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arms sales
'Complicit in War Crimes': UK Official Resigns Over Arms Sales to Israel
Mark Smith, a diplomat, is the first known U.K. official to resign over Gaza.
Aug 19, 2024
A British diplomat on Friday resigned in protest of the United Kingdom's arm sales to Israel, saying that there is "no justification" for the sales and that Israel has committed war crimes.
Mark Smith, who was a second secretary at the U.K. embassy in Dublin, had a previous official role working on arms export licensing assessments for the Middle East, he said. He is the first known British official to resign over the war in Gaza.
He sent an email to a long list of fellow officials in the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO). Iraqi-British journalist Hind Hassan obtained the email and published it on social media.
"It is with sadness that I resign after a long career in the diplomatic service; however, I can no longer carry out my duties in the knowledge that this department may be complicit in war crimes," says the email, which was later verified by other sources.
"There is no justification for the U.K.'s continued arms sales to Israel yet somehow it continues," it says.
Full resignation letter from FCDO British diplomat Mark Smith: pic.twitter.com/k9y7varCHC
— Hind Hassan (@HindHassanNews) August 16, 2024
In an interview with BBC Radio 4 on Monday, Smith said that "anybody who has a kind of basic understanding of these things can see that there are war crimes being committed" and it was "not once, not twice, not a few times, but quite flagrantly and openly and regularly."
At least a dozen officials in the United States have resigned over the Biden administration's handling of the war in Gaza that began last year. Last month, twelve of them issued a joint statement calling out the U.S.' "undeniable complicity" in the killings and forced starvation of Palestinians.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since October 7, according to the Gaza health ministry. In late October, Craig Mokhiber, a top U.N. official in New York, resigned his position over the U.N.'s response to Israel's assault on Gaza. Another estimate put the likely death toll much higher. More than 1,100 Israelis were killed by Hamas and allied groups on October 7.
However, no British officials had made a similar move until Smith on Friday.
Since 2008, the U.K. has granted export licenses for $727 million in arms sales to Israel, largely for aircraft and radar systems; U.K. parts are also used in U.S.-manufactured F-35 combat aircraft destined for Israel, according to the Campaign Against Arms Trade.
The U.K. government recently "played down" its supply of weapons to Israel, saying it was "relatively small" at $53 million in 2022, the BBCreported. That's just a fraction of the weapons transfers to Israel made by the U.S., which approved another $20 billion worth last week.
The U.K. government, led by the center-left Labour Party since last month, is conducting a review of its weapons sales policy to Israel to determine if it's in compliance with international law. Foreign Secretary David Lammy reportedly ordered the review on his first day in office and has raised the possibility of cutting off sales of offensive weapons to Israel, while allowing the sale of defensive weapons to continue.
Led by the Conservative Party for the first nine months, the U.K. was in lockstep with the U.S. on the assault on Gaza but has taken steps that show a bit of divergence since Labour took power. The government has reestablished funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and announced that it would not, despite an earlier pledge, challenge the International Criminal Courts plan of seeking arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders.
In response to Smith's resignation, an FCDO spokesperson told the BBC that the department was committed to upholding international law and "will not export items if they be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law."
The Middle East Eyereported that the FCDO promised officials in the department a "listening session" after Smith's email was sent. Smith criticized the organization for not listening to repeated pleas for a change of course on weapons sales to Israel.
"I have raised this at every level in the organization, including through an official whistle blowing investigation and received nothing more than 'thank you we have noted your concern'," Smith wrote in the email.
British newspapers reported that Smith was a "junior" diplomat but Hassan wrote on social media that this was in an attempt to undermine him.
"For one, he is a mid-level diplomat: Second secretaries can often have a decade of experience, if not more," she said.
"Furthermore the point of focus should be that Mark Smith is experienced in arms licensing; he knows what he's talking about when it comes to arms sales and governments," she added.
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Biden's New Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia's Prince Bonesaw
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
Aug 16, 2024
Perhaps we should be grateful that it took President Biden over four years to fully abandon his campaign pledge to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, eroding the promise bit by bit before finally announcing at the end of the day on Friday, August 9, that the administration would resume sales of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the Kingdom.
