Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza – book review
4 December 2025
Peter Oborne, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza (O/R Books 2025)
Peter Oborne’s Complicit brings Britain’s political and media establishment thoroughly to account for its abetting of Israel’s genocide, finds Chris Bambery
The imperial crimes of the British elite are immense. What Complicit does is lay out in a clear, scientific way a fresh crime, the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The culprits are members of the Tory and Labour governments who not just armed and defended Israel throughout but rubbished the International Court of Justice when it ruled there was a plausible case that Israel was committing its ongoing genocide.
Alongside them in the dock are the heads of the BBC and the other establishment media outlets in this country. They not just turned a blind eye to genocide but they repeated lies fed to them by Israel such as the non-existent beheaded babies of 7 October 2023.
The charges Oborne brings in this book are devastating and should ensure they all end up in the dock of the Hague. Prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, a human-rights lawyer, and deputy prime minister, David Lammy, a graduate of Harvard Law School, must worry in the small hours that international law might one day come knocking. I suspect they will get away with it but, over time, Britain’s record in defending and arming genocide will be seen as yet another shocking crime of Empire and it will be embedded in the historical biographies of them and so many others.
Public opinion is overwhelmingly against the genocide and is hardening every day. I write this during the supposed ceasefire in Gaza imposed by Donald Trump. Millions have seen the shocking footage of two Palestinians in the West Bank trying to surrender, holding up their clothes to show they have no weapons, being ordered by the Israeli Border Police to crawl along the ground and then being shot in cold blood. The Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir not only said the Border Police had done the right thing but he then promoted the officer in charge of the unit responsible.
Oborne charts the cross-party agreement on Gaza which came into being after Starmer replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. The immediate response of both parties after 7 October was to repeatedly harp on that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, a refrain repeated as the death toll in Gaza mounted: ‘This cross-party cartel came together in defiance of majority British opinion, in denial about Israeli atrocities, and oblivious to the genocidal incitement frothing forth from the most senior Israeli politicians’ (p.31).
The critique of the BBC and the establishment media’s coverage of Gaza is truly devastating. The book is worth reading for that alone. But they faced two problems; one was that via social media and alternative media you could follow the genocide in real time, not least because IDF soldiers were posting their crimes on Tik Tok.
Secondly, there were, from the start, devastating Jewish voices opposing what Israel was doing, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim for instance. These were voices excluded from the BBC. That, and the growing number of Jews taking to the streets against genocide in Britain and, on an even greater scale, the USA.
The smear that opponents of Israel are antisemites was trotted out repeatedly, not least against Jeremy Corbyn, but it became ever more threadbare. Netanyahu and his defenders lost the argument early on, though not in the corridors of power.
This didn’t stop the attempts to brand the succession of huge marches for Palestine as being ‘hate marches’ and as ‘antisemitic’. Oborne sees them as a necessary response to an elite and government which ignores public opinion; in the tradition of the Chartists, the suffragettes, the Jarrow Crusade and the movement against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Peter Oborne’s Complicit brings Britain’s political and media establishment thoroughly to account for its abetting of Israel’s genocide, finds Chris Bambery
The imperial crimes of the British elite are immense. What Complicit does is lay out in a clear, scientific way a fresh crime, the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The culprits are members of the Tory and Labour governments who not just armed and defended Israel throughout but rubbished the International Court of Justice when it ruled there was a plausible case that Israel was committing its ongoing genocide.
Alongside them in the dock are the heads of the BBC and the other establishment media outlets in this country. They not just turned a blind eye to genocide but they repeated lies fed to them by Israel such as the non-existent beheaded babies of 7 October 2023.
The charges Oborne brings in this book are devastating and should ensure they all end up in the dock of the Hague. Prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, a human-rights lawyer, and deputy prime minister, David Lammy, a graduate of Harvard Law School, must worry in the small hours that international law might one day come knocking. I suspect they will get away with it but, over time, Britain’s record in defending and arming genocide will be seen as yet another shocking crime of Empire and it will be embedded in the historical biographies of them and so many others.
Public opinion is overwhelmingly against the genocide and is hardening every day. I write this during the supposed ceasefire in Gaza imposed by Donald Trump. Millions have seen the shocking footage of two Palestinians in the West Bank trying to surrender, holding up their clothes to show they have no weapons, being ordered by the Israeli Border Police to crawl along the ground and then being shot in cold blood. The Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir not only said the Border Police had done the right thing but he then promoted the officer in charge of the unit responsible.
Oborne charts the cross-party agreement on Gaza which came into being after Starmer replaced Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. The immediate response of both parties after 7 October was to repeatedly harp on that ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, a refrain repeated as the death toll in Gaza mounted: ‘This cross-party cartel came together in defiance of majority British opinion, in denial about Israeli atrocities, and oblivious to the genocidal incitement frothing forth from the most senior Israeli politicians’ (p.31).
The critique of the BBC and the establishment media’s coverage of Gaza is truly devastating. The book is worth reading for that alone. But they faced two problems; one was that via social media and alternative media you could follow the genocide in real time, not least because IDF soldiers were posting their crimes on Tik Tok.
Secondly, there were, from the start, devastating Jewish voices opposing what Israel was doing, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim for instance. These were voices excluded from the BBC. That, and the growing number of Jews taking to the streets against genocide in Britain and, on an even greater scale, the USA.
The smear that opponents of Israel are antisemites was trotted out repeatedly, not least against Jeremy Corbyn, but it became ever more threadbare. Netanyahu and his defenders lost the argument early on, though not in the corridors of power.
This didn’t stop the attempts to brand the succession of huge marches for Palestine as being ‘hate marches’ and as ‘antisemitic’. Oborne sees them as a necessary response to an elite and government which ignores public opinion; in the tradition of the Chartists, the suffragettes, the Jarrow Crusade and the movement against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Imperial commitment
Why such slavish support for Israel at Westminster? One familiar argument is to claim it’s all the fault of the Jewish lobby. Oborne devotes a chapter to describing the lobby here in Britain, but his conclusion is that they are pushing at an open door because British foreign policy has, since 1956, stuck as close as possible to the foreign policy of the USA. Support for Israel is another way of proving your loyalty to the White House.
As Oborne states: ‘As prime minister Starmer displayed an entirely orthodox understanding of Britain’s foreign policy. First and foremost, that meant sticking to the US as closely as possible … rhetorical support for Palestinians’ right to self-determination was expressed without placing any pressure on Israel to realise it. Palestinian resistance of any kind was opposed, and Israel was lavished with diplomatic and practical support’ (p.163).
Neither in the UK not the USA, can I see any change in Western support for Israel, despite the sea change in public opinion. But as a new generation of political leaders emerge, there must be some who see the way the wind is blowing and follow it from behind.
As the former chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph and a former journalist on the Evening Standard and Daily Express, it would be hard to write Oborne off as another loony lefty; after all, he proudly positions himself in the now deceased tradition of One Nation Toryism. But that will not stop the attacks from apologists for the state of Israel.
That’s why I don’t think the establishment will try to smear him as they did Corbyn and the marches for Palestine; they will try to ignore Complicit and hope the charges against them go away; but they won’t.
It’s important you read this book because in page after page, it builds up the case. We need to be able to repeat Oborne’s accusations wherever we work, study or socialise because these swine need to branded for what they are, accomplices of and participants in genocide.
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