On 29 January 2025, David Lammy met with the Board of Deputies of British Jews in his then-role as foreign secretary. The purpose of the meeting was:
to understand the sentiment in the UK Jewish community in relation to the FCDO’s policy to the conflict in Israel/Gaza.
This is a perfectly legitimate reason for a meeting, especially as the ongoing genocide is being directed by politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu who frequently conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The problem is there’s no evidence of Lammy conducting a similar meeting with British Muslim or Christian groups – the majority / significant minority groups in Palestine.
British sentiment?
We noticed Lammy’s Board of Deputies meeting in the January to March 2025 tranche of ministerial meetings for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). The listing for it reads as follows:
The FCDO refer to it as “the conflict in Israel/Gaza”; at the time of the meeting, we were referring to it as a ‘genocide’ in line with groups like Amnesty International, who made their official declaration of genocide in December 2024. As of today’s date, the UK has still not accepted that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, but the UN has.
In the January to March tranche of ministerial meetings, there are other meetings which relate to ‘Israel/Gaza’, but there isn’t a comparable meeting with British Muslim / Christian representatives. The same is true of the October to December 2024 tranche of ministerial meetings.
In the July to September 2024 tranche, Lammy held the following meeting with ‘British Jewish Community Leaders’:
Two days later, he held this meeting with the chief rabbi:
Once again, there are no comparable meetings between Lammy and representatives of the UK’s Muslim or Christian communities. There have been several months since March, though, and Lammy could have conducted multiple meetings before being shunted into the deputy leadership position. You’d think this would be easy to confirm, right?
Unfortunately, you’d think wrong.
Muslim groups Stonewalled by Lammy
We sent a Freedom of Information request (FOI) asking for details on the meetings conducted by David Lammy, Catherine West, and Raymond Collins – the three ministers who left the FCDO in September. We suggested it was in the public interest to scrutinise their engagements now that they’ve left office. The FCDO denied our FOI on the grounds that they do not need to publish meetings in advance of the publication schedule.
As we only needed to know if Lammy had conducted a comparable meeting, we contacted the FCDO press office. Noting that this matter was very much in the public interest given the UN’s verdict that Israel is committing genocide, we asked if Lammy had conducted any meetings with Muslim / Christian leaders in the April to September window.
While the FCDO did ask what our deadline was, the deadline has now passed, and we haven’t heard from them.
One group we did hear from was the Muslim Council of Britain, who we believed would be seen as an appropriate representative group for ‘British Muslim sentiment’. When asked if they had conducted a meeting with Lammy, Mustafa Al-Dabbagh (assistant secretary general) told us:
We did not hold such a meeting, nor where we approached for one by Mr. Lammy or his team.
Two tier politics
If Lammy did not conduct comparable meetings with Muslim and Christian representatives, this suggests that the FCDO adopted a one-sided approach to ‘community sentiment’. Lammy would potentially point to a rise in antisemitic incidents as his reason for meeting with Jewish groups, but there’s been a similar increase in Islamophobia over the same period. This is what Middle East Monitor wrote in February 2025 – the month before Lammy’s meeting with the Board of Deputies:
Anti-Muslim hate crimes and incidents in the United Kingdom reached a record high in 2024 amid Israel’s offensive in Gaza, a report has revealed.
According to Tel MAMA, an organisation which monitors hate and assaults on Muslims within the UK, data that it compiled showed that 5,837 anti-Muslim hate cases took place last year, in comparison to 3,767 cases in 2023 and 2,201 the year before that.
With those incidents having been both online and in person, the increase marked a sharp rise of 165 per cent within only two years.
The article goes on:
In a statement, the organisation attributed the drastic increase to Israel’s 15-month-long offensive in the Gaza Strip, littered with numerous war crimes, human rights violations and the breaking of international law.
“The Middle East conflict super-fuelled online anti-Muslim hate,” Tell MAMA stated, asserting that “the Israel and Gaza War, the [UK’s] Southport murders and riots… created a surge in anti-Muslim hate cases.”
It should be noted that the Board of Deputies of British Jews have a highly politicised stance on Israel’s genocide. As noted by Alex Nunns, this is an intervention they made in January, two months before the meeting with Lammy:
Palestinian historian Zachary Foster, meanwhile, criticised the group for its ultra-hardline stance:
Most recently, the Board of Deputies has criticised the UK government for recognising the Palestinian state:
Panic
Over the past few months, there’s been a notable sense of panic from politicians and institutions. Perhaps they expected Israel to step back instead of inflicting a man-made famine and levelling what remained of Gaza.
Israel hasn’t stepped back, of course, and now that the UN agrees it’s a genocide, people are scrambling to protect their reputations.
As of right now, refusing to answer our questions comes across like the FCDO trying to save itself another embarrassment – no different from Lammy tweeting the following even as we continued to support the Israeli military:
Of course, if Lammy did hold comparable meetings, we’re eager to hear about them.
Our emails remain open.
Featured image via Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (Wikimedia)
By Willem Moore
This post was originally published on Canary.
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