Dissenting civil servants are silenced, says UK diplomat who quit over Gaza

Mark Smith resigned last August over the UK’s failure to stop selling arms to Israel, amid the genocide in Gaza.

London, United Kingdom – Mark Smith, a diplomat who quit his Foreign Office job over the UK’s refusal to stop selling arms to Israel, said civil servants who question the onslaught in Gaza are routinely silenced by their seniors.

“Thousands 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,” he said on Friday in London, at an unofficial inquiry probing alleged UK complicity in Israeli war crimes.

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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.

“I was routinely asked to go to senior directors’ offices and told to, quote, ‘make the situation look less bad,” said Smith, who was a diplomat and policy adviser at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. “Sections that I’ve written which talked about civilian casualties, for example, I was asked to kind of play them down, make them smaller.”

He described the office’s working culture as “very strange” and “different to anything I’ve ever experienced in the civil service”.

“Everyone 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.”

He said it is “fully understood in the department” that conversations about the UK’s conduct and relationship with Israel should take place “in person and not in writing”.

“The reason for that is that we didn’t want those conversations to be requested by a court,” he claimed.

Smith resigned in August 2024, saying at the time that there was “no justification” for the UK to keep exporting weapons to Israel. He said he had raised the issue at “every level in the organisation” and received nothing more than, “thank you, we have noted your concerns.

“I had grave concerns when Israel was conducting aerial campaigns in Gaza,” he told the room on Thursday. “I couldn’t 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.”

Smith addressed the so-called “Gaza tribunal” headed by Jeremy Corbyn, an independent lawmaker and former Labour leader, appearing via videolink with his camera turned off.

Few other British civil servants have publicly resigned over the UK’s policy regarding Gaza.

Fran Heathcote, head of the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, said her organisation believes that the UK “is asking civil servants to undertake interactions with the government engaged in genocide”, referring to Israel.

The British government is “ignoring the concerns that have been raised by their trade union”, she said, “ignoring the provisions of its own civil service code and ignoring a whole range of domestic and international legal obligations by which it is banned”.

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

Mark Smith, a British civil servant who quit over the UK’s weapons trade with Israel, said senior colleagues in the Foreign Office tried to silence his concerns [Anealla Safdar/Al Jazeera]

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

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.

“These parts can and do ultimately end up in the Israeli F-35,” said Rami Khayal of the Palestinian Youth Movement group.