Labour’s support for the mission in Libya marks an important turning point. By backing the government, we have shown that we are, once again, willing to accept our responsibility to intervene, and that the years of damaging infighting over the Iraq war are finally drawing to close. By pointing towards our duties of ‘humanity’ and ‘solidarity’, and standing up against the Stop the War Coalition and others who are seeking to depict the Libya operation as an oppressive colonial adventure, Ed Miliband has gone some distance in reclaiming our heritage as an internationalist party that stands up for freedom and democracy.

However, despite this success, it is important to remember that it took us nine long years to refind our feet, nine years throughout which we often failed to challenge attacks on our internationalist values, recently summarised succinctly by the shadow defence secretary as ‘security, peace and liberty’.

Goldstone’s sudden retraction of his most heinous accusation against Israel’s actions in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, and the government’s dishonest response to it, now marks a real opportunity to build on our recent success, and demonstrate that it is Labour that can be counted on to defend our internationalist values. With Hamas’ rocket fire on Israeli civilians intensifying once again, now is the time to draw a red line against anti-Israeli bigotry – bigotry which not only sullies our principles, but also emboldens Hamas in its efforts to terrorise both the Israeli and Palestinian people.

When Goldstone, under the auspices of the discredited Human Rights Council, accused Israel of employing a specific policy of killing civilians in Gaza he did a great disservice – both to a country trying to protect its own people following 9,000 rocket, mortar and missile attacks, and to the Palestinian people, who Goldstone gave Hamas the green light to continue exploiting as human shields. The retired judge opened the floodgates to all those anti-Israel activists who were more than happy to use his UN-sanctioned document to cast Israelis as inhumane, bloodthirsty war criminals.

While in government though, we were rightly unsupportive of the Goldstone Report, we comprehensively failed to challenge the tidal wave of inflammatory language that soon overcame our party following its publication. We didn’t do enough to scrutinise Goldstone’s baseless assumptions, and we didn’t point towards the wealth of publically available evidence of Hamas launching rockets from homes, schools and hospitals and of Israel’s use of text messages, phonecalls, leaflets, precision weapons and ground troops to minimise civilian casualties. And in the midst of this misinformation we, along with our EU partners, chose to add to Israel’s woes by backtracking on a promised upgrade of relations, slowly turning our backs on the only democracy in the Middle East – a particularly short-sighted policy given recent developments in the region.

Now that Richard Goldstone has written in the Washington Post that: ‘civilians were not intentionally targeted [by Israel] as a matter of policy’, and that ‘if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document’, we all have an opportunity and an obligation to raise awareness of his about-face and stem the tide of anti-Israel activism that his report, whether intentionally or not, encouraged in our party, trade unions, courts and beyond. But the government hasn’t taken this opportunity – it has dishonestly asserted that ‘all such allegations must be met with credible and independent investigations’, despite the fact that Israel has already conducted such investigations, and it is precisely the conclusions of those investigations that seemingly encouraged Goldstone to change his mind.

It is now Labour’s job to say that Goldstone made a major mistake by writing a report before waiting for the evidence to arise and, equally importantly, it is our job to highlight the real dangers of employing such kneejerk, inflammatory and hurtful language in a situation as sensitive as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One only needs to look to the jump in antisemitic incidents that has continued since the Gaza conflict to appreciate the damage that such language has had on community cohesion in this country. While Goldstone certainly didn’t invent this language, he did give it the UN’s seal of approval, allowing it to be used by anti-Israel activists for such perverse objectives as securing arrest warrants against Israeli politicians engaged in the peace process.

Israel’s friends who stood steadfast through the misinformation will feel rightly vindicated by Goldstone’s retraction. However, this unexpected victory will be hollow if it continues to receive little coverage and acknowledgment and, therefore, fails to result in a realignment of our language towards Israel and the conflict. Only by standing by our internationalist values, and against the government’s foreign policy weaknesses, will Labour create the space for supporting Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers, and close down that space where outbursts of hatred have become dangerously acceptable. 

Photo: United Nations Information Service – Geneva