Former British PM Johnson dismisses UK calls for arms embargo on Israel as ‘insane’

Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson slams recent calls for an arm embargo on Israel by British lawmakers and former Supreme Court justices as “insane,” in a column in The Daily Mail.

“It’s not the hypocrisy I mind. It’s the implication: that good, clever, kindly people in this country are actually willing to take away, from Israel, its means of defending its citizens against Hamas,” he writes, adding that the Palestinian terror group actively uses “the death and suffering of their own citizens, maximizing their pain and grief so as to rally international opinion against Israel — and we are falling for it.”

In a video accompanying the Daily Mail column, Johnson says that while he is “appalled” by the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza amid the ongoing war, but doesn’t believe it should “end in a victory for Hamas.”

Historically a strong proponent for Israel and for the UK Jewish community, Johnson describes as “contagion” the claim that the UK government is obligated under international law to impose an arms embargo on Israel because of alleged war crimes during its ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.

He also singles out British foreign minister David Cameron to put a stop to any government involvement in the push for an arms embargo.

“If you want evidence of government madness, it appears that Foreign Office lawyers are busily canvassing the idea — which has not, as far as I can tell, yet been rejected by the Foreign Secretary himself. He seems to have gone into a kind of purdah on the subject,” Johnson writes.

Purdah is a religious practice of female seclusion in Muslim and Hindu communities, but the term is also used in the UK for the period between the announcement of an election and the formation of a new government. During that period civil servants are prevented from making moves that could be interpreted as politically motivated.

“We are being asked to shun the Israelis, to mount a total moral repudiation of Israel — when that country has only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since World War II; and when 130 hostages, including, for heaven’s sake, a baby, are being kept in dungeons in Gaza by their jihadi captors; and when the release of those hostages, it cannot be stated too often, would mean the immediate withdrawal of the Israeli Defense Forces and the end of the conflict,” he adds.

Johnson, who resigned as British prime minister in July 2022, visited Israel in November last year and toured southern Israeli border towns devastated by Hamas’s October 7 massacre.