Deir el-Balah, Gaza and London, UK – Israa Saleh, a petite, soft-spoken Palestinian doctor who wears a colorful hijab, has been in mourning for months.
Her colleague Maisara al-Rayyes was killed in November when an Israeli airstrike destroyed her family home in Gaza. Her remains still lie under the rubble.
Saleh described al-Rayyes, who like her is a recipient of a prestigious Chevening scholarship from the British government, as a “brother”.
“I am still grieving,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune in Deir el-Balah, the central Gaza city where she fled after being displaced 10 times in the past nine months. “This war has taken everything from us.”
She returned to Gaza in 2022 after completing a master’s degree in Liverpool, a city that reminded her of the Gaza Strip with its “coastal nature” and “incredible” people.
Rishi Sunak was then the new Conservative prime minister. Back home, Saleh was working for Médecins du Monde, the international humanitarian organisation, and was considering marriage.
But a year later, the latest and deadliest Israeli attack on Gaza has dashed her wedding dreams: spending time with her fiancé has become impossible and the reception venues have been bombed.
Living in the northwest of England for more than a year, Saleh, 30, has closely followed the recent UK elections that saw the first Labour government in 14 years come to power. Now she is cautiously hopeful that Britain will change its position on the war.
“I wasn’t really surprised by Keir Starmer’s (Labour leader) victory,” she said. “But nothing gives me more hope than the protests that are breaking out across the country. That might actually push Labour to act.”
She believes that the UK is “politically complicit in genocide” on the one hand, given its support for the Israeli army, and on the other hand, “helps the population” by providing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip.
“His position must be clear. He must take a firm stand and listen to his people to end this war. That is how the Labour Party must operate.”
Asaad al-Kurd, a 51-year-old English teacher and father of six in Deir el-Balah, is less optimistic.
He usually follows international news. But after losing his sister and children in the war, along with dozens of other family members, his life seems too “hellish” to pay attention to the news.
“I felt detached from this year’s election,” he said. “Both Labour and the Conservatives are complicit in genocide. Keir (Starmer) and Rishi (Sunak) have pledged unprecedented military support for Israel and justified Israel’s monstrous war crimes… Whatever they say gives me no hope. Nothing will change at all.”
He compared the UK to Washington’s “tail” as their foreign policies are closely aligned.
“(But) we must remember that the United Kingdom is behind our disaster,” he said. “The Conservative Party “Prime Minister Arthur Balfour gave Israel land in Palestine.”
Gaza war is ‘a foreign policy priority’
Al-Kurd is a teacher at UNRWA, the agency that several countries, including the UK, stopped funding after Israel claimed that 12 of its 30,000 staff played a role in the October 7 Hamas incursion into southern Israel in which 1,139 people were killed. Israel has provided no evidence to support the allegations.
As the death toll in Gaza approaches 40,000, Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the UK in the World programme at the Chatham House think tank, said the war is “a top foreign policy priority” for the new Labour government.
She told Tel Aviv Tribune that changes in “big policy issues”, as opposed to differences in rhetoric, would signal a departure from the previous conservative administration.
Resuming funding for UNRWA, a shift in arms exports to Israel or explicit support for the jurisdiction of international courts would signal that Labour was on a different path, she said.
In opposition, Starmer regularly expressed solidarity with Israel and angered many when he said it had the right to cut off water and electricity to Gaza. He quickly backed down, but his stance cost Labour four seats to pro-Palestinian independents and widened the divide with British Muslims who traditionally support the party.
In November, Starmer voted against a parliamentary motion demanding an immediate ceasefire. In a radio interview before the election, he said he would not “declare whether something is genocide or not,” while reaffirming Israel’s “right to self-defense.”
But he also said that every country, including Israel, “must be held accountable before the court of international law” and vowed to review legal advice on arms sales to Israel as prime minister.
David Lammy, the new foreign secretary who is due to visit Israel shortly, broke with the official UK line in late May by supporting the independence of the International Criminal Court after it sought arrest warrants for Israeli officials and Hamas leaders for alleged war crimes.
Conservatives have said the ICC has no jurisdiction in the case, while US President Joe Biden has said it is “outrageous” to suggest any equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
Richard Hermer, Starmer’s new attorney general, is “one of the interesting appointments” in the new government, O’Sullivan said.
Hermer, a critic of Israel, is a human rights expert who denounced the former government’s move to criminalize boycott campaigns and was among a small group of Jewish lawyers who wrote an open letter reminding Israel of its “international obligations” at the start of the war.
“On some of these international law issues, we could see changes,” said O’Sullivan, who described Hermer as a “deep well of expertise.”
According to Kamel Hawwash, a British-Palestinian academic who ran as an independent on a pro-Palestine ticket in the election, if Starmer’s government fails to challenge the Conservatives’ position on the ICC, it will signal that it is against “the equal application of international humanitarian law to all states.” Labour ultimately won the seat Hawwash was seeking.
Joseph Willits, head of parliamentary affairs at the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), said the new government must “fully support” the ICC “unequivocally”, adding that there was “rightly some optimism” around Hermer’s appointment.
The Palestinian State and Internal Divisions
The Labour Party’s manifesto commits to eventual recognition of Palestinian statehood as part of a “renewed peace process” towards a two-state solution.
But since the Conservatives suggested in January that the UK could recognise a Palestinian state before the end of the peace process, Labour’s promise has not been seen by analysts as revolutionary.
Spain, Norway and Ireland recognized the state of Palestine this year, angering Israel.
“It is very unlikely that the new Labour government will do that,” said Glen Rangwala, associate professor in the department of politics and international studies at the University of Cambridge. “Their commitment in the manifesto… makes recognition conditional on the resumption of a negotiation process… in effect, it allows the issue of recognition of Palestinian statehood to be delayed.”
Rangwala expects Labour to treat the handful of pro-Palestinian independents in parliament as “marginal figures”.
The party likely assumes that after the “current phase” of the Gaza war ends, the public profile of independents will “decrease further” and pro-Palestinian voters will return to the Labour fold, he said.
But Willits said Starmer was risking his reputation if he failed to address the growing divide.
“Some might think it’s easy, with a huge Labour majority in Parliament, to dismiss Palestine as a marginal, unimportant, fifth-column issue,” he said. “If Keir Starmer doesn’t want to just be haunted and remembered as the guy who said Israel had the right to cut off electricity and water to Gaza, then he needs to deal with this policy reset on Palestine. It will be a major test for this government.”
Preparing for a possible political earthquake
Looking ahead, Starmer’s approach could be affected by the outcome of the US election in November.
But even if former President Donald Trump returns to the White House, analysts say the UK is likely to seek to influence the US position rather than take the lead.
“If Trump wins the election, the actions of the United States on this issue will be much more unpredictable,” O’Sullivan said. “They will remain important and influential, so I think a Starmer government will seek to manage the consequences of that.”
Rangwala, of the University of Cambridge, said that while the change of government in the UK is “unlikely to result in a significant change in British policy towards Palestine and Israel”, the US elections are a “key complicating factor”.
“If a new Trump administration endorses expanding Israel’s war aims, many in the Labor Party will seek to distance themselves from Washington,” he said.
“But even then, it is more likely that the government’s policy will lean more toward encouraging the United States to soften its position than toward taking an overtly different position – a difference in tone from the United States rather than a difference in substance.”
As the war enters its tenth month, CAABU’s Willits said, “The number one priority must be ending this genocide, and that means no longer being dependent on where Washington goes – or doesn’t go.”
