On Monday, as Israelis were busy burying their dead, the British foreign secretary David Lammy announced that his country is suspending 30 of 350 licenses for the export of arms to Israel, in order to prevent possible violations of international humanitarian law. It’s worth noting that, according to the UK’s own offficial assessments, the IDF hasn’t broken any such laws. Melanie Phillips comments:

The defense secretary, John Healey, said the UK remained “a staunch ally of Israel” but that the British government had a “duty to the rule of law.” But Israel isn’t breaking any law. Nor does the British government say it is. It says merely there’s a “serious risk” that it might.

But there’s no evidence to back that either. It’s an entirely tendentious assertion by the Foreign Office, which has drawn overwhelmingly on malicious falsehoods produced by the Hamas-linked UN and NGOs that lie reflexively about Israel as part of a global strategy to bring about its destruction.

The impact on Israel’s military capabilities will indeed be minimal. Israel buys relatively few weapons from Britain, which buys far more weapons from Israel. Given the incalculable benefits Britain also derives from Israeli intelligence and military expertise—the very expertise the British government has now besmirched by recycling Hamas-derived lies and distortions—Britain has far more to lose than Israel from a cooling of this relationship.

The arms embargo is but the latest in a series of deeply hostile moves against Israel by the new Labor government.

For instance: as Phillips details, another government minister recently bragged about getting preferential treatment at an emergency room because a doctor recognized her and remembered her anti-Israel positions.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.