Hundreds rally against government’s partial suspension of arms exports to Israel

A crowd of around 200 people gathered outside the Foreign Office on Tuesday evening for a defiant rally against the government’s decision to suspend 30 arms export licences to Israel.

Waving Israeli, British and flags reflecting pre-revolutionary Iran, the crowd chanted “shame!” and booed mentions of Foreign Secretary David Lammy and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who were accused of “betraying Israel”, against warnings that it was not just Israel under threat, but the whole Western world.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck, senior rabbi of the S&P movement, said: “What is at stake here is not just the survival of Israel. This is about everything that we hold dear and cherish in the West, about life and liberty. We are dealing with a death cult of jihadists who are eager to die, who are eager for their children to die, and who will wilfully, gleefully, give up their lives in order to destroy everything. If this country, this government, is not aware of that, there are much greater problems than they deem that they have.

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“The withholding of arms to Israel is not just a punch in the gut to Israel, and to the Jewish people. It is an opening of their arms to Hamas, to the Islamic state, and all the jihadist groups. It has been said many times: when they tell you what they aim to do, believe them”. And Rabbi Dweck had a special message for the prime minister: “Sir Keir, don’t be taken hostage by Hamas”.

Featured speakers included Vladimir Bermant, a businessman who is the founder of the Military Experts Panel, just returned from taking a group of generals from Britain and five other Nato countries to Israel. He said the group had surveyed the IDF’s rules of engagement — “and concluded that they are ‘best in class’”.

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The group had had briefings from senior IDF officers and had visited Gaza to see for themselves the “challenging operating environment” for the Israeli forces. Bermant quoted the Conservative politician and former Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, who had declared the decision to suspend 30 arms export licences was political, rather than based on a legal framework.

“The decision was political and politicised. Kemi knows the claim of legal justification was only an excuse. We say, ‘reverse the arms embargo now!”

Other speakers included investigative researcher David Collier and writers Jonathan Sacerdoti and Nicole Lampert. A last-minute addition to the line-up was the British-Iranian dissident known as Lily Moo, a devoted friend of Israel, who urged the crowd to put pressure on the government to proscribe the Iranian Islamic Revolution Guard Corps. The rally took place next to the Whitehall encampment of the Iranian dissident Vahid Beheshti, who has been campaigning for proscription of the IRGC for months.

The event, which concluded in a heavy downpour to suit the crowd’s mood, was organised by the Stop the Hate group in conjunction with the 7/10 Human Chain project.