Labour Party scandal shows how support for Israel is plummeting on both sides of the Atlantic

The news from Britain is that Keir Starmer’s tenure as prime minister is in jeopardy following Labour losses in recent local elections. He took a big hit when Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigned Thursday so as to challenge Starmer for party leadership.  

What’s not in the headlines is that in private texts, Streeting has called for sanctions against Israel as a “pariah” state committing “war crimes.” 

In texts that he was forced to release earlier this year in an Epstein-related scandal, Streeting cited Israel’s “calculated brutality against women and children” and wrote: “This is rogue state behaviour. Let them pay the price as pariahs with sanctions applied to the state.”  

Streeting is on the center-right– a follower of Tony Blair. But his text shows how much the Labour base has shifted due to Gaza. If Labour doesn’t stand up for Palestine, Streeting warned last year, its party conference would be “a sea of Palestinian flags and the moderates will be waving them.” 

Another politician now contending for Labour leadership is Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, whom Starmer blocked from Parliament in part due to his call for a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023. You remember those days – when wanton massacres of civilians had begun, and Biden and Starmer kept giving Israel more rope.  

Labour’s struggle parallels the struggle inside the Democratic Party in the U.S., between its establishment and insurgent wings, and also reveals the declining power of the Israel lobby. 

Indeed, Starmer’s political crisis was brought on in part by his own fervent support for Israel.

The scandal that hurt Starmer most in recent months involves Jeffrey Epstein. Just eight months after he’d appointed Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the U.S., Starmer fired Mandelson when the Epstein emails revealed the ambassador had had a chummy relationship to the convicted sex offender, to the point that Mandelson shared internal government decisions with Epstein in 2010.  Mandelson was later arrested and is being investigated for these actions. 

As the scandal unfolded, it was revealed that Mandelson had been rushed into his job as ambassador in February 2025 despite his having failed a vetting process. The Starmer government has been pounded by the question– Why was it so important to get Mandelson into the job? 

The obvious answer is that Starmer, who took office in the summer of 2024, was eager to prove his Israel bona fides, in contrast to Labour’s last leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose unapologetic support for Palestine caused Labour to banish him as allegedly antisemitic, in 2020. Mandelson was a longtime defender of Israel inside the Labour ranks. A corporate lobbyist who had served as a minister in the Tony Blair government, Mandelson bragged that he worked “every day” to undermine the Labour Party when Corbyn was leader. 

In his few months in office, Mandelson did his utmost to back Israel during the Gaza genocide. Texts published by Streeting (after Mandelson was disgraced) show that during a time of full revolt by the Labour base over Gaza, Mandelson was urging the government not to support the establishment of a Palestinian state as France had done. Starmer duly opposed a Palestinian state last July in a speech that echoed points Mandelson made in the Streeter texts. 

Then, after Mandelson resigned in September 2025, Starmer reversed his position on a Palestinian state. 

Starmer’s former chief of staff was also a casualty of the scandal. Morgan McSweeney was a Mandelson ally who had been an architect of efforts to purge the party of Corbyn allies and had pushed Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador. Oh, and by the way, he spent “several months” on a kibbutz in Israel as a young man. 

Mandelson’s and McSweeney’s appointments support my theory of the Israel lobby – it is an operator that transcends conventional political divisions, and any ambitious politician in the U.S. or Britain has to come to terms with the lobby if they want to get anywhere. 

Wes Streeting could become the next Labour prime minister, and his texts to Mandelson last summer on the Palestine question were filled with anger toward Israel. 

“Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes. Their government talks the language of ethnic cleansing and I have met with our own medics out there who describe the most chilling and distressing scenes of calculated brutality against women and children.”

While attesting that he has “never been a shrinking violent on Israel. I’ve supported LFI [an Israel lobby group inside the Labour Party] for over 20 years,” Streeting said the pro-Palestine politics are too powerful to resist. 

“We need to be leading the charge on this. The alternative is being dragged there with enormous damage to Keir, the govt and the party.”

Labour is now experiencing that damage. The big winners in last week’s local elections were the right-wing Reform party, but also the Green Party, which supports BDS. 

The Labour crisis is the mirror image of the ongoing battle over Israel inside the Democratic Party in the U.S. 

The party’s private autopsy of Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump in the 2024 election is said to conclude that she lost significant numbers of votes because of the Biden administration’s reflexive support for Israel throughout the Gaza genocide. Today, many Democratic politicians dare to call for an end to military aid to Israel. Likely presidential candidate Gavin Newsom, a moderate, accused Israel of apartheid, though just as quickly the California governor pulled it back, in evident concern for donors. 

For years, the Israel lobby has had sway over the party establishment. Obama had to jump the same hurdles that Starmer did with his Mandelson nod. 

Jimmy Carter was exiled from the Democratic Party after writing his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid in 2006. He was banished from any real role at the conventions. 

As President-elect in 2008, Obama was regarded with suspicion by the lobby and sought to prove his bona fides by reaching out to Malcolm Hoenlein, then the leader of a large Israel lobby group, to call Hillary Clinton to see if she’d be open to serving as secretary of state. “Obama seemed to understand that he needed someone to lend him credibility with the Israeli government and its American defenders, a tough friend of Israel,” the New York Times said, in reporting that morsel. 

Then, when she prepared to run for president in 2015, Clinton wrote a letter to a leading Israel lobbyist and donor condemning the BDS movement, and sought to distance herself from the Obama administration’s mildly critical stance on Israeli settlements. 

Gaza has altered these politics forever. The next generation is lost to Israel. And the shock waves are hitting British politics now. 

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