Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza
Peter Oborne, OR Books £12

THE most disturbing conclusion to be drawn from Peter Oborne’s forensic examination of Britain’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction is that its support for Israel has torn the very fabric of our democracy. This comes across on every page of what will surely become a go-to work of reference about the moral nadir to which our governing elite has sunk in a long history of British hypocrisy.

Oborne details one of the darkest periods in a process underway since the Balfour Declaration as generations of leaders have turned the UK into both apologist and accomplice in ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, racist apartheid and ultimately genocide. He writes: “Preventing future outrages by our leaders calls for more than legal accountability. It requires bringing democracy to Britain’s state and society, whose governing institutions are now indelibly disgraced.”

Complicit is a candid, evidence-based record of Britain’s role in the slaughter visited by Israel upon the Palestinians with an unequivocal message for those in our midst who have enabled this: we are coming for you.

If a gallery of rogues comprising David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Keir Starmer, David Lammy and many others was not initially worried by the fallout of their contempt for the British people, they should be now. For this book amounts to a comprehensive case for the plaintiff in a suit that — if justice were to ever mean anything — would eventually see them sanctioned in the harshest of terms.

As such, Complicit is also a book about a democratic treason: the subversion of the role of political opposition, the treachery of the fourth estate, the capitulation of a puppet class to a foreign power … the list goes on.

Oborne sets a clear marker with the January 2024 ruling by the ICJ at The Hague which found to be plausible South Africa’s allegation that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Predictably, the judgement was denounced by the British state, but given the Genocide Convention’s incorporation into domestic law, its ministers will never again be able to sleep soundly.

The author — a heavyweight journalist with an unrivalled track record — then explores every inglorious aspect of our complicity in the crime of the century, beginning with the cross-party consensus in support of Israel shored up by Starmer’s cowardly silence as Opposition leader.

This is the first of many grievous assaults against democracy, the second being how Britain’s media abandoned their calling, to act as a foul mouthpiece for Israel’s twisted narrative. Double standards, bigotry, crass ignorance, and quick submission to Israeli pressure from the highest echelons of British journalism at the BBC downwards have blown to smithereens any pretence of integrity and impartiality.

A third blow to democracy has been growing authoritarianism: demonisation on the spurious grounds of “anti-semitism” became a weapon in the hands of the unassailable pro-Israel parliamentary front that formed as pro-Palestine marches sowed moral panic in Westminster.

And all the while, the insidious Israeli lobby was — and remains — hard at work suborning an already weakened democracy, cajoling, threatening, silencing, and buying up MPs faster than an American can buy real estate on the Gaza Riviera.

Oborne examines the historical revisionism of the Conservative Friends of Israel, blind to memories of Israeli terrorism against British soldiers, and the formation of Starmer as he engaged in a deception without precedent using “anti-semitism” to betray Jeremy Corbyn.

He also relates how Israel’s case at The Hague imploded and its subsequent mockery of international law — ignored by both Britain’s press and spineless government — and explores the spreading cancer of “atrocity denial” as the IDF caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

He exposes the linguistic atrocity of terms such as “blood libel,” a slur to whitewash Israeli wrongdoing, and Starmer’s own rhetorical tumours deployed to suppress “anti-British” protests against his compliance.

When all’s said and done, concludes Oborne, the wholesale complicity of Britain’s political elite in genocide bequeaths their people a bloodstained legacy that will never wash away.

“Damn those who put power before morality” he thunders with an indignation that will echo through the ages. “Damn all who were complicit in this brazen, public, and protracted crime against humanity.”

Elbit Ferranti protest
Protesters block the entrance to Israeli-owned Elbit Ferranti arms company in Oldham, Greater Manchester. Picture date: Monday February 1, 2021.