When Keir Starmer assumed the British premiership on July 5, it was with the promise of restoring a more moderate Labor party after the era during which it was led by the anti-Israel radical Jeremy Corbyn. And while there is in fact much less anti-Semitism coming out of the mouths of Labor MPs these days, Stephen Pollard is so far not impressed with Starmer’s moderation. His foreign secretary, David Lammy, has already decided to restore funding to UNRWA (the organization for the support of the descendants of Palestinian refugees) despite the participation of its members in the October 7 attacks; he has also banned some arm sales to Israel. Pollard writes:

Britain is now only a theoretical ally of Israel. In practical terms, it is doing the bidding of those driven by hostility to the Jewish state. As I write in late July, the UK has just abandoned the previous government’s legal attempts (in coordination with Germany) to block the International Criminal Court’s arrest-warrant proceedings against Benjamin Netanyahu. The British government is now in effect endorsing the court’s decision to pursue the Israeli prime minister for war crimes in Gaza.

Such moves, Pollard observes, won’t really have much direct effect on Israel. Rather, he argues, they are “designed to appease domestic voters who are driven by an obsession with hatred of Israel.” And those voters have become a more significant, and better organized, constituency than ever:

With 4 million Muslims in England and Wales (6.5 percent of the population), the Muslim vote has always mattered in Britain. But until now it has never acted as a bloc or split away from the mainstream to support candidates who use intentionally divisive campaigns to appeal almost entirely—and only—to Muslims. For the first time in Britain (other than in the unique circumstances of Northern Ireland), sectarian voting became a significant driver of electoral fortunes in July, with four Muslim independent candidates who ran on a so-called pro-Gaza ticket winning, and a fifth, the former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn (who was expelled from the party), who had a similar platform.

Labor lost these four seats to Muslim independents and came very close to losing many more—the near-losers included Wes Streeting and Shabana Mahmood, who are both now Cabinet ministers. In an election that saw Labor win one of its biggest-ever majorities, its overall vote total actually fell by more than 14 percent in those constituencies with a Muslim population of more than 15 percent.

To hold on to those districts, Labor will have to try to win back the defectors. And it’s easy to see how:

A poll before the election for the Henry Jackson Society showed that one in four British Muslims cited the Israel/Palestine conflict as their most important election issue, compared with just 3 percent of the public. Almost half said that Jews have too much power over UK government policy. The 2024 election showed how these attitudes are moving into the political mainstream with the rise of a newly cohesive Muslim bloc vote.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].