And what will little LFI do now? Poor thing

Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) have clung to the two-state solution for decades, a slogan used to excuse occupation, deflect criticism, and shield Israel from accountability. But in 2025, that fig-leaf has disintegrated. The International Court of Justice ruled Israel’s occupation illegal; UN resolutions have long declared settlements a flagrant breach of international law. Gaza lies in ruins, the West Bank is carved into enclaves, Jerusalem annexed in all but name. The map is gone. Meanwhile, Britain keeps arming Israel: £261m in export licences as of July 2025 even after suspensions. Bullets, bombs, and jet parts flow while LFI repeats its empty refrain. If LFI truly believed in peace, they’d demand recognition of Palestine, sanctions, and an arms embargo. Instead, they raise glasses at receptions, shielding crimes with platitudes. The truth is clear: the two-state solution is dead. And with it, and shred of credibility that LFI still had.

_{TetleysTLDR: The Article}

Labour Friends of Israel is standing over a corpse. Not Hamas. Not Hezbollah, but Their own sacred cow: the two-state solution. For decades, this was their shield. Their moral fig-leaf. Whatever Israel did, bomb Gaza, bulldoze homes, steal land, expel families, LFI would whisper the same mantra: we support a two-state solution. It sounded respectable. It sounded moderate. It sounded like hope. But the two-state solution is dead. Dead in law. Dead in geography. Dead in politics. And LFI knows it.

LFI never tire of telling us they back a 'two-state solution'. It’s the mantra trotted out whenever anyone questions their role. Yet look beyond the soundbites and the record tells another story. For decades Israel has entrenched settlements across the West Bank, carving up land, strangling contiguity, and making a viable Palestinian state all but impossible. If LFI truly stood for two states, they would have fought tooth and nail against this creeping annexation. Instead, they’ve wrung their hands while defending Israel’s security concerns, quietly backing governments that openly reject Palestinian sovereignty. Their glossy pamphlets like 30 Steps to a Two-State Solution are fig leaves, offering incremental tweaks while the ground beneath Palestinians’ feet is stolen. They speak of diplomacy and persuasion, never of consequences or accountability. LFI MPs routinely resist motions recognising Palestine, block calls for sanctions, and water down criticism of Israel’s excesses. This isn’t support for two states, it’s cover for the status quo: an apartheid reality dressed up as pragmatism. The truth behind this is simple, by shielding Israel from pressure, LFI enable the very policies that bury Palestinian statehood. Their talk of peace is nothing more than a hollow slogan masking complicity.

Benjamin Netanyahu has never been a partner for peace and has said openly from the outset that he will never allow a two-state solution. For him, even to contemplate it would mean confronting the hard-right forces that keep him in power, the settlers, the religious extremists, the ultra-nationalists. To concede a Palestinian state would be to lose their backing, and with it his political survival. His entire career has been built on feeding their demands for more land, more settlements, more bloodshed dressed up as 'security'. He knows that any serious move toward Palestinian sovereignty would finish him personally, so instead he doubles down on intransigence. The result is a permanent blockade on peace: Netanyahu’s future is bound to the hard right’s project of endless occupation.

The ICJ put it bluntly: settlements must be dismantled, settlers withdrawn, reparations paid. The occupation is illegal, and the international community is obligated not to recognise it. [ICJ, 2024]But what did Britain do? Carry on selling the weapons. Carry on protecting Israel at the UN. Carry on muttering about two states while shovelling munitions into the furnace.

And this is, well, awkward to say the least for Labour Friends of Israel. LFI has spent years parroting the line that a two-state solution is the only realistic outcome, even as Netanyahu himself has repeatedly killed that prospect stone dead. Their entire pitch rests on a fiction: that Israel’s leadership is secretly open to peace if only Palestinians behave. In reality, Netanyahu has nailed his colours to the mast: no Palestinian state, no sovereignty, just permanent occupation. For LFI, this exposes them as apologists for an illusion, clinging to a peace process their own friends in Likud have torched.

If your goal is a two-state solution, then why would you raise your colours on the mast of an oppressor who who no intention of permitting it?

And this is the point no one in Westminster dares touch. Why, in a supposedly independent democracy, do we have Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel embedded like barnacles within the very machinery of our politics? These are not fringe pressure groups lobbying from the outside; they are woven into the fabric of both main parties, boasting MPs, ministers and shadow ministers as members. Their influence is not casual, it is structural. The effect is corrosive. When both government and opposition are saturated with organisations whose central mission is to defend and promote the interests of a foreign state, it skews debate before it even begins. The result? Near-total silence on Israel’s war crimes, ritual genuflection to security whenever Gaza is bombed, and a two-state solution cynically parroted while the bulldozers plough on. Nobody onfronts the elephant in the room: how the Hell did we end up with a political class so captured that MPs are expected to join these factions as if it were a career requirement? How is it healthy that British foreign policy is shaped not by principle or evidence, but by factional loyalty to lobby groups that treat Palestinian lives as collateral damage? Until this stranglehold is broken, the platitudes about peace are just that, platitudes.

