Labour has always had a flair for banning the wrong people. In 2009 it was Geert Wilders, the Dutch MP guilty of little more than offending Islamists with a short film. Jacqui Smith, then Home Secretary, thought Britain safer gagging a politician than letting him speak. Sixteen years later, Labour has refined the art. Now the villains are Israeli generals, barred from the Royal College of Defence Studies, as though Jerusalem, not Tehran, were the mortal threat to Britain’s security.
The decision is not a technicality. The Royal College of Defence Studies is one of the crown jewels of British military education. It has long trained officers, diplomats, and civil servants from across the globe, a place where strategy and statecraft are debated at the highest level. Israel, a close Western ally whose senior commanders have fought wars no classroom scenario could simulate, has always been part of that mix. Until now.
Israel’s Ministry of Defence did not mince words. Maj. Gen. (res.) Amir Baram, its director-general, blasted Labour’s decision as “a discriminatory act,” “deep disloyalty to an ally at war,” and a betrayal of tradition. He is right on all counts. Israel today faces a two-front war against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, both groups committed to its destruction. To exclude Israeli officers now is not only cowardly—it is treachery dressed up as principle.
The official explanation from the Ministry of Defence is suitably sanctimonious. Britain, it says, welcomes officers from many nations and teaches them all to respect international law. But this time, Israel alone was deemed problematic, Israel alone judged unworthy of training, Israel alone accused of failing the standards of humanitarian law. The hypocrisy is not even subtle. A Labour government that marched Britain into Iraq without UN approval, and left Basra in smoking ruin, now clutches the Geneva Conventions like a parish curate fingering rosary beads.
One could almost admire the audacity. Tony Blair’s record in Iraq and Afghanistan includes civilian casualties that dwarf anything Israel has inflicted in Gaza. Yet Labour presumes to instruct Israel on proportionality, as if the architects of Basra’s collapse or Helmand’s chaos were the keepers of international law. When it is Israelis defending their citizens against jihadist rockets, Labour suddenly becomes a Quaker society, aflutter with concern for legal punctiliousness.
The absurdity would be comic if it weren’t so corrosive. Israeli generals are not mere foreign students—they are the embodiment of the only democratic army in the Middle East, the only military in the region that fights under the rule of law rather than under the rule of the Kalashnikov. To ban them is not to uphold humanitarian law, but to weaponize it: a stick used to beat those who try hardest to follow it.
And what, precisely, does Labour gain? Certainly not credibility with Washington, which understands Israel is indispensable. Certainly not influence in the Middle East, where Britain ceased to matter in 1956 at Suez. What Labour gains is the applause of the bien pensants: the BBC panelists, the Guardian editorialists, the campus radicals who chant “From the river to the sea” as if it were a foreign policy. This is not about law. It is about theatre, the theatre of cheap virtue.
The timing makes the gesture even more farcical. While Israel wages a war it cannot afford to lose, Labour congratulates itself for refusing to let an Israeli officer sit in a London seminar room. It is the diplomatic equivalent of barring the fire brigade from a training exercise while your house is smouldering, lest the neighbours think you insensitive.
It is also part of a dreary pattern. Labour once liked to boast it was the party of internationalism, standing shoulder to shoulder with allies in defense of democracy. Today it is the party of petty bans, symbolism without substance, and an abiding sneer at Israel. Its leaders imagine themselves as moral arbiters, but to everyone else they look like provincial prefects, too timid to confront terrorists, too eager to slap Israel, and too proud of their own irrelevance.
The damage, though, is not only symbolic. By excluding Israelis, Labour ensures that Britain’s most senior defence academy will have plenty of students from authoritarian regimes, whose human-rights records are appalling, but none from Israel, whose courts and civil society scrutinize its every military move. The Royal College will go on training officers from states with blood on their hands, but Israel will be shamed and excluded, to prove Labour’s sense of virtue is intact.
Back in 1927, when the Royal College was founded, Britain trained officers who built empires and broke armies. In 2025, under Labour, it produces moral hall-monitors, proud to ban the only ally in the Middle East that actually fights under the law. This is the same party that blundered into Iraq and bled in Helmand, now lecturing Israel on how to wage war. The irony is exquisite: Labour, which cannot win its own wars, has finally found one adversary it dares to confront—not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Tehran, but Jerusalem.
Giuseppe Levi Pezzulli (“Bepi”) is a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England & Wales. He is a Councillor of the Great British PAC and a member of Advance UK’s College.
Bepi’s research interests include global governance and economic statecraft. Within this context, he undertakes studies to leverage economic and financial power for foreign policy and national security purposes, formulating defensive strategies to protect economic leadership, as well as affirmative strategies for investment and trade promotion.
His analyses appear on CNBC, Rai News, Sky News, NATO Defense College Found’n, The American Banker, The American Thinker, The Critic, and Bloomberg terminals. He is the Research Editor for Longitude Magazine and the Director of Research at Italia Atlantica.