Although Keir Starmer going out to bat for the genocidal Netanyahu regime (and giving it feminine pronouns) is very much the established norm, on some level I'm puzzled by his decision today to double down on David Lammy's insistence that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Ultimately this will not remain a matter of interpretation for self-interested politicians - the question of whether genocide has occurred will be adjudicated in international courts and also by academics. When a legal and academic consensus of genocide is established, and I do think that's now a question of 'when' rather than 'if', Starmer will clearly be seen to have been catastrophically on the wrong side of history, and that's bound to be detrimental to his legacy. It really is odd that he's not leaving himself a bit of wiggle-room.
In one specific sense, of course, Lammy was just indisputably wrong and there should have been no great difficulty in publicly admitting that. He suggested that not enough Palestinians had been killed for it to be genocide, and using that word would trivialise 'real' genocides like the Holocaust in which millions died. However, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe after the Holocaust was the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which "only" 8000 people died. That's less than a fifth of the minimum death toll in Gaza (likely to be a massive underestimate) and is a little over 0.1% of the number killed in the Holocaust. Ultimately defining genocide isn't a numbers game, it's about the nature and characteristics of the act.
In the long run, the UK government's good relations with Netanyahu could end up looking as poorly judged as having good relations with Hitler - the only real difference between the two leaders' actions is one of scale. It's interesting that one of the reasons given for scepticism over the claims that Donald Trump is a fascist is that true fascist governments of the past have tended to be violently expansionist. Well, Trump may not tick that box (notwithstanding his fury when Denmark refused to sell him Greenland) but Netanyahu certainly does - he's made no secret of the fact that he's going all-out for annexation of what both he and Bill Clinton call "Judea and Samaria", ie. the sovereign Palestinian territory of the West Bank. The Israeli government also meets a number of the other criteria for fascism, notably militarism, suppression of opposition and a belief in racial supremacy.
An authentic fascist leader is committing an authentic genocide in plain sight in the year 2024 - and yet he remains the West's number one buddy. That's going to have long-term consequences for leaders like Starmer, probably well beyond what most people can imagine right now.