The outrage that followed the refusal of the Labour Party leadership to back the call for a ceasefire in the parliamentary vote on 15 November was inevitable: it was the final straw for hundreds of thousands of people who had been demonstrating against the blitzkrieg on Palestine. Throughout the war, the Labour Party has sided with the Zionist state and deliberately ignored all the prima face evidence of Zionist war crimes and of its genocidal intent. Instead, leader Sir Keir Starmer gave a green light to collective punishment of the people of Gaza, blaming the suffering of the Palestinian people on the 7 October military action of the resistance forces. It shows once again that the Labour Party is first and foremost an imperialist party. It has to defend the interests of British imperialism and that means it will never abandon its Zionist ally, the guarantor of Britain’s interests in the Middle East. Robert Clough reports.
The 15 November vote was preceded by a huge demonstration numbering over half a million which took place on Armistice Day, 11 November, despite the outrage of the Tory government and the racist tabloids. The Metropolitan Police rejected calls to ban the march, fully aware that they would face open defiance from tens of thousands of people; the Labour leadership evaded taking sides by saying it was an operational question for the Met. Following the ceasefire debacle, anger reached a new pitch, and demonstrations took place outside several Labour Party offices in the constituencies of MPs who had refused to back the amendment. Hundreds had already protested against the arch-Zionist Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting, besieging the Labour Party offices in his Ilford North constituency on 6 November. The following day, Year 13 pupils walked out of assembly at the local Beal High School because Streeting was due to attend it; at the same time, primary and secondary school students walked out in Bristol.
‘Labour Party – shame on you’
The day after the House of Commons vote, crowds led by school students demonstrated outside the office of Bethnal Green and Bow MP Rushanara Ali, chanting ‘vote her out’ and ‘Labour Party shame on you’ because she would not support the ceasefire vote. Over the next few days there were protests in further Labour-held constituencies including a demonstration outside Starmer’s offices. Other protests have taken place outside a surgery held by Steve McCabe, the Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, with crowds chanting ‘Steve McCabe, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.’ It was reported that he tried to escape in his Porsche SUV. Shabana Mahmodd from nearby Birmingham Ladywood was also targeted, as was Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry.
These demonstrations have brought predictable outrage from Labour leaders: Harriet Harman condemned the spraying of slogans on Shadow Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens’ office as ‘an attack on democracy’; Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves declared ‘I believe in the right to protest, I don’t believe in the right to intimidate. Some of those protests, I believe, over the last few days have crossed the line from protest to intimidation. Protesting outside people’s homes, putting pressure on them in that way, I think it’s totally unacceptable.’ There is no evidence that any protest has taken place outside an MP’s home.
Labour defends war crimes
The protesters’ anger is fully justified. Day after day, week after week following the 7 October action by the Palestinian resistance, TV screens showed the Zionist war machine commit war crime after war crime: the use of phosphorus bombs, the forced expulsion of one million Palestinians from their homes in the north of Gaza, the bombing of schools and hospitals, the attacks on UN premises, the invasions of hospitals and seizure of male patients. Yet Starmer’s response was to insist that ‘It’s unwise for politicians to stand on stages like this or to sit in television studios and pronounce day by day which acts may or may not be lawful under international law.’ He also said a ceasefire would ‘freeze the conflict’, allowing Hamas to launch attacks against Israel again in the future. ‘Hamas would be emboldened and start preparing for future violence immediately.’
Starmer’s determination to stand in unconditional defence of the Zionist terror campaign was evident from its outset. He condemned the 7 October resistance action immediately as a ‘massacre’ undertaken by ‘terrorists’ against which the Zionist state had every right to retaliate under the claim to ‘self-defence’. Asked whether the Zionist state had the right to cut off food and water supplies as it was threatening to do, he replied in an interview on 11 October ‘I think that Israel does have that right, it is an ongoing situation, obviously everything should be done within international law but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has the right to defend herself.’
