Doublethink on Gaza: How Labour is Trying to Rewrite the Definition of Genocide

When 2+2= Equals Denial: Labour’s Gaza Rhetoric and the Death of Truth

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Orwell’s darkly prophetic words from 1984 ring with chilling relevance as we witness the British government’s linguistic gymnastics over Gaza. But perhaps the most pertinent Orwellian observation for our times is this: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Today, Sir Keir Starmer, self-declared Zionist and leader of what was once the party of the working class, is attempting to convince us that two plus two equals five. The arithmetic of atrocity is being rewritten before our eyes, with the Labour government not merely engaging in genocide denial, but something far more insidious: genocide revisionism.

In last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions. Starmer was directly asked:

“Will the Prime Minister share his definition of genocide with this House?” he asked.

In his response, Starmer said: “It would be wise to start a question like that by reference to what happened in October of last year. I’m well aware of the definition of genocide, and that is why I’ve never described this as and referred to it as genocide.”

If that wasn’t headline enough consider the breathtaking audacity of Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s attempt to redefine genocide as something that only happens when “millions of people” lose their lives.

This neat semantic trick would erase not only the current horror in Gaza but also retroactively delete recognised genocides like Srebrenica from the historical record. It’s a masterclass in Orwellian doublethink: simultaneously knowing and not knowing, holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Over three dozen British human rights and aid groups have called on Foreign Secretary David Lammy to clarify his understanding of genocide and Britain’s related legal obligations as pressure mounts over comments he made in relation to Israel’s war in Gaza.

Last week, a Conservative MP asked the foreign secretary to clarify that “there is not a genocide occurring in the Middle East” and said ‘that that terminology’ like “genocide” referring to Gaza was “not appropriate”.

Lammy said he agreed and added: “Those terms were largely used when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term.”

On Tuesday, the 37 organisations, which include Christian Aid, Action Aid UK, the Council for Arab-British Understanding, and Medical Aid for Palestine, said Lammy’s focus on death tolls appeared to show “a dangerously misguided understanding of the crime”. The Genocide Convention does not use numerical thresholds to define the crime.

In an open letter, they said his comments “injected a deeply troubling ambiguity… in light of the mass atrocities perpetrated against civilians in Gaza”.

The UN’s definition of genocide is crystal clear: Under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. No minimum death toll is required. No arbitrary threshold must be crossed. The definition encompasses killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children. Yet Starmer, “well aware” of this definition, chooses to pretend it means something else entirely.

As Richard McNeil-Willson of Edinburgh University points out, this goes beyond mere denial into the realm of active historical revision. It’s an attempt to retroactively sanitise not just current actions but past colonial atrocities as well. Under Starmer and Lammy’s novel interpretation, many of Britain’s own historical crimes would conveniently cease to qualify as genocide. How convenient for the establishment.

Richard McNeil-Willson, who lectures in the Islamic and Middle Eastern studies department at Edinburgh University, said Starmer’s position on Gaza is becoming “politically untenable” after a UN special committee report said the policies and practices carried out by Israel are “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”.

The Labour leadership’s position becomes even more grotesque when we consider the evidence before us. The UN special committee reports Israel using “starvation as a weapon of war” and running an “apartheid system.” Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of “crimes against humanity” in causing massive, deliberate forced displacement. Over 43,000 Palestinians dead, according to health officials. Yet somehow, in Starmer’s mathematical universe, this doesn’t add up to genocide.

The committee, set up in 1968 to monitor Israel’s occupation said in its annual report that there were serious concerns that Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war” and was running an “apartheid system” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

A report by Human Rights Watch also accused Israel of “crimes against humanity” in causing the massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

But perhaps the most Orwellian aspect of this situation is the cold political calculation behind it. As McNeil-Willson observes, the government has decided that genocide denialism is politically cheaper than accepting genocide and dealing with the legal implications. They’ve calculated that the moral cost of denial is less than the political price of truth. This is the arithmetic of amorality: where political expedience trumps human lives, where party messaging outweighs documented mass death.

The thought police aren’t just at Sarah Wilkinson’s door anymore. They’re in Downing Street, rewriting definitions, massaging meanings, and telling us that two plus two equals whatever number best serves the current narrative. When Starmer says he’s “well aware” of the definition of genocide while simultaneously mangling it beyond recognition, he’s performing exactly the kind of doublethink that Orwell warned us about.

The tragedy isn’t just in Gaza. It’s in the death of truth itself. When political leaders can brazenly redefine genocide to exclude ongoing atrocities, when they can perform semantic somersaults to avoid their legal and moral obligations, when they can tell us with straight faces that what we’re seeing isn’t what we’re seeing – that’s when we know we’re living in Orwell’s world.

As Labour haemorrhages support over its stance on Gaza, as international bodies pile evidence upon evidence, as the death toll mounts, Starmer’s position becomes increasingly untenable. But perhaps that’s the point – in a world of doublethink, nothing needs to be tenable. It just needs to be repeated often enough, with enough authority, until the very concept of truth loses all meaning.

Orwell’s Winston Smith finally broke when he was made to see five fingers instead of four. How many dead Palestinians will it take before we accept that two plus two equals five?

Paul Knaggs

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