After General Election, Labour's lack of morality on Gaza will matter

This has little to do with the popularity of Keir Starmer. Rather, the election is defined by the pantomime-like failure of the Tory Party. The introduction of Nigel Farage into the election is potentially catastrophic for the party too. Not because Reform are likely to win many seats, but as a result of their stripping votes away, primarily at this stage, from the Conservatives.

In reality, Labour enjoy shallow support in the country. They lack the kind of foundation and intellectual rigour required to inoculate the party from a suite of problems. The kind of sustainable “reset”, in which we arrive somewhere back in the late 1990s will not come to pass.

On the one hand, because the economic model which is held to so dogmatically is bankrupt, and on the other, because the world is in an increasingly volatile state. As soon as Starmer takes office it will be the latter – the geopolitical – that catalyses the most immediate crisis for the Labour leadership.

Specifically in regards to the Middle East – although it has rarely featured to any serious extent in the televised debates, and campaign messaging across the board, the situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate.

The human toll is impossible to fully grasp. According to Save the Children, more than 20,000 children are now lost, detained, or missing under rubble, separated from parents and families who have been repeatedly displaced having lost their homes to Israeli bombs. As you read this, many are scrambling through rubble to find the bodies of their loved ones. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles has said that the delivery of humanitarian aid is now “almost impossible”.

Inspections of the many mass graves in the tiny strip of land have revealed evidence of torture as well as death. It is impossible to do justice to the variety and scale of the atrocities committed daily.

But perhaps the words of Arwa Damon, a CNN correspondent who has covered the worst war zones in the Middle East, goes some way to illustrating the dystopian nightmare in Gaza: “I saw the death of the human soul.”

READ MORE: Keir Starmer ends silence on ICC arrest warrant request for Benjamin Netanyahu

What is happening there is not just morally unconscionable. It has sent a wrecking ball through the already tattered remnants of international legal framework, and the so-called “rules-based order”.

Israel and its Western accomplices stand in direct contravention of the International Court of Justice provisions. Rafah, meant to be a “red line” for the US, is nothing of the sort. That, it turns out, doesn’t exist.

The UN Security Council is ignored, and the International Criminal Court is to be sanctioned by the US on a bi-partisan basis for having the temerity to hold Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant to account through the issuing of applications for arrest warrants for war crimes.

That’s before you even get to the world’s aid, health, human rights and humanitarian institutions which are pleading for open crossings in a bid to prevent the man-made famine which is already gripping the Palestinian people. What is happening in Gaza opens the floodgates across the world: it is a question of global security.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping the assault on Gaza going

Some have chosen to psychologically compartmentalise this horror. In truth, to properly analyse the events in Gaza is to unravel a whole worldview: that the enlightened West acts in the interests of rights, freedom and democracy; that it respects international institutions and the rule of law. It is ideologically shattering.

But performative ignorance and wishful thinking will not hold as the crisis continues, and escalates. Having lost global support, and without a strategy beyond mass destruction and the idea of establishing large-scale settlements in Gaza through ethnic cleansing, the Israeli state is looking northwards and to the expansion of military offensives into Lebanon.

As those of us who have been campaigning for a ceasefire in Gaza have warned, this demand is and was also about preventing the spread of a wider war.

As the BBC’s Lucy Williamson, reporting from the Israel-Lebanon border, writes: “A ceasefire there [Gaza] would help calm tensions in the north too, but Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is keeping both conflicts going, mortgaged by his promise to far-right government allies to destroy Hamas before ending the Gaza War.”

READ MORE: At least 39 people killed in Israeli strikes across northern Gaza, officials say

In recent days the Israeli military said in a statement that it has approved plans to mount a ground assault across Israel’s northern border: “As part of the situational assessment, operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon were approved and validated, and decisions were taken on the continuation of increasing the readiness of troops in the field.”

While this would be a disastrous policy, the evidence tells us that doesn’t make it any less plausible.

Indeed, the logic of escalation is hardwired into Netanyahu’s approach. This, and many other related questions, will be posed to Starmer almost immediately. Of course, he will look to parrot the White House line as a default.

But that won’t be easy, as Tony Blair found out, and key fissures around this axis will open up major strategic problems for the new government. Especially when it is confronted by a combination of popular demonstration, and criticism from the mainstream of the charity and aid sector, UN agencies, legal scholars, international courts and so forth.

The domestic issues are mountainous: the economy; declining living standards; social instability; low levels of trust in official politics. But the foreign policy front will not simply be a distant appendage to this landscape which can be annexed off. It will be central to the next period of governance in the UK.

This era is historically pivotal as to the political, economic and military structure of the Middle East, and to Western interests in the region.

That may have eluded the supine election debate.

But the cold reality of things will hit the day after the votes have been counted. And because the Labour leadership are operating not out of moral or political principle, but in an effort to align with the United States, it will open a can of worms that they are ill-equipped to navigate.