Suggesting that such collective punishment, a war crime, could be within international law required a logic known only to himself. It took three weeks for him to attempt to row back from these comments, by which time it was too late for anyone to believe that he was not giving a green light to genocide. Not once has he suggested that the Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves. By that time, Labour had suspended MP Andy McDonald for ‘deeply offensive’ comments at a pro-Palestine rally on 28 October; his offence was a completely anodyne declaration that ‘We will not rest until we have justice. Until all people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea, can live in peaceful liberty.’
Nandy: Israel first
Starmer was not alone among senior Labour politicians in standing four-square with the Zionist terror. The day after the ceasefire vote, the Shadow International Development Secretary Lisa Nandy reiterated where Labour Party priorities lay, saying that ‘To many people in Israel, including the Israeli government, when they hear the term ceasefire it is simply an instruction that they should lay down their arms and just allow that situation to continue. I don’t see how that’s a correct position to hold.’ Such a declaration, made at the same time as Zionist forces were scouring Al Shifa hospital for alleged Hamas tunnels, and while patients were dying in the intensive care unit, shows the barbaric character of the Labour leadership. Its prime concern throughout has been to protect the interests of its Zionist attack dog.
While the protests outside Labour Party offices have focused on those who failed to support the ceasefire vote, those who voted in favour cannot be seen as less reactionary. The amendment to the King’s Speech that they supported included the statement that they ‘unequivocally condemn the horrific killings by Hamas and the taking of hostages’ but pointedly did not equally ‘unequivocally condemn’ any actions which were part of the Zionist blitzkrieg. Not a single Labour MP has expressed any support for Palestinian resistance; an Early Day Motion organised by left Labour MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group on 17 October ‘utterly condemns the massacre of Israeli civilians and taking of hostages by Hamas’. There was no equivalent condemnation of the numerous war crimes that the Zionist state had already committed. John McDonnell damned the 7 October operation as ‘the killing of the innocents by Hamas’, despite evidence that the cause of many deaths was indiscriminate fire from Israeli attack helicopters. Support for a ceasefire is to be the limit of any ‘revolt’ against the Starmer leadership; questioning the legitimacy of the Zionist state, let alone its relationship with the British imperialist state, is complete anathema.
Corbyn condemns Palestinian resistance
The behaviour of Jeremy Corbyn throughout these weeks has been abject. Despite knowing that he will not be allowed to stand as a Labour MP at the next election, he has refused to criticise the stance of the Labour leadership or directly challenge Starmer for his endorsement of the Zionist military onslaught. At the first national Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) demonstration on 14 October he told the crowd that the solution to the crisis was to uphold international law, that ‘the horrific attacks on civilians in Israel were deplorable’, and that ‘none of us are here to condone killing.’ But not a word of criticism of Starmer passed his lips.
Later, on Piers Morgan’s TalkTV show, he came across as weak and evasive as he was repeatedly challenged over his attitude to Hamas. But in The Tribune a few days later he would write that ‘if we understand terrorism to describe the indiscriminate killing of civilians, in breach of international law, then Hamas is a terrorist group’ and that he had ‘repeatedly condemned’ the Hamas attack ‘in Parliament, in print and at every demonstration I have attended’. Yet still he refused to condemn Starmer, despite the latter saying that Corbyn’s days as a Labour MP are over. Once again, as he has done so often in the past, Corbyn has placed his loyalty to the Labour Party before political principle.
The political impotence of the left of the Labour Party has rarely been more evident than at the present. It is terrified of attacking Starmer – he has isolated it as a credible force within the party. Either they knuckle under, or they have to go, and for left MPs that is a decision about their £86,000 a year jobs. Their hope is to salvage some electoral credibility with their stance over the ceasefire, and the PSC leadership is helping them out by giving them platforms on their demonstrations. Yet on the critical issue, the Labour left and the leadership are as one: there can be no rupture in the alliance between British imperialism and the Zionist state. That is why the protests outside Labour Party offices are so significant: for the first time in decades, a section of the working class is starting to oppose Labour. It is a move that socialists and communists must foster by attacking the legitimacy of the Zionist state and demanding its total isolation through the imposition of economic, political, diplomatic and cultural sanctions. With the legion of war crimes committed by the Zionist state over the past few weeks, its plans to complete the genocide of the Palestinian people, it is the minimum stand we can take to support the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 297 December 2023/January 2024
