KEIR Starmer has appointed a pro-Israel lobbyist as his parliamentary private secretary.
Jon Pearce, the Labour MP who chairs the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) group, visited Israel earlier this year amid its genocide in Gaza.
He has also publicly opposed Britain recognising a Palestinian state unilaterally and launched an attack on the ICC over its arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu.
A PPS is appointed to be an assistant and acts as the “eyes and ears” of the minister in the House of Commons. It is an unpaid but coveted job, particularly if for the Prime Minister, given the access it gives.
In April, Pearce said LFI believes that the ICC warrant is “morally suspect [and] legally dubious”.
“We wouldn’t have dropped Britain’s objection to it,” Pearce said in a column for the Jerusalem Post about the ICC warrant, which he wrote after the trip to Israel in which he met with top ministers including the country’s president Isaac Herzog, and first reported in the UK by Turn Left Media's Lewis Aaron.
Herzog – who recently visited the UK and met with Starmer – has previously been criticised after photographs showed him signing Israeli bombs set to be dropped on Gaza.
His comments in the wake of the October 7 attack were also cited in South Africa’s International Court of Justice case as expressing genocidal intent.
Pearce also said in the column that LFI opposes the UK Government’s decision to suspend 30 out of around 350 weapons export licences to Israel, and tacitly criticised Labour for restoring funding to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
Pearce has now stepped down from his LFI role to assume this new duty.