In reality, the ban was merely the last vestige of a long-abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various, gruesome atrocities and abuses both at home and abroad. In its place, the Biden administration’s courtiers doubled down on their embrace of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), offering up a never-ending basket of concessions and goodies, as the golden ticket for continued U.S. primacy in the Middle East, come what may to everyone and everything else.
What follows will be their rush to the finish line, bestowing on the prince the biggest prize of all — an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee — before the clock runs out on Joe Biden’s presidency.
Cutting off the biggest U.S. weapons purchaser in the world carried well-understood costs of its own, upsetting not only U.S. defense companies deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraging MBS to retaliate by flaunting closer ties with China and Russia. And so just a few months into the first year of the Biden administration, his national security team walked back the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to block “offensive” weapons, not “defensive” ones.
Queries from members of Congress about the distinction between these terms went unanswered. Soon, billions in weapons were flowing, paving the way for a further mending of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the now infamous July 2022 Biden/MBS “fist bump” in Jeddah.
Once the Biden team announced that it too would follow Trump’s lead to make adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords its number one Middle East foreign policy priority, any lingering concerns about rewarding the Kingdom with new military support despite its widespread horrors in Yemen and at home, or fueling its further belligerence in the region, were swept under the desert sands.
Coupled with national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s open admission of his secondary priorities — cheap oil and keeping China out of the region — the only answer to MBS’s “jump” was to ask “how high?” MBS turned to a hardball game of reverse leverage, not only refusing to open his oil spigot to relieve global oil prices ahead of the 2022 November primaries despite Biden’s pleas, but prominently hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in a multiday red carpet affair, announcing China would build a civilian nuclear plant and support missile development in the country, and refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
And so it was time for the Biden team to bow to MBS’s wishes. The first major concession was to grant the Crown Prince immunity from U.S. prosecution, squashing several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment and attacks against Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss. The next was for the Biden team to secure the ultimate prize in the Saudi bucket list: a NATO Article 5 treaty level U.S. security guarantee for the Kingdom. Efforts by the Biden team to woo the Crown Prince with a mere aerial security umbrella was not sufficient to persuade him; only a bilateral, treaty level guarantee would work, he made clear.
The Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the nine months of relentless Israeli bombardment and starvation of Gaza’s civilian population that it precipitated, upended these plans. A humiliated Sullivan, who only days before the cataclysmic assault pronounced that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades now” and boasted that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” was forced to shelve the plans for a Saudi/Israeli peace agreement.
Even MBS could not dare to openly endorse Israel in the face of near universal Saudi sympathy for Palestinian suffering.
While a largely AIPAC-funded Congress would likely have supported a U.S. security guarantee for Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, without this, ratification of a treaty level commitment would be a very hard sell. The Biden team is now considering the idea of delinking the security guarantee, as well as poaching China’s development of the civilian nuclear plant, from normalization with Israel in a “less for less” deal.
Under a proposed “Strategic Alliance Agreement” the U.S. would commit to helping defend Saudi Arabia if it were attacked, in exchange for Saudi granting Washington access to Saudi territory and airspace, prohibiting China from building bases in the Kingdom or pursuing security cooperation with it, and signing a parallel “Defense Cooperation Agreement,” to boost weapons sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning on terrorism and Iran.
Such a move strips away the cover of “regional peace for Israel” as the motivation for the Saudi security guarantee, more nakedly exposing the underlying motivations driving the Biden team: a stale but cemented worldview that U.S. interests require military hegemony in the Middle East, alongside cheap oil and defense industry profits. It’s hard to discount the siren call of personal profiteering for Biden officials, who will no doubt consider multi-million payouts from the UAE and Saudi, even if they’re not as lucrative as the billions in take-home by Trump officials Stephen Mnuchin and Jared Kushner. (Recall also that Secretary Blinken’s WestExec Advisors, whose client list Secretary Blinken has never disclosed, is now partly owned by Teneo, a firm that works for the MBS controlled Saudi public investment fund.)
