In announcing Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana set out the framework for its position on Palestine:
‘Millions of people are horrified by the government’s shameful complicity in genocide…that is why we defend the right to protest for Palestine. That is why we demand an end to all arms sales to Israel. And that is why we will carry on campaigning for the only path to peace: a free and independent Palestine’.
Yet what does this mean when, as leader of the Labour Party, and even afterwards, Corbyn made inexcusable concessions to imperialist and pro-Zionist sentiment?
First, as Labour leader, he opposed any boycott of Israeli goods. As his spokesperson told The Guardian, ‘Jeremy is not in favour of a comprehensive or blanket boycott… He doesn’t support BDS. He does support targeted action aimed at illegal settlements and occupied territories.’ ‘Asked if Corbyn would be happy to buy Israeli goods himself, the spokesman said: “Yes.”’ (13 December 2017)
Second, in 2018, he declared support for a two-state solution: ‘We must work for a real two state settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which ends the occupation and siege of Gaza and makes the Palestinian right to return a reality.’ But the right to return and the existence of an Israeli state are mutually incompatible. Furthermore, talking of a ‘real’ two-state settlement is to legitimise an imperialist distraction to head off support for real Palestinian self-determination.
Third, in an article in The Guardian on 3 August 2018, he wrote ‘In the 1970s some on the left mistakenly argued that “Zionism is racism”. That was wrong’. It is absolutely right, and the UN General Assembly agreed so in 1975, not just ‘some on the left’. US President George Bush Sr in 1991 personally moved its rejection at the UN stating that ‘To equate Zionism with racism is to reject Israel itself, a member of good standing of the United Nations. This body cannot claim to seek peace and at the same time challenge Israel’s right to exist.’ Imperialism was very clear what the definition meant, even if Corbyn could later jettison it.
Fourth, he drove acceptance of the Zionist IHRA definition of anti-Semitism through the Labour Party, claiming in September 2018 that it ‘does not undermine freedom of expression on the Israel-Palestine conflict’ – an astonishing piece of self-deception, while the reduction of colonisation to a ‘conflict’ is equally abject.
Lastly, he opposes the right of the Palestinian people to decide not only the contours of their future, but also how to achieve it, specifically their right to armed resistance. Thus in Tribune, Corbyn wrote in relation to the 7 October 2023 Al Aqsa flood operation ‘I deplore the targeting of all civilians. That includes Hamas’ attack on 7 October, which I have repeatedly condemned in Parliament, in print and at every demonstration that I have attended’ (17 November 2023). Corbyn not only denied the Palestinian people the right to resistance, but also subscribed to the reactionary fiction that the 7 October action deliberately targeted civilians.
While Palestinian solidarity across the world is demanding the isolation of the Israeli state through a programme of total sanctions – political, economic, cultural and diplomatic – the movement in this country led by the PSC goes no further than calling for an arms embargo in a vain attempt to persuade Zionist Labour MPs to vote for one. The new party will ape the positions of the PSC and STWC, defend Corbyn’s reactionary standpoint and reject any challenge to British imperialism.
Victory to the Palestinian people! Sanctions now!
