London, United Kingdom — Visiting Tel Aviv in mid-October, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stood next to his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, who had launched a devastating war on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel. “We want you to win,” Sunak told Netanyahu before the cameras.
More than two months later, the United Kingdom’s support for Israel’s war has remained largely unqualified, even as Israeli bombs and artillery firing have killed more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 8,000 children.
But whatever a “win” might look like for Israel, Sunak’s Conservative Party and the opposition Labour Party, whose leader Keir Starmer has also backed Netanyahu’s war, have both lost voters like Ala Sirriyeh, a senior lecturer in sociology at Lancaster University.
“It has shown very starkly who they are prepared to throw under the bus to get elected, whose welfare matters and whose does not,” she told media. “As a Palestinian, I feel completely alienated from the major political parties [in the UK] and will not be voting for either of them in the near future.”
She is not alone. As Israel continues to bomb Palestinians in Gaza, a coalition of political groups, worker’s unions, students, healthcare professionals, journalists, writers, and common people from all walks of life have been organising in the UK, urging their political leadership to call for a ceasefire. The protesters, day in and day out have occupied public spaces and weapons factories and marched across city centres and university campuses. Thousands of people have signed petitions calling for a ceasefire.
Yet, as leaders across both major parties have stayed firm in their support for Israel, they face a particular crisis of credibility among British Muslims, who constitute 6.7 percent of the population and traditionally largely vote in support of the Labour Party.
“It is deeply distressing to see these calls for a ceasefire being ignored or shut down,” Sirriyeh said.
In a survey involving 30,000 Muslim participants conducted in late October by the Muslim Census, an organisation based in the UK, only 5 percent of the respondents said they would vote for Labour in the next general elections. That is much lower compared with 71 percent of British Muslims who voted for the party in 2019. The Conservative Party, which drew 9 percent of the Muslim vote in 2019, would get less than 1 percent of the votes of those sampled in that survey.
In another survey of 1,032 Muslims across the UK, more than two-thirds expressed dissatisfaction with the British government’s response to the Israeli assault on Gaza. Nearly half of the respondents conveyed similar sentiments regarding Starmer’s approach to the crisis, though a majority still backed the Labour Party.
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