UK suspends 8% of arms licences with Israel, but leaves other 92% in place

We wouldn't want to get carried away, would we?

Foreign Secretary David Lammy has suspended 30 arms export licences with Israel, after establishing a risk of serious violations of international law. Thankfully, those violations would not be serious enough to suspend the other 320 arms export licences because doing so would land us in trouble with the US. Plus, Lammy didn't want to be called “Hamas” by his friends.

Lammy noticed the risk of Israel committing serious violations of international law after spending ten months watching Israel commit serious violations of international law. Once he saw pieces of the 40,000th dead civilian being scooped into a plastic bag, he decided he’d finally reached his limit.

Brutal dictators around the world have taken note and will be careful not to exceed the acceptable civilian death toll in future genocides. The new rule is 40,000 innocent lives and not one more. It’s gonna be so awkward when the real death toll in Gaza is announced at 200,000, isn’t it?

Following Lammy’s decision to pretend we’re making a principled stance against genocide, it’s unclear if Israel will respond with sanctions of its own. I understand numerous MPs are concerned they could lose their contributions from the Israeli lobby because they have mistresses to buy gifts for.

Lammy stressed his decision does not amount to an arms embargo, explaining he has only blocked weapons that can be used against Palestinians. As everyone knows, 90% of weapons can’t be used against Palestinians. This is why the other 320 arms export licences remain in place. Palestinians are relieved to hear all the other weapons can’t be used against them.

Lammy emphasised Israel has a right to defend itself and Palestine does not, so it’s important we send some weapons to Israel. This is a clever strategy because it keeps the International Criminal Court off our backs, assuming the world’s most senior judges are idiots.

Lammy said: “We are deeply worried by the methods that Israel's employed, and by reports of civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure particularly.” Thankfully, he has not suggested the IDF are terrorists because that label is reserved for Arabs.

Both Israeli and Palestinian leaders are under investigation for war crimes, but we are much gentler on the side with the higher body count. This is because the US has made it clear they will choose Israel over the UK every time. This means we could lose our lucrative F-35 contracts, and those contracts matter much more than civilian lives.

To be fair, we only have ourselves to blame for this mess because we never bothered setting up a UK lobby across the pond. If we were clever enough to buy congress before AIPAC made Israel “America’s greatest ally”, our military would be the one getting funded by the US, but we weren’t clever enough, were we? x

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