{"id":116423,"date":"2025-09-05T13:47:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T13:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/116423\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T13:47:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T13:47:09","slug":"dissenting-civil-servants-are-silenced-says-uk-diplomat-who-quit-over-gaza-israel-palestine-conflict-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/116423\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissenting civil servants are silenced, says UK diplomat who quit over Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict News"},"content":{"rendered":"

London, United Kingdom \u2013 Mark Smith, a diplomat who quit his Foreign Office job over the UK\u2019s refusal to stop selling arms to Israel, said civil servants who question the onslaught in Gaza are routinely silenced by their seniors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThousands of conversations within the walls of the Foreign Office on the most controversial aspects of our arms sales policy will never be seen by the public [and] never be put to a court,\u201d he said on Friday in London, at an unofficial inquiry probing alleged UK complicity in Israeli war crimes.<\/p>\n

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He said he was repeatedly warned by colleagues against documenting his concerns in writing, as he worked on a report assessing whether the government is legally compliant in exporting arms to certain countries.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was routinely asked to go to senior directors\u2019 offices and told to, quote, \u2018make the situation look less bad,\u201d said Smith, who was a diplomat and policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. \u201cSections that I\u2019ve written which talked about civilian casualties, for example, I was asked to kind of play them down, make them smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n

He described the office\u2019s working culture as \u201cvery strange\u201d and \u201cdifferent to anything I\u2019ve ever experienced in the civil service\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone wanted to make it look as though we were on the right side of the law, and any kind of suggestion [otherwise] tended to be met with panic and a kind of extreme pressure, to not talk about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said it is \u201cfully understood in the department\u201d that conversations about the UK\u2019s conduct and relationship with Israel should take place \u201cin person and not in writing\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason for that is that we didn\u2019t want those conversations to be requested by a court,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n

Smith\u00a0resigned in August 2024, saying at the time that there was \u201cno justification\u201d for the UK to keep exporting weapons to Israel. He said he had raised the issue at \u201cevery level in the organisation\u201d and received nothing more than, \u201cthank you, we have noted your concerns.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had grave concerns when Israel was conducting aerial campaigns in Gaza,\u201d he told the room on Thursday. \u201cI couldn\u2019t understand how the team were justifying that because to even an outside perspective, it was very clear that Israel was in breach of war crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith addressed the so-called \u201cGaza tribunal\u201d<\/a> headed by Jeremy Corbyn, an independent lawmaker and former Labour leader, appearing via videolink with his camera turned off.<\/p>\n

Few other British civil servants have publicly resigned over the UK\u2019s policy regarding Gaza.<\/p>\n

Fran Heathcote, head of the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, said her organisation believes that the UK \u201cis asking civil servants to undertake interactions with the government engaged in genocide\u201d, referring to Israel.<\/p>\n

The British government is \u201cignoring the concerns that have been raised by their trade union\u201d, she said, \u201cignoring the provisions of its own civil service code and ignoring a whole range of domestic and international legal obligations by which it is banned\u201d.<\/p>\n

She said civil servants from several departments troubled by British policy regarding Gaza have been in touch with the union, informally seeking advice.<\/p>\n

\"CorbynMark Smith, a British civil servant who quit over the UK\u2019s weapons trade with Israel, said senior colleagues in the Foreign Office tried to silence his concerns [Anealla Safdar\/Al Jazeera]<\/p>\n

A month after Smith resigned, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, announced that the UK would revoke some arms export licences, saying there was \u201ca clear risk that they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law\u201d.<\/p>\n

But campaigners have long called for tougher action on Israel, demanding the UK stop exporting British-made components of the F-35 jets, via the global pool programme, as the genocide in Gaza continues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese parts can and do ultimately end up in the Israeli F-35,\u201d said Rami Khayal of the Palestinian Youth Movement group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"London, United Kingdom \u2013 Mark Smith, a diplomat who quit his Foreign Office job over the UK\u2019s refusal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[591,59,39473,57,58,590,50,229,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-116423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-europe","tag-gb","tag-genocide","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}