SAYEEDA WARSI’S belated resignation provides an opportunity to reflect upon this government’s disastrous approaches to foreign and military affairs.

She is right in her somewhat restrained evaluation of its policy on Gaza as “morally indefensible.” 

From the Prime Minister down, the British Cabinet has been an apologist for — and an accomplice in — the mass murder of defenceless civilians. 

More than 1,800 Palestinians, most of them civilians including many hundreds of women and children, have been slaughtered by the “targeted” strikes of Israeli tanks, war planes, battleships, missiles and mortars. 

British arms supplies have helped turn the laughably misnamed Israeli Defence Force into one of the world’s most ruthless destroyers of innocent human life. 

Confronted by the resulting carnage under their noses, UN officials have finally stopped mincing their words in order to condemn Israeli war crimes.

Yet Prime Minister David Cameron still cannot bring himself to agree that these murderous assaults have been “disproportionate” — itself a rather modest characterisation — in relation to an Israeli civilian death toll which amounts to just three.

This is the same wretched figure who weeps crocodile tears in a Mons ceremony for the Great War dead. 

British soldiers perished then, so he told the world on Monday, to “prevent the domination of a continent and in defence of British values.”

Presumably, he didn’t mean the continents of Africa or Asia, dominated as they were before 1914 by Britain’s imperial armed forces as our ruling class used brute force and bribery to subdue more than 300 million subjects denied even the most basic democratic freedoms.

At home, those “British values” included denying votes to women, shooting down striking workers and condemning millions of working-class people to “know their place” in the slums, mines, mills and workhouses that shortened their lives. 

And this is the same Prime Minister Cameron who was so eager to send more soldiers and civilians to an early grave in Syria 12 months ago. 

Thankfully, his witless plans to further weaken the secular regime in Damascus and unwittingly assist jihadist forces such as Isis were overturned by MPs in a rare fit of rebellion against US foreign policy.

This is the foreign policy which governs the approach to issues such as Palestine, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine adopted by the Tory, Lib Dem and Labour leaderships. 

Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander were both shockingly slow to voice outrage at Israeli massacres in Gaza. 

Even now, echoing Britain’s cravenly pro-Israel mass media, they cannot criticise Israel without condemning equally if not in stronger terms the ineffectual Hamas rockets.

Ms Warsi’s resignation letter correctly makes the point that this policy is losing Britain friends and influence abroad, while sowing the dragon’s teeth of Islamist radicalism at home.

But it is not only in Gaza that a change of approach and language is required. Britain desperately needs an independent foreign and defence policy which breaks free of US, EU and British big business domination.

We should be champions for the creation of a viable, secure and sovereign Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel; for an end to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese territory; for the enforcement of UN resolutions by international and people’s sanctions; and for the release of Marwan Barghouti and the thousands of other Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails.

And Britain should leave Nato, nuclear weapons and all the rest of the cold war’s dangerous paraphernalia behind.