Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Oborne, OR Books, 2025, 360 pages, £11.99
Peter Oborne’s Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza is an impressive work of journalism. It arrives not from the usual suspects on the political left, but from a veteran journalist with roots deep in Tory conservatism, lending a brutal, almost forensic weight to his central charge: that Britain’s political and media establishment became a ‘cross-party cartel’ dedicated to enabling Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza following 7 October 2023.
Oborne meticulously details the breakdown of democratic accountability. He highlights the uniformity of response from the government under Rishi Sunak and the opposition led by Keir Starmer, who famously – and disgracefully – affirmed Israel’s ‘right’ to cut off power and water to Gaza’s besieged population. This alignment, Oborne shows, was total, leaving the Scottish National Party (SNP) as the only ‘substantial parliamentary opposition’ to this deadly policy (p10). The book paints a damning picture of a political class that willingly gave Israel a ‘green light’ with Foreign Secretary David Cameron denying Israeli genocidal intent and aligning Britain to the US position, ‘they sent Netanyahu the message that Britain was fully behind the Gaza slaughter’ (p21).
The book extends its gaze from Westminster’s echo chamber to the Fourth Estate, exposing the deep-seated corruption of British journalism. Oborne highlights the failure of journalists to challenge Israeli officials, regardless of the despicable nature of their language. He recounts the moral panic manufactured around pro-Palestine demonstrations, with commentators calling for the army to be deployed against peaceful marchers (p81). Perhaps most importantly, he chronicles how British media disseminated outright fictions, such as the myths of ‘beheaded babies’, effectively manufacturing consent for Israel’s retaliatory assault (p52). He further reveals the subtle and overt biases at institutions like the BBC, which employed a ‘racist arithmetic’ (p53) in its reporting, and the pernicious influence of powerful lobbying groups like Conservative Friends of Israel, who hosted hustings in Tory leadership elections and never once criticised Israeli policy, but would criticise Zionist British governments if they were not sufficiently pro-Israel (p132-135).
This comprehensive laying bare of the conspiracy against the Palestinian people is what makes the book a vital addition to the anti-war library. However, it is here that the limitations of Oborne’s ideological lens become apparent – a lens forged in a nostalgia for a pre-Thatcherite, supposedly more principled conservatism rooted in ‘Tory Arabism’.
Oborne correctly observes that Britain previously attempted to balance support for Israel with that of its Arab client states like Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, with figures like Alec Douglas-Hume supporting a Palestinian right of return (p102). He charts what he describes as the subsequent shift towards an almost identical position to Washington by the Blair government, ‘supplication to the United States, along with an ever-stronger domestic pro-Israel lobby’ (p103). Yet, this analysis of ‘Arabism’ as a simple ideological preference misses the crucial, material reality of imperialism.
For a publication like this, it is necessary to point out that Britain’s support for Arab states was never a matter of sentiment; those states were vassals of British imperialism, useful in securing access to resources and combating regional anti-imperialist movements. Britain’s foreign policy was not driven by a decline into being an American stooge out of stupidity, but by the necessity of balancing its own imperial interests against those of its partner, the US. The full embrace of Israel came only after anti-imperialist upheavals and a strategic realignment in the region rendered many of its former Arab client states unreliable in the context of Cold War struggle and resource exploitation.
In the same vein, the book is misleading in how it describes the origin of the ‘cross-party cartel’ in support of Israel. The book is not particularly focused on Labour or its history, most likely as Oborne is far more interested in getting his own house in order, as it were. But this means that his analysis of Labour’s fundamental support for Zionism comes down to Starmer’s apparent profound journey from human rights lawyer to Zionist stooge. He fails to acknowledge exactly why the Tory policy was far more critical towards Israel pre-Thatcher, in the party’s old loyalties to their own brand of Arab monarchs who represented their interests, and it entirely misses the other half of the picture – Labour’s fundamental pro-Zionist agenda.
Oborne’s political solution remains confined to a call for ‘greater democracy in British politics’. While the exposure of the political rot is essential, framing the problem in terms of a failure of candid advice to a ‘friend’ (p17) obscures the fundamental issue. The genocide in Gaza is not a policy failure; it is the brutal, logical execution of imperial strategy.
Oborne’s book is essential reading for confirming the mechanics of media and political collaboration in abetting genocide but it must be read with a critical eye. The required solution is not more democracy in Westminster, but an anti-imperialist movement in Britain fighting for the total liberation of Palestine, rejecting the parliamentary system that has proven itself utterly complicit in the crimes of imperialism.
Jacob O’Neill
