12th November 2023
The people united…thousands marching across Westminster Bridge calling for a ceasefire in Gaza
As thousands once more take to the streets of London to march for peace and call for a ceasefire in Gaza, British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, continues to fuel the fires of conflict by condemning the protests as ‘hate marches.’ Braverman has further suggested that the Metropolitan Police actively favour left wing marches over those of right wing organisations. Coming from the woman who claims that homeless people living in tents are making a ‘lifestyle choice’ there should be little left to surprise anyone. Yet Braverman has a habit of pulling something that little bit more mind boggling out of the bag.
The phoney war about the Armistice Day commemoration and the National March for Palestine being on the same day, 11th November, has rumbled across the TV and print media all week. The fact that the respective events were some distance and hours apart has not stopped the press and politicians from insisting that the police ensure that there was no disruption to the Armistice Day events, even though there was no threat or likelihood of any disruption taking place.
On the day the only source of aggravation, including 105 arrests, were counter demonstrators from the far right English Defence League and their ilk, the very people Braverman was seeking to protect.
All of this posturing serves two purposes. The first, in the undeclared war within the Tory party to succeed lame duck Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, being seen to be tough on ‘radicals’ and left wing protesters plays well to the Tory base. Throw in the inference that such protesters are likely to be anti-semitic and supporters of Hamas and you are half way to a place on the leadership ballot.
The second is to undermine the just cause and legitimate claim to statehood of the Palestinian people themselves. It is a familiar trope of the right wing to caricature anyone supporting freedom and democracy as a terrorist. Nelson Mandela was infamously characterised in this way by the Tories when imprisoned in South Africa. Many other liberation leaders across the former British Empire have suffered similar demonisation.
The BBC cannot report any atrocity committed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in Gaza without the qualification that the action is in response to “the killing of 1400 people on 7th October by Hamas, designated a terrorist organisation by the UK government.” Rarely, if ever, does the media qualify Palestinian resistance with a phrase indicating it is in response to “nearly 60 years of illegal occupation under international law and countless massacres in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the ongoing illegal blockade by land, sea and air of Gaza, which has been implemented by Israel since 2007.”
The famous ‘balance’ of the BBC does not stretch quite this far.
Meanwhile the IDF continue to bomb hospitals in Gaza with impunity, massacre men, women and children in refugee camps and carpet bomb the northern half of Gaza into rubble. The death toll is currently at an estimated 11,000 people, and rising. Last Friday alone Israel launched air strikes on four hospitals and a school. It is little wonder that half of the death toll so far are children.
The only ‘concession’ the Israeli state has made is to institute four hour long so called ‘humanitarian pauses’, to encourage people to be herded to the south of Gaza, while the IDF takes the time to re-arm and refuel, ready for the next wave of bombardment. Terms such as ethnic cleansing and genocide rarely, if ever, pass the lips of the media’s political pundits but how else to describe the actions of the IDF?
Western leaders’ claims that IDF action is justified because Israel has ‘the right to defend itself’ were paper thin to start with. They can only be seen now as a completely transparent attempt to dodge the hard work of getting down to holding the Israeli regime to account for decades of systematic oppression and the implementation of apartheid laws against the Palestinian people.
However, cracks in the Western edifice are beginning to show under the pressure of public protest. French President Emmanuel Macron has now joined the call for a ceasefire, saying that Israel must stop bombing Gaza and killing civilians, adding that there was “no legitimacy” for the bombing.
Unsurprisingly, in a statement responding to Macron’s comments, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that world leaders should be condemning Hamas, and not Israel.
That the Labour Party leadership in Britain, at the instigation of Kier Starmer, should find itself in a less progressive position than a right wing French President on such a key issue of peace and international solidarity is shameful.
Labour have recently unveiled a PR campaign characterising Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, as spineless. Hard to argue with that. Yet when it comes to the question of Palestinian rights it is the Labour leadership in general, and Kier Starmer in particular, lacking a backbone.
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