evidence that Palestinian armed groups are hiding right next to civilians and not allowing civilians to leave.”  Yet, the ‘human shielding’ assertion was a mainstay of the British media.

Oborne poses a fundamental question: why does the media find Israel’s pretext credible, given that “so few of Israel’s allegations have been corroborated … when its government has a record of lying about (civilian deaths), and when it refuses to allow UN investigators or international journalists to enter Gaza”.  We might add: given that the same media has generally accepted that Israel has consistently lied about the availability of food in Gaza – a subject treated in exemplary detail in the book – why should their claim regarding “human shielding” be so readily accepted?

It is a depressing irony, as the book points out, that there is ample evidence that Israel used Palestinian civilians as “human shields”.

This book is an indispensable read for anyone wanting to understand the non-violent mechanisms by which the suited and coiffed representatives of a democratic society are willingly complicit in the commission of great crimes and how they seek support for the carnage they promote, drawing their fellow citizens into an unwitting shadow of complicity and denial of crimes.

Permit this reviewer a final reflection. The war against Corbyn was won by those that Peter Oborne attacks: the liars, slanderers, panic mongers and moral savages intent on crushing the left. In that war, criticism of Israel was falsely and tendentiously conflated with anti-Semitism and radical critics of Israel were castigated as racists. Indeed, traces of that ideological war continue, and the rise of Starmer and Streeting symbolise a formidable victory for the Labour right. But, as ex-Tory Prime Minister MacMillan is quoted as saying: “Events, dear boy, events.” The events of Israel’s ferocious war on the Palestinians have largely upended the situation. Today, the Labour right is stained to the marrow by its slavish support of Israel, faces widespread hostility and the slogan of “Free Palestine”, at least for now, is on the lips of millions. However the fight for that slogan fares, we have to learn to deal with the corruption of democracy we are living through.