Rachel Reeves’ Labour Friends of Israel speech: Nothing learnt from the Gaza genocide

An eight-month-old baby girl died on Thursday from exposure to severe cold and storms in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Rahaf Abu Jazar died after rainwater leaked into her family’s tent during overnight storms. 

Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians were similarly at the mercy of Storm Byron as Israel continues to block aid, killing many.

Mortality rates of newborns in Gaza have risen by 75 percent since October 2023, from 27 a month in 2022 to 47 neonatal deaths in September 2025. (By comparison, UK monthly neonatal deaths are 87 - for a population of 70 million, compared to Gaza’s 2.2 million).

Infants are dying due to the ongoing brutal siege and Israel’s refusal to let in essential aid, tents, mobile shelters, medicines and baby formula. A refusal that is part of Israel’s systematic violation of the October ceasefire after two years of genocide.

Meanwhile in London, senior UK cabinet members gathered for an annual Labour Friends of Israel lunch to offer moral support to a country accused of genocide by all major western and Israeli human rights groups. 

After a war that has likely killed more than 100,000 Palestinians, UK ministers and MPs came to show solidarity with the perpetrator, Israel, whose leaders are under warrant of arrest by the International Criminal Court, and whose occupation has been declared illegal by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice.

UK cabinet members gathered to offer moral support to a country accused of genocide by all major western and Israeli human rights groups

Giving the main speech at the pro-Israel event, Chancellor Rachel Reeves declared: “I am a Zionist not in spite of my belief in democracy and freedom and equality, but because of those beliefs.”

It is hard to know where to start with this statement, other than to say Zionism is an ideology that claims self-determination for Jews the world over, on land stolen by force from Palestinians. Equality and freedom, never mind democracy, do not flourish in such conditions.

She described her journey to Zionism, including her first LFI-sponsored trip to Israel in 2005 before she was an MP, followed by several other official tours when she was a Labour MP, where she learnt “the importance of the Jewish homeland and my understanding of the complexities of the conflict”. 

Reeves devoted the first part of her speech to the horrors of the attack of 7 October 2023 and the view that this was a “pogrom” by Hamas to “murder Jews for being Jews”. Before that attack, Gaza was under siege for 16 years, with periodic Israeli assaults that killed thousands, and a peaceful protest campaign in 2018 met with snipers.

More than 20,000 children have been murdered by Israeli forces since October 2023. Each day, more are killed, like two boys looking for firewood last week, shot dead for approaching Israel's so-called yellow line. But Reeves has little to say about this vast horror, other than it has been “hell” for people in Gaza.

Israeli talking points

Listen to Reeves, and this genocide was all down to Hamas using civilians as “human shields to safeguard its arsenal of weapons…to imprison the innocent hostages it sought to trade for killers held in Israeli prisons…resulting in thousands of innocent Palestinian deaths”.

Here she adds further calumny to her apologism, saying that Palestinians in Israeli jails are all killers, rather than victims of an oppressive occupation, which some have resisted through arms, as they are entitled to under international law.

For Reeves, there is no Israeli excuse or justification for mass murder and war crimes that she doesn’t find worth rehashing.

For Reeves, there is no Israeli excuse or justification for mass murder and war crimes that she doesn’t find worth rehashing

This is a chancellor who went on the airwaves in recent weeks to explain why she had dropped the two-child benefit cap that had left hundreds of thousands of children in poverty, rightly saying children should not suffer because they are from large families. Caring for children in the UK is one thing, extending such care to Gaza is another.

The killing of countless Palestinian children is not a new feature of Israel’s occupation: hundreds were killed in the first and second intifadas, in the 2008 assault on Gaza, the 2014 war, when 550 children were murdered, and again in the strikes in 2021.

The UK chancellor said Israel must lift all restrictions on aid into Gaza. But she does not say that the UK will act if this doesn’t happen. 

UK ministers only ever used weak words and performative measures in response to Israeli war crimes and violations. The Labour government recognised the Palestinian state in September, but nothing substantial has changed in terms of UK weapons sales to Israel, diplomatic pressure over violations of the October ceasefire, never mind accountability for verifiable crimes against humanity.

Israel’s genocide continues, just in a slower, quieter way that keeps it out of the headlines. 

For now, thanks to US President Donald Trump’s so-called peace plan, Israel is kept in check just enough to reduce the global pressure that had reached a crescendo in September.

Antisemitism

Reeves spent a lot of the speech talking about rising antisemitism in the UK, saying: “The record increase in antisemitic incidents we have seen since the 7 October attacks is a stain on this country.”

She linked this directly to the idea that antisemitism and criticism of Israel are one and the same, insisting, “that means recognising that hatred of the world’s only Jewish state rests at the core of modern antisemitism”.

This is the key framing of the new antisemitism doctrine, evolved by Israeli strategists as a modern defence against global opposition to Israel’s occupation of Palestine and wars. 

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It was used to bring down former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and to expel many left-wing party members, including many Jewish ones.

Reeves dismisses as a conspiracy theory the idea of a Zionist lobby, despite her own office accepting tens of thousands of pounds from pro-Israel lobbyists, as declared in the parliamentary register of interests. 

She frames the uproar over the pro-genocide chants of Macabee Tel Aviv football ultras and the violence for which they are infamous - leading to them being banned by police from attending a match at Aston Villa in Birmingham - as antisemitism.

Antisemitism has indeed been on the rise since 7 October 2023, with the recent deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester a grave example. There's a self-fulfilling logic to the framing of antisemitism as directly linked to “hatred” of Israel. Antisemitic attackers usually see British Jewish people as representatives of the state of Israel; that false conflation is actively encouraged by Israeli leaders, and is explicitly stated in Reeves’ LFI speech. 

Many British Jews do not support the actions of Israel, and thousands have disavowed Zionism, seeing it as a colonial project that relies on apartheid, occupation, and, now, genocide. Yet these are not the Jewish people whom Reeves was addressing.

She said, quoting late chief rabbi Jonathan Sachs: “A society in which antisemitism thrives is one in which…Disinformation replaces truth…Extremism supplants moderation…Conspiracy theories unseat reason…And hate takes the place of tolerance.”

Whose disinformation?

Israel’s government trades in disinformation, hatred of Muslims, conspiracy theories of the great replacement theory and a war of civilisation against barbarism - these are the malign traits of its propaganda war to deflect attention from its actions, and world outrage at its crimes.

This diehard stance for a vicious apartheid system will likely be a key factor in this government’s downfall

Israel has violated the ceasefire in Gaza more than 700 times since it started on 10 October, killing close to 400 Palestinians.

Meanwhile, it threatens war against Syria, and has committed daily violations of the November 2024 ceasefire with Lebanon, killing hundreds with threats of a major new assault on the war-ravaged country.

Reeves said nothing about Israel’s escalating aggressions for which it pays no price. Instead she spoke glowingly of the normalisation deals of the Trump-backed Abraham Accords, referring to “the new emphasis placed on interfaith dialogue and tolerance by states such as the UAE”. 

The very same “tolerant” UAE dictatorship, a close ally of the British government, that is arming a brutal paramilitary force in Sudan now carrying out massacres of thousands of civilians in Darfur. 

Why deny one genocide, when you can gloss over two.

Rachel Reeves, like her boss Keir Starmer, has been a committed Zionist and Israel apologist for many years. For Labour, this is not a bug but a feature of the party leadership and government. The Gaza genocide has not shifted this one inch. This diehard stance for a vicious apartheid system will likely be a key factor in this government’s downfall.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.