Elections have consequences, as we’re routinely told. And in the UK, the recent elections have brought about quite the shift in British policy toward Israel.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer got off to a good start when he took over the Labour Party from bitter anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn four years ago. Starmer immediately apologized for the party’s incubation of open Jew-hatred. He sought to cleanse the “stain” of it from Labour and invited the public to judge his results by whether Jews—who abandoned Labour in Corbyn’s general election—would return to the party. It worked, Labour has kept its anti-Semites from the levers of power within the party, and Starmer became prime minister upon Labour’s recent historic wipeout of the Tories.

But now Starmer is leading a shift on Israel policy, and the way in which he is choosing to do so will be a boon to global anti-Semitism. The changes are mostly symbolic, but they illustrate how destructive symbolic actions can be in the realm of foreign affairs.

The first move Starmer’s Britain made was to drop its challenge to the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction over Israeli leaders regarding the issuing of arrest warrants. The ICC is deliberating over whether to seek such warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Initially, the UK was to join Germany in filing an objection. But the Conservatives are now out of power and Labour has decided not to pursue it further.

Starmer’s explanation is risible: “I think you would note that the courts have already received a number of submissions on either side, so they are well seized of the arguments to make their independent determinations.” Really? Britain is satisfied to leave up to others the question of whether the Israeli prime minister can visit Britain without fear of arrest?

Whether or not it affects the outcome of the case, if Sir Keir has an objection to the possible arrest of the leader of an allied democracy, that is the sort of thing he should want to go on record with. Perhaps filing that objection is a mostly symbolic act, but not registering such an objection is symbolic of something else—namely, that the prime minister of Israel is a war criminal if a kangaroo court says so. At the very least, the British public might find it alarming that Sir Keir is so bored by the question of British sovereignty.

The second move has to do with weapons sales to Israel. Strategic leaks and careful public statements have made clear that, at least prior to this weekend’s Hezbollah massacre of children in northern Israel, Foreign Secretary David Lammy was preparing to suspend all licenses to export offensive weapons to Israel.

The UK does not directly provide such weapons, but approves their sales from British manufacturers. These sales make up less than one percent of Israel’s arsenal. Moreover, Lammy said, “it would not be right to have a blanket ban between our country and Israel,” so the UK share of Israel’s weapons would drop to a rounding error.

For those reasons, this is regarded as a symbolic act. It may be, but yet again, the symbolism is important.

Recently the UK made another funding decision regarding the Gaza conflict: It would restore the money it gives to UNRWA, the Hamas-coopted UN agency whose members took part in the October 7 attacks. The message appears to be: We can fund an agency that acts as an adjunct of Hamas but we should discontinue even permitting most weapons sales to Israel.

“Symbolic” is not a synonym for “harmless.” There are plenty of times when an action can be both—a suburban borough in New Jersey, where I used to live, banned fracking in 2013. I assure you there had been no hydraulic fracturing for fossil fuels under the banks of the old Raritan River. No one was harmed by this purely symbolic—if also spectacularly inane—town council vote.

But Israel is indeed harmed by Starmer’s moves. The Labour Party’s leftist base feels toward Israel as the more-progressive Democrats here in the U.S. do: suspicious, contemptuous, and occasionally outright bigoted.

And so it is not the act itself but the rationalization for it. The story being told about Israel is that it cannot be trusted with the weapons of war and that its leaders may be considered unwelcome in the United Kingdom. Starmer would never say that explicitly, of course. But he is legitimizing the lies being told by those seeking to destroy the Jewish state. Israel is the villain of this story, and now Keir Starmer is the villain of his own.

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