Labour may yet try to woo back voters alienated by its failure to speak out over mass slaughter – but it’s unlikely to succeed

It’s easy to determine the morality of a political party by examining who is welcome and who is not. In Keir Starmer’s Labour, apologists for war crimes rise to the top, while opponents of mass slaughter face the boot. This is not hyperbole. When Israel’s slaughter of Gaza began, Starmer publicly declared that Israel had the right to cut off water and electricity. As a human rights lawyer – who previously argued at the international court of justice (ICJ) that the 1991 Serbian siege of Vukovar constituted genocide – there was no excuse: article 33 of the Geneva conventions, for a start, prohibits collective punishment. Facing an immediate and merited backlash, he sought to claim he had not said what he, in fact, had. “I was saying Israel had the right to self-defence,” he explained. “When I said ‘that right’, it was that right to self-defence. I was not saying Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines – on the contrary.”

Labour MP Kate Osamor, on the other hand, was suspended after referring to Israel’s onslaught as a genocide. She did so on the same day that the world’s highest court recognised the potential for a finding of genocide and ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. Note that Osamor is left wing, and one of Labour’s few black female MPs: two others have already been sent packing.

Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.