BORIS JOHNSON: All Starmer’s pledges to stand with Israel were hypocrisy and guff. Instead I believe he’s effectively saying: I stand with Hamas

It was only last month that Keir Starmer declaimed a Commons statement on the worst massacre the Jewish people have experienced since World War II. He seemed perfectly sincere.

‘October 7, 2023,’ he intoned, ‘was the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust’. He went on to evoke some of the horrors.

‘Men, women, children and babies were killed, mutilated and tortured by the terrorists of Hamas. Jewish people murdered while protecting their families. Young people massacred at a music festival. People abducted from their homes… Rape, torture and brutality beyond comprehension.’

With signs of deep personal emotion, he spoke of his own pain ‘as a father, a husband, a son, a brother’ when meeting the families of the victims.

‘Their grief and pain are ours,’ he told a silent House.

The message, said the PM, was plain, and one he has repeated often since the massacre last year.

‘We must unequivocally stand with the Jewish community. We must never look the other way in the face of hate.’

At the end of the statement, the whole Commons ‘hear-heared’, and who could doubt that Starmer meant what he said?

Of course, he stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel. No British Prime Minister, surely, could feel otherwise.

Imagine that the October 7 massacre had been inflicted on the people of this country. It would have been, pro rata, by far the biggest one-day loss of British civilian life in modern times. If you calculate that on that day, the Israelis lost more than one person for every ten thousand of their population, then you must imagine the killing of almost 8,000 British men, women and children – at one fell swoop.

As a daily death toll, it would have been worse than anything achieved by Hitler’s bombs. Then try to grasp the psychological and emotional impact of that catastrophe on the British people, and British politics.

Imagine thousands of British people tortured, mutilated, raped. Think of hearing their screams, seeing their blood – in an orgy of slaughter by terrorists whose avowed aim was not just to wipe this country off the map, but to purge the entire planet of British people.

Think how the Commons would have responded, and what we the people would have demanded of our leaders.

Any British Prime Minister would have faced an identical and entirely legitimate demand: to find the killers and to bring them to justice, or at least to make sure, by all necessary means, that they could not commit any such atrocity again. Above all there would have been an overwhelming clamour that no stone should be left unturned in the effort to bring the hostages home.

So when the government of Benjamin Netanyahu set out to kill or capture Hamas, or at least to make them incapable of repeating their crimes, he was doing what was right, and inevitable. He was doing what would have been demanded of any democratic leader, including the Prime Minister of this country.

Yes, the sufferings of the people of Gaza have been tragic, and our hearts ache for the loss of civilian life. Yes, the images from Gaza have been horrifying. But we must maintain moral clarity.

One day Starmer claims to stand with Israel; the next he is collaborating in an attempt to  jail its elected leader, says Boris Johnson

We must remember who the real authors of the disaster were. It was not the fault of the Israeli Defence Force that Hamas terrorists chose to conceal themselves in hospitals and other civilian targets. It wasn’t the Israelis who forced innocent Palestinians, at gunpoint, to be human shields.

If Hamas had wanted to end the Israeli attacks, they could have done it at any time – by giving up those who were responsible for organising and inspiring the October 7 massacres. They could have brought the Israeli campaign to an abrupt end by handing back the rest of the hostages; something they have still failed to do.

There are still dozens of terrified Israelis being held in Gaza, and that is the choice of Hamas. It is Hamas, and Hamas alone, that has been truly responsible for the sufferings of the people of Gaza.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, has had no choice. He had to try to bring this reign of terror to an end. No elected leader – not even Keir Starmer – could have done otherwise.

So it was utterly bewildering, and shameful, that on Thursday the Labour leader made a mockery of that October 7 statement to the House of Commons. All those heartfelt expressions of sympathy, and pledges to stand with Israel: it was all guff, hypocrisy and blather.

Instead of standing with Israel, Starmer is effectively standing with Hamas – because he has cravenly endorsed the request, from the International Criminal Court (ICC), that the leaders of Israel should be charged with war crimes. If either Netanyahu, or Yoav Gallant, his defence minister, set foot in this country, they risk being arrested and bundled off to the Hague for trial and imprisonment.

We are treating them like Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic, the butchers of the Balkans, when this ICC case is patently absurd.

The Hague court is designed for tyrants – like Putin or Milosevic – who have no chance of facing justice in their own country. The ICC is supposed to ‘complement’ any potential failure of due process.

But the whole point of Israel is that it is a functioning democracy, with a highly active culture of litigation. If Netanyahu or Gallant were indeed guilty of causing starvation, or mass murder, then there is every prospect that they would eventually be arraigned before the Israeli courts.

Instead – and this is perhaps the most obscene feature of the whole business – the ICC is expressly bracketing the Israeli leadership with Hamas. The court has simultaneously indicted the two Israeli politicians, Netanyahu and Gallant, alongside a Hamas terrorist called Mohammed Deif.

To compound the absurdity and unfairness, Deif is now dead, and wherever he is to be held to account for his crimes it will not be in the Hague. Starmer has chosen, amazingly, to go along with it all.

By accepting this indictment, the Labour government has accepted the moral equivalence of Hamas and Israel: that is, the equivalence between the terrorists and the victims; between those who committed unprecedented torture and mayhem and those whose wretched duty is to try to stop it happening again.

He has done it, because he is pathetically trying to appease pro-Palestinian sentiment – fuelled by anti-semitism – in the Labour party. After almost five months in office, this government is adrift, devoid of principle or purpose.

One day Starmer claims to stand with Israel; the next he is collaborating in an attempt to humiliate Israel and jail its elected leader.

One day he claims to be standing up for democracy in Hong Kong; the next he is grovelling to Xi Jingping.

He claims to be backing the Ukrainians but shows no sign of offering the leadership necessary to get Putin’s jackboot off their neck.

At home, his economic policy appears to have collapsed, as his CV-doctoring Chancellor – Rachel Reeves PhD DLitt VC – defiantly pursues her disastrous budget: persecuting farmers, and pushing up inflation again, just when we thought we had it beat.

With every week that passes, the odds are growing: for all their majority, that this really could be a one-term Labour government.