UK continues to provision Israel’s F-35 fighter aircraft despite finding Israel at clear risk of breaking international law

The UK Government, in a welcome development, has acknowledged a clear risk that UK arms exports to Israel might be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law (IHL). This has led to a decision to suspend around 30 of the 350 currently extant licences for exports to Israel. This decision is long overdue – in January, the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel could be committing genocide in Gaza. However, the Government continues to allow the most problematic of UK arms exports, components for F-35 fighter aircraft, which have been at the heart of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. Without those components, the F-35s would not fly. 
 
The UK has clearly been wrestling with this decision for some time, ultimately finding it impossible to ignore the wealth of credible reports that Israel’s conduct in Gaza has repeatedly been in breach of international law. This admission – by one of the world’s major exporters and one which has long resisted making such a designation – may well influence decision-making by authorities elsewhere. And yet those exports from the UK most likely to be used to commit or facilitate IHL violations – components for the F-35, used extensively in Gaza – will be able to continue unimpeded.  
 
A simple removal of the word “Israel” from one paragraph of a single open general licence would have been enough to stop this traffic. The Government, however, has given itself an explicit ‘carve out’ for these exports, as long as they do not go directly to Israel, but instead go through a third party. Most F-35 components from the UK to Israel already make their way there indirectly; in the future, it will be trivial to reroute any exports that might have previously been shipped direct via another country instead. The Government has thereby designed a loophole big enough to fly fighter aircraft through.

The Government has made great play of its commitment to IHL in all of this, insisting its decision is based on international obligations that it must respect and arguing that other issues were irrelevant to the decision. This assertion does not stand up to scrutiny: the elephant in this room is the UK’s fear that applying IHL to the F-35 programme will have negative implications for its relationship with the US such that it will be viewed as an unreliable military and security partner, a concern that is dominating government thinking on what it can and cannot to export to Israel.
 
The UK Government will no doubt continue to claim that it has made a principled decision. But, by explicitly choosing to exempt the export of exactly those arms most likely to be used to break international law, it finds itself right back where it started: preaching the gospel of responsibility while practising the politics of cynicism and hypocrisy.