How the Foreign Office veiled Israel’s crimes in Gaza to keep British arms flowing
Peter Oborne reports in Middle East Eye on 3 October 2026:
Twenty-five years have passed since sociologist Stanley Cohen asked a question that remains just as urgent today as it was when he first posed it. How is it that institutions, governments and ordinary people can know about atrocities, mass killing and human rights abuses, but simultaneously manage to put them out of their minds?
His brilliant study, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, drew on Cohen’s own reporting of cover-ups, disappearances and torture in his native South Africa. Yet its examination of the ways in which we pretend to ourselves that terrible events are not taking place was broader, taking in Latin America, the Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, the Middle East and other examples.
Cohen distinguished between the different ways in which politicians, journalists and others have suppressed knowledge of the truth. He identified what he called “literal denial” – the unblinking assertion that crimes are not taking place.
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Cohen also paid attention to a more sophisticated form of denial which does challenge basic facts, but instead sanitises them in ways that seem reasonable or acceptable. He called this phenomenon “interpretative denial”.
Export licences
Channel 4 recently published an hour-long documentary exploring how British ministers have employed the technique identified by Cohen as “interpretative denial”, to sanction Israel’s destruction of Gaza. It is obvious to most people that Israel regularly commits crimes against humanity, with the newest Google Maps imagery showing total devastation across the enclave. Yet throughout this period, British ministers have denied Israeli war crimes. How have they managed this level of cognitive dissonance?
The Channel 4 film, Britain’s Gaza Secrets Exposed, went a long way to providing the answer. Over the past three years, British firms have exported millions of pounds worth of weaponry to Israel while it flattened Gaza and slaughtered civilians.
All those weapons need export licences. Under both domestic and international law, Britain is not allowed to export weapons to any country which it has reason to suspect commits war crimes.
This explains why, for the last three years, the Foreign Office unit that investigates potential breaches of humanitarian law has been busy assessing Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Channel 4 reporter Ramita Navai obtained internal Foreign Office assessments of Israel’s conduct during the early stages of the war, dealing with hundreds of notorious cases. Her investigation shows that again and again, the British Foreign Office failed to hold the Israeli army to account.