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East — from the mass slaughters of civilians and perpetual war-footings, encouraging destabilizing bellicosity, entrapping our country in zero-sum military conflicts, and undermining U.S. global standing as a credible force for human rights and democracy — remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
With the clock ticking on the expiration of the Biden term as the Gaza war rages on, it’s doubtful that the administration will be able to deliver any expansion of the Abraham Accords or a security agreement for MBS. It’s not even clear MBS will accept these rewards, saving them for the next round of haggling with a new administration. For now, we’ll just have to hope that “Mr. Bonesaw” will show more sense than the Biden administration and avoid any new wars in the region.
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Oxfam Joins Case Calling on High Court to Stop UK Arms Sales to Israel
"As long as Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in apparent contravention of international law, the U.K. government has a responsibility to stop selling it arms."
Jun 13, 2024
As government data showed the British government has approved more than 100 arms licenses for Israel since it began bombarding Gaza in October, the humanitarian group Oxfam on Thursday joined a legal case demanding the U.K. High Court intervene in the country's continued weapons sales in the interest of protecting Palestinian civilians.
Oxfam said the court "has been presented with evidence that Israel is not complying with the legal obligations that apply during armed conflict." Human rights experts have said for months that Israel is blocking crucial humanitarian aid and failing to take steps to protect civilians, as in its recent attacks on encampments in Rafah and at Nuseirat refugee camp, where at least 274 Palestinians were killed in the Israel Defense Forces' operation to rescue four Israeli hostages.
Oxfam joined Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and U.K.-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) in calling on the High Court to order the Secretary of State for Business and Trade to suspend all licenses of weapons and military equipment for Israel, and to stop granting new licenses.
At a Royal Courts of Justice hearing on Thursday, Oxfam was granted permission to act as an intervener and provide a witness statement outlining the conditions the group has seen in Gaza since October.
"Gaza is fast becoming completely uninhabitable," said Halima Begum, chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain. "More than 37,000 people have been killed and a further 84,000 have been wounded, the majority children. At least 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza are facing famine and children are dying of starvation. As long as Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in apparent contravention of international law, the U.K. government has a responsibility to stop selling it arms."
Begum called on the U.K. to use "all the diplomatic leverage it has to push for an immediate and lasting cease-fire."
Oxfam joined the legal case days after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution endorsing a U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday accused Hamas of holding up the cease-fire deal by proposing more amendments to the agreement, while Hamas said it had only proposed counter-revisions to changes made by Israeli officials.
Meanwhile, Israeli attacks continued in Rafah, Gaza City, and other parts of the enclave.
"Morally, the U.K. should not be fueling this onslaught by selling Israel more weapons," said Begum. "It is vital that the bombardment of Gaza ends, so that Oxfam and our fellow humanitarian agencies can safely deliver life-saving aid to civilians on the scale that is so urgently required."
The U.K. has licensed at least £489 million ($624 million) of military exports to Israel since 2015, and the country provides about 15% of the components of the F-35 stealth bomber aircraft being used by Israel in Gaza.
On Tuesday, after the government released new figures regarding U.K. arms sales to Israel, Begum said the British government is engaging in "a remarkable feat of intellectual compromise" as it claims to support peace efforts in Gaza "while facilitating the supply of even greater flows of weapons to one of the belligerents."
"It is a comprehensive failure in the U.K.'s moral leadership and the values of humanity for which this country is still known on the global stage that the government has granted more than 100 new licenses for arms sales to Israel," said Begum. "This has occurred in the unequivocal knowledge that tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian children and their parents are being killed by Israel's prosecution of the war in Gaza."
Tim Bierley, campaigner for Global Justice Now, noted that "it's clear to most people that the U.K. must cut off the supply of arms" to Israel as it faces an International Criminal Court investigation into its actions in Gaza. A YouGov poll last month found 55% of Britons supported suspending arms sales to Israel for the duration of the fighting in Gaza, including 40% of Conservative voters and 74% of Labour Party supporters.
"Despite the breathtaking scale and brutality of Israel's war crimes in Gaza, the U.K. has given the green light to huge shipments of weapons to the country, including components for military aircraft and guns," said Bierley. "The leaders of many countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, and Spain, have taken steps to [halt arms sales], but the British government has opted instead for complicity in war crimes. We must not accept this as normal."
The High Court is scheduled to hold a judicial review hearing about a potential intervention in arms sales in October.
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