I can’t decide if last night’s Labour revolt was an act of pointless narcissism or sinister appeasement. Maybe it was both. On one hand it will make not the slightest difference to world affairs that 56 Labour MPs defied their party leader and backed an ‘immediate ceasefire’ in the Israel-Hamas war.

They ignored Keir Starmer’s plea for party unity on the right of Israel to defend itself against the anti-Semitic terrorists of Hamas and put their names to an SNP amendment calling for an end to the ‘collective punishment of the Palestinian people’.

Will the Israelis be quaking in their boots that such political luminaries as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Naz Shah have insisted it lay down its arms? I doubt it. I expect the task of snuffing out the neo-fascists who murdered more than a thousand of its people feels more pressing to the Israeli establishment than the fact that some British MPs who don’t know what a woman is thinks it is committing a war crime.

Will the Israelis be quaking in their boots that such political luminaries as Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Naz Shah have insisted it lay down its arms?

There was a hollow vanity to this rebellion. The revolters seem more concerned with advertising their own virtue than with putting forward proposals for how our ally of Israel might deal with the racist mass murderers to its south.

Consider Jess Phillips, one of the eight shadow ministers to quit their roles in order to side with the SNP. As my colleague Fraser Myers pointed out on Twitter/X, her resignation letter had a measly two sentences on Gaza and 13 uses of ‘I’: the most important pronoun of all to the modern left.

‘This week has been one of the toughest weeks in politics since I entered Parliament’, she said. Not as tough as it has been for the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, I’d wager, who are now in their fortieth day of criminal captivity and yet who merit not one mention in Phillips’ self-aggrandising letter.

There is a dark irony in Phillips’ praise for Labour’s prioritisation of ‘the issue of men’s violence against women’, for isn’t that what Israel has been prioritising too? The brutalisation of Jewish women by Hamas was horrific. Women were raped, murdered, their twisted bodies were paraded in the streets for gleeful desecration by whipped-up mobs.

I know this will be controversial, but I put it to Phillips that Israel’s hunt for the misogynistic terrorists who violated the dignity of so many Israeli women is striking a far more decisive blow on ‘men’s violence against women’ than Labour has of late.

It isn’t only Jess. All the Labour revolters know, I think, that their defiant votes will neither dent the resolve of Israel nor improve the lot of Palestinians. They might get a fuzzy feeling from their TikTok-friendly virtuous posturing but Gaza will get precisely nothing. Is it too much to ask that our MPs address the problems in our own society instead of hectoring Israel over how it chooses to face down the existential and barbaric threat faced by its society?

On the other hand, though, beyond the usual annoyances of virtue-signalling, there’s something ominous in this revolt. Something that will make many wonder if Labour’s sense of decency really has improved following the ousting of the Corbynista mob.

There is an arrogance to the revolt. These people know, right, that Britain’s Mandate in the Middle East expired in 1948? That we can’t just boss people living there around like we used to? How dare British MPs who often make a terrible fist of running their own constituencies presume to tell a sovereign nation how it should counter the murderous threat posed by a terror group on its borders?

Then there is the fact that Hamas has openly said it wants to launch more racist pogroms against Israel. ‘We will do this again and again’, said Ghazi Hamad of Hamas’s political bureau. ‘There will be a second, a third, a fourth’, he said of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. No nation on earth should be expected to turn the other cheek to a racist movement that massacres its citizens and promises to do it again and again.

Yes, the SNP amendment calls on ‘all parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire’. So Hamas as well as Israel. And yet most of the passion in the Commons was directed against Israel. We know who this ceasefire request is really aimed at: not the terrorists who carried out the worst act of anti-Jewish violence since the Holocaust, but the Jewish State that had the temerity to respond to that violence with fury and force.

To my mind, calling on Israel to lay down arms in the face of anti-Semites who have openly said they want to kill more Jews is outright immoral. It is not a demand for a ceasefire at all, but for capitulation. It’s a cry for Israeli surrender, not Middle Eastern peace. People who are genuinely interested in peace would be demanding the release of the Israeli hostages and the surrender of the terrorists who started this war. Anything else, surely, is a species of appeasement?

British leftists love to pose as anti-fascist. They rage against the far right. ‘Punch a Nazi’ was the slogan of the online left in recent years. And yet when a genuinely fascistic assault was launched upon Jews in Israel, they went all coy. ‘Don’t fight back’ became their new rallying cry. It’s fine for us Westerners to punch a Nazi, but you Israelis? Don’t even think about it. Let the Nazis punch you.

We all want the Israel-Hamas war to end. It is hell, as all war is. But for that to happen we will need more than sad-eyed statements from British MPs – we need a massive reduction in Hamas’s capacity to visit racist violence on our allies in the Jewish state. That’s real anti-fascism.