Emily Thornberry was secretly filmed by an Israeli minister – yet she’s surprised by this dirty tactic

Britain’s political and material support for Israel during its genocide in Gaza has bolstered the apartheid state’s fascist rulers. And while most of us expect would expect no common courtesy from such war criminals, veteran Israel–appeaser Emily Thornberry seems surprisingly upset about an Israeli minister trolling her. She’d now like her Labour government to look into this, but the party isn’t about to start rocking the war-boat its pro–Israel donors helped to build.

The fact is that fascists don’t care about feelings or procedure. And we can see that in how, despite Britain’s unflinching support for Israel’s genocidal war criminals, Israeli deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel just trolled Thornberry. Putting to one side the question of why British politicians keep visiting a government whose leader is a wanted war criminal, let’s focus on why Haskel thought it would be good to secretly record and try to embarrass Thornberry despite her consistently supportive stance towards Israel.

Israel has no interest in voluntarily ending its brutal colonial occupation

Haskel asked Emily Thornberry about British engagement with occupied Palestinians and the potential that Hamas would win elections if they took place. She then suggested this was why Israel wouldn’t agree “to a two-state solution”, echoing war criminal prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regular rejections of anything relating to Palestinian statehood.

Even if you look beyond the propaganda, Hamas certainly has its issues. But it’s simply part of Palestinian politics today, and even British diplomats recognise the need to talk to the group. So the Israeli government’s longstanding use of a ‘…but Hamas…’ excuse is just a convenient tool to argue for what it actually wants – a continuation of its lucrative apartheid system and illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and the prevention of a Palestinian state.

As Israeli journalist Dimi Reider suggested in 2021, there was no “compelling reason for Israelis to entertain a departure from the status quo” because Israel seemed “more secure, more stable, and more prosperous than at any point in its history”. And the intense frustration stemming from the failure to progress with a lasting peace plan paved the way for Hamas’s 2023 attack and Israel’s subsequent genocide in Gaza.

Simple choice: democracy or a continuation of fascist brutality?

The idea of a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel is popular mostly among “liberal Zionists and foreign diplomats”, Reider said. But the idea is “obsolete” and “dead”. For many commentators, that’s been clear for almost two decades, partly due to the growth of illegal Israeli settlements but also due to the US-led peace process clearly favouring Israeli domination and Palestinian subjugation, and even more so when Donald Trump took office in 2017. Since 2023, the voices saying goodbye to the two-state option have only multiplied.

Outside government circles, observers now believe a one-state solution is the only path to peace. There would be a number of ways to organise this. However, Palestinians have suffered many decades of colonial brutality, and Israel has long developed a culture of demonising and dehumanising Palestinians. This situation means many on both sides would struggle to come to terms with a new, democratic arrangement. It can happen though. Because for all the flaws of South Africa’s current system, it is a real-world example of how to overcome a legacy of colonial apartheid – however slow that process may be.

In late 2024, Emily Thornberry herself said in a discussion about Israel:

You can either have a democratic state or you can have a Jewish state.

Although she later backtracked, those words expressed the issue very well. Because Israel is currently an ethnonationalist state for which brutal oppression of Palestinians is a necessity. It simply cannot call itself democratic as long as that reality remains.

Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions summarised this in even more explicit terms. The choice, he stressed in October 2023, is between “apartheid/genocide in an ethnically pure Jewish state built on the ruins of Palestine” or:

one democratic state of equal citizens accompanied by a l-o-n-g, painful but necessary process of restoring Palestinian rights, acknowledging the crimes and injustices committed by us Israeli Jews and reparations.

Featured image via screengrab