Burnham must establish an inquiry into Britain’s role in the Gaza genocide
Delaying scrutiny will not make questions about UK complicity in Gaza disappear.
Professor in the school of law at Queen Mary University of London and is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.
History does not really repeat itself, but, as the saying frequently attributed to Mark Twain goes, it often rhymes. Take, for example, Britain’s involvement in the Middle East since the turn of the century. It took six years before the British government established an independent committee of Privy Counsellors to examine the United Kingdom’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war, and an additional seven years before Sir John Chilcot and other members of the inquiry committee published their damning findings that former Prime Minister Tony Blair had misled the public and his own government.
The Inquiry found that the UK chose to join the invasion before peaceful options had been exhausted, that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, pose an imminent threat and that Blair had deliberately exaggerated the danger and then promised former United States President George Bush: “I will be with you, whatever.” It also found that Britain’s intelligence agencies had produced “flawed information”, that Blair had ignored warnings about what would happen in Iraq after the invasion, and that the government had not tried hard enough to keep a tally of Iraqi civilian casualties, which, according to Iraq Body Count, amounts to between 187,499 and 211,046 deaths.
The two days of hearings were among the most difficult in my life, given the emotional toll of listening to so many horrific testimonies. In addition to testimony after testimony describing the extent of the British government’s complicity in the mass murder and destruction, we also heard from a whistleblower about the culture of deception – to cover up the government’s wrongdoings – that had taken over the corridors of power. In the subsequent months, we analysed the findings and concluded that Britain had played a vital role in Israeli military operations in Gaza, including but not limited to: