Ahead of the May local elections, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, alongside other groups such as the Palestinian Youth Movement, Muslim Vote, and Palestine Forum, launched a massive electoral campaign named ‘Vote Palestine’. As the name suggests, the idea is to have candidates standing for election sign a pledge to end the complicity of local government in the genocide in Palestine and ‘uphold the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people’. Recent reports indicate that upwards of 1,600 candidates have signed the pledge.
In practice, ‘Vote Palestine’ is an electoral campaign for the Greens, who make up well over half the candidates that have made the pledge. The same Greens whose 2024 manifesto’s section on Israel and Palestine begins by condemning the Al-Aqsa flood operation and unambiguously states the party’s support for a two-state solution; who more recently failed to pass a motion stating Zionism is Racism; and who now have begun hunting down anti-Zionist activists in the party. Of the other candidates, several hundred come from the Zionist, imperialist Labour Party, whose thoroughly Zionist and imperialist character has been made abundantly clear with every consecutive government formed. The Vote Palestine campaign allows the Labour ‘left’ to wash its hands of the Party’s crimes and rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the Palestine movement. These are the people the Vote Palestine campaign wants us to believe will break over a hundred years of British support for Zionism.
The Vote Palestine campaign is diverting the already waning energy of the Palestine movement in Britain towards electoralism with the promise of a pledge which in reality is unenforceable and vague. Instead of doing the hard work of building an anti-imperialist movement on the streets, ‘Vote Palestine’ encourages people to go door-knocking and leafleting on behalf of candidates. It is part and parcel of the distraction and demobilisation of the movement organised by the opportunist PSC over the past year, driving it towards respectability rather than revolution.
The death of British imperialism will not come through the ballot box; it will come through struggle on the streets, in direct confrontation with the state. This May election – don’t vote, organise!
