Peter Oborne's Complicit: A haunting exposé of Britain's moral abdication in the face of Gaza's suffering

Thirteen British citizens were aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla that embarked for Gaza’s shores in September 2025, laden with humanitarian aid to break the siege and distribute it to a starving population.

Like the other flotillas before them, these ships were intercepted by the Israeli navy, which attacked them with water cannons and stun grenades and then took them captive.

The abducted activists, including several British citizens, were transferred to Ketziot Prison, a notorious site deep in the Negev desert.

Israel’s largest detention facility, Ketziot, is known for housing high-security Palestinian prisoners and for systemic human rights violations documented in numerous human rights reports, including even the US Department of State’s 2023 report on Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

Most of the abducted members of the flotilla were returned to their home countries within days following pressure from their home governments.

British and US abductees languished longer inside the Israeli prison because their governments refused to take appropriate action to free their citizens.

When asked what the UK government was doing to free the flotilla crew, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated that it was “a matter for the Israeli government.”

This astonishing abdication of UK responsibility for its own citizens taken captive by Israel in international waters is part of the pattern that is laid out in meticulous detail by British journalist and broadcaster Peter Oborne in his ground-breaking new book Complicit: Britain's Role in the Destruction of Gaza. Complicit is the latest in OR Book’s impressive and rapidly growing list of books on Palestine.

Oborne is himself a veteran journalist who has authored books on Boris Johnson, Alastair Campbell, and, most recently, Western misunderstandings of Islam — so hardly anyone could be better suited than him to conduct a forensic investigation of UK complicity in the Gaza genocide.

Enabling slaughter

Broadly, Oborne aims to uncover why and how the British political elite “enabled the criminal slaughter of countless innocent Palestinians.” It is a story that must be told, and one which has ramifications well beyond Gaza.

Over the course of Complicit, Oborne documents how the Conservative Party laid the foundations for British complicity.

Yet the majority of chapters are spent examining the Labour Party’s steady support for the Gaza genocide. There is a good reason for this focus: Labour has been the ruling party for the majority of Israel’s post-October 7 aggression.

Inevitably, Oborne’s critique centres on Keir Starmer, including his political formation, the alliances he has fostered while in power, and the hypocrisies Starmer has engaged in as a former human rights lawyer.

Starmer’s morally questionable rise to power, which involved many efforts to censor and suppress Israel-critical speech, is the subject of another essential book released this month by the same publisher, Paul Holden’s The Fraud.

While the Gaza genocide did not begin under Starmer’s watch, he expressed his unreserved support for Israel’s starvation tactics from the very beginning.

Perhaps most criminally, Starmer and his party have used complicity in genocide as a means of ascending to power.

Oborne dedicates an entire chapter to examining Starmer’s political formation. Among the most compelling and original parts of the book is Oborne's point-by-point refutation of Starmer’s Gaza genocide denialism, using as his main text the arguments Starmer presented in 2014 to the International Court of Justice on behalf of Croatia in its case against Serbia for genocide.

A mere two days after Defence Minister Yoav Gallant had declared Israel’s intention to cut off all food, water, and electricity to Gaza and described the people living there as “human animals,” then-Labour-leader and soon-to-be Prime Minister Starmer was asked by journalist Nick Ferrari whether Israel’s “siege is appropriate? Cutting off water? Cutting off power?”

To this, Starmer simply said that Israel “has that right.”

It was a revealing moment, one that exposed the full scope of the Labour Party's unconditional support for Israel’s genocide and which accurately presaged the complicity of the UK government in enabling forced starvation in Gaza.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has highlighted Starmer's statement as an example of “Genocide Under the Guise of Diplomatic and Political Actions.”

As Israel’s aggression in Gaza persisted, ceasefires were broken and countless red lines were crossed. Hospitals were bombed, civilians in so-called safe zones were targeted, and the world witnessed the largest military assault against journalists and healthcare workers in recorded history.

Gradually, UK officials began to shift their tone when asked about Israel’s actions. But even as the tone shifted and the UK formally began calling for a ceasefire in the summer of 2024, the government’s actions remained largely unchanged.

What did change in the summer of 2025 was the UK's policies regarding protests against the Gaza genocide. In July 2025, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper introduced a motion to Parliament to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The extraordinarily chilling effect of this proscription continues to be felt, with thousands of peaceful protesters arrested merely for expressing support for direct action aiming to stop the Israeli genocide.

The UK government has since stepped up its repression of Palestine solidarity further, even threatening to ban pro-Palestine chants at protests.

Since Oborne’s book went to press in August, he was unable to capture the full scale of the repression of pro-Palestine speech within the UK, which is an essential aspect of UK complicity in the Gaza genocide.

Most readers of Oborne’s detailed account will be left with a measure of despair. No matter how naïve their hope may seem in retrospect, many Labour voters expected that their party would do more than the Conservatives to stop the genocide once they were the party of government. They were proven wrong.

Just as Joe Biden’s legacy as “genocide Joe” has made it impossible for supporters of justice in Palestine to take the Democratic Party seriously as the party of social justice, so has the perception of Labour as a party that can accommodate leftist anti-war positions been destroyed forever.

Change is on the horizon

However, change is on the horizon. A new politics is being formed from the ruins of an establishment complicit in genocide.

On 2 September 2025, Jewish eco-populist Zack Polanski was elected leader of the Green Party on a platform that recognised Israel as the genocidal state that it is.

Since Polanski’s landslide election, membership in the Green Party has doubled, ushering in a new era for the first political party in the UK to condemn Israel’s aggression in Gaza as a genocide and to call for a full arms embargo against Israel.

Arguably, the Green Party’s rise to prominence is due to its outspoken condemnation of the genocide, a position that is reflected in the motion to proscribe the IDF as a terrorist group, which was passed at the 2025 party conference.

Such resounding political victories for the anti-Zionist left demonstrate that the will of the British people has been badly betrayed by the decisions of both the Conservative and the Labour governments to continue British participation in an arms trade that has resulted in Gaza’s annihilation.

In the wake of British complicity, the next step is to ensure that British leaders are never allowed to forget their criminal complicity in genocide.

Their criminal records must be incorporated into the annals of British history and bring about a reckoning every time the story of this genocide is told.

In the years to come, Oborne’s unsparing account of the British role in the Gaza genocide will be a crucial tool in this work of memorialization and accountability.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of several influential works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016), and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). Alongside Malaka Shwaikh, she co-authored Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Gould's articles have appeared in leading publications such as the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and The Nation, and her work has been translated into eleven languages