The Gaza Strip is the final proof. Years of blockade, multiple bombardments, infrastructure reduced to rubble. By 2025, Gaza is a graveyard, not a state-in-waiting. The UN itself warns that vast swathes are uninhabitable. Water, electricity, hospitals, schools ...obliterated. International human rights experts called the ICJ opinion historic, but also a warning: the idea of two states has been bombed into oblivion. And what do LFI say? The same tired refrain: We support a two-state solution. It’s not a policy. It’s a punchline.

So let’s talk about complicity. Because Britain’s fingerprints are all over the corpse. Between October 2023 and March 2025, the UK exported thousands of items to Israel under military and dual-use licences. That includes munitions of war, bombs, grenades, and over 150,000 bullets. [CAAT Report, July 2025] Even after the Labour government suspended 30 licences in September 2024, over 300 licences remained open. [Commons Library, 2025] By July 2025, the UK had 347 extant licences, worth over £261 million in goods, including £180m of military items. [UK Gov Export Data, 2025] This isn’t 'defensive', it’s direct support for a state the ICJ has declared an occupying power in breach of international law. And when challenged? The High Court ruled in June 2025 that sales of F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel are lawful. Lawful doesn’t mean just. Lawful doesn’t mean right. It means Britain’s courts defer to political expediency. [Guardian, 30 June 2025]

This is where Labour Friends of Israel comes in. Inside Labour, they act as a party-within-a-party. Always ready with a press release, always ready to condemn critics of Israel as 'extremists', always ready to weaponise factional fights with the same refrain: we support a two-state solution. You have to hand it them it’s the perfect slogan. It makes you sound like you want peace, while defending the structures that destroy it. It lets you appear moderate, while you back militarism and annexation. If they truly meant it, they’d be demanding sanctions, embargoes, and recognition of Palestine now. They’d be pushing for Britain to stop arming Israel, to honour international law, to implement the ICJ ruling.But they don’t. Because it was never about two states. It was always about one: Israel.

_{The Obituary}

On October 7th what HAMAS did was reprehensible. But Israel never let a good crisis go to waste and they used this as a catalyst to enable Eretz Israel, the final ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Whilst hostages are still in there, if there are any left after the pummelling of Gaza, they know only too well this has long since ceased to be about them, about getting them home. We know that, their families know that and Israel knows that. LFI know that too.

For thirty years, this slogan shielded occupation. It silenced critics. It justified arms sales. It covered for apartheid. It was weaponised inside Labour to purge dissenters, to crush solidarity with Palestine.But the mask has slipped. Recognition of Palestine by governments worldwide, the ICJ’s ruling, the rubble of Gaza, all of it exposes the lie. The emperor has no clothes.

_{What Real Friendship Would Look Like}

That’s what a true friend of Israel would demand, because real friendship means telling uncomfortable truths, not cosying up at embassy receptions.

Instead, what do we get? Delegations. Receptions. Glasses of wine raised over canapés in Tel Aviv with Isaac Hertzog and Tzipi Hotovely and Mark fucking Regev. Speeches about peace while the bombs fall. Platitudes about two states while Britain’s bullets are shipped by the thousand. Do they rage at Israel for killing their cherished dream? No. Do they grieve the death of Oslo? No. They shuffle forward, whispering the same empty refrain, hoping no one notices the corpse in the room. But people do notice and not just campaigners. Not just Palestinians. The ICJ has noticed. The UN has noticed. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, CAAT, they have all documented the illegality, the complicity, the blood trail from Britain to Gaza. The world sees through it. And there should be a reckoning.

_{Poor LFI}

So what will little LFI do now, poor thing? Your fig-leaf is gone. Your credibility lies six feet under cwtched up to the two state solution that can't even escape you in death. Your slogan is in pieces. No one believes in the two-state solution anymore, not even you. Not that you ever did. This isn't because people gave up, but because Israel buried it under settlements, walls, and bombs. And you helped. Do not expect pity. You were not bystanders. You were enablers. You turned a slogan into a shield, a shield into a weapon, and a weapon into silence. So yes: poor LFI. May your slogan rest in pieces. And may the rest of us finally tell the truth: the two-state solution was always a lie you waved around to protect your paymasters. Justice will only come through accountability, sanctions, and solidarity. Anything less is complicity and cowardice.

The fact is you chose power over principle, slogans over truth, and lobby money over lives. History won’t forget.

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And what will little LFI do now? Poor thing

TetleysTLDR: The Summary

TetleysTLDR: The Article

The Obituary

What Real Friendship Would Look Like

Poor LFI

_{TetleysTLDR: The Summary}

_{TetleysTLDR: The Article}

_{The Obituary}

_{What Real Friendship Would Look Like}

_{Poor LFI}