Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Cameron is threatening to suspend arms sales to Israel. The Telegraph reports that the former prime minister demanded Israeli officials grant the Red Cross access to captured Hamas fighters or face a suspension of the export licence for defence materiel.

Israel has claimed a security exemption to the Geneva Convention as the reason for blocking such access. The Red Cross has not visited Israeli hostages being held by the Palestinians. The Brits were previously reported to be contemplating an arms embargo if Israel invaded the Hamas stronghold of Rafah. Cameron has also complained about the length of time it takes for aid convoys to be allowed entry by Israeli security forces.

The past five months have seen a collapse into cowardice by the West

According to the Israeli government, 208 humanitarian aid trucks were inspected and admitted to Gaza on Thursday, 125 via Kerem Shalom on the armistice line with Gaza, and 83 via Nitzana on the border with Egypt. Meanwhile UN aid agencies distributed 155 trucks’ worth of aid inside Gaza. Seven world food programme vehicles also entered northern Gaza on Thursday, while four tankers of cooking gas were admitted and 157 tonnes of aid air-dropped into the same region. Two dozen aid trucks were due to be transferred from Jordan to Gaza on Friday. During this week’s operation against Hamas in al-Shifa hospital, the IDF handed over a fuel truck, 1,800 litres of water and almost four tonnes of food. To recap, this is just the aid provided in the past few days.

As for Red Cross access to Hamas terrorists, I am in no position to assess the Israelis’ claim of a security exemption. Nevertheless, it is a serious escalation for the Foreign Office to go from making diplomatic representations to threatening Israel with an arms embargo. Note that Gaza is not permitting the Red Cross access to the Israeli hostages it is holding. Has David Cameron threatened to suspend aid to the Palestinians in response?

Israel, let’s not forget, is a friendly nation, though one wonders why it bothers when Britain’s progressive ruling class treats it with such contempt. UK-Israel trade was worth £6 billion last year and Israel was one of the first countries in the world to sign a post-Brexit trade continuity agreement with Britain. Just one of its pharmaceutical companies, Teva, supplies one in every seven packs of prescription medicines to British pharmacies, with its generic products helping to save the NHS £2.4 billion in 2021 alone. Israel’s security services share intelligence on Islamist plots within the UK, such as the 2015 Hezbollah cell in London which was reportedly disrupted thanks to a tip-off from the Mossad. Their police train our police on how to deal with lone-wolf terror attacks.

Now, it’s possible to admire or sympathise with Israel and still acknowledge that it hasn’t got everything right in this war. It’s war: no country gets everything right. But while this strategic decision or that tactical choice may be open to challenge, Israel’s conduct of Operation Iron Swords, as their campaign into Gaza has been named, has overall shown a country trying to balance its legitimate desire to punish those who murdered, raped and tortured 1,200 of its citizens with recognition of the heavily built-up theatre it is fighting in.

Gaza is urban warfare at its most hazardous, densely populated in all the worst places, with terror tunnels and weapons stockpiles deliberately concentrated in civilian areas, and an enemy lacking in any scruples about using innocents, including children, as human shields. Despite these conditions, even if we take Hamas’s casualty numbers at face value, it is remarkable how precisely the IDF has managed to target its operations.

As Andrew Roberts recently commented in the House of Lords:

War is hell, and every individual civilian death is a tragedy, but – I speak as a military historian – less than 2:1 is an astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields. It is a testament to the professionalism, ethics and values of the Israel Defence Forces.

While a historian can see these things clearly, those busy providing future historians with primary sources have failed to display proportion, insight or critical thinking. The Biden administration, egged on by the anti-Western progressives who staff the US State Department, is currently pushing a UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire. (There was a ceasefire in place on 6 October but we are expected to trust Hamas that it won’t break this one, too.)

Since David Cameron became Foreign Secretary, his pronouncements on Israel and Gaza have become ever harder to distinguish from those of Humza Yousaf or the Labour soft-left. Beyond the centrist establishment, though even creeping into that establishment in places, are wild and unsubstantiated charges of genocide, virulent anti-Semitism among the young and the educated classes, the emergence of sympathy for Hamas and the Houthis as a high-status opinion, and open calls for the annihilation of the State of Israel.

These are days of blood and shame. Jews were slain en masse, a few throats were cleared condemning their killers, then the world return to its factory settings of calumnying Israel for defending itself. Few countries, and certainly not the United States, would have met the outrage of 7 October with such a measured, targeted campaign, though I am fully prepared to accept that the UK is one of them. Britain’s governing elite cannot fathom a response to the mass murder of young concert-goers that doesn’t involve a chorus of ‘Don’t look back in anger’ and another national conversation on Islamophobia. Hypocrisy is unfortunate but it’s preferable to fear and enfeeblement.

The past five months have seen a collapse into cowardice by the West, a vacating of the moral arena by so many who profess to be liberals, rationalists and opponents of terrorism and extremism. The Palestinian pogrom of 7 October, which the latest polling tells us 71 per cent of Palestinians still support, should have prompted even the weakest, most craven, most status-driven Western liberals to reassess their seminar-room pieties about this conflict. Instead, they have leaned further into anti-Western radicalism and progressive victimhood politics, both of which tread shallowly through history but are steeped in grievance. No wonder Israel offends them. It is a country set on self-preservation while the West seems bent on self-destruction.