On 21 September, FRFI supporters joined 5,000 people marching through Liverpool in support of the Palestinian people on the eve of the Labour Party conference. Organised by the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), the aim of the protest was to demand that the Labour government impose an immediate and full arms embargo on the Israeli state rather than the very partial one it had put in place at the beginning of September.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy had announced this limited arms embargo to a great fanfare on 2 September. However, he suspended only 30 out of 350 export licences, allowing through licences for parts of the F-35 fighter-bomber aircraft, claiming that they were a link in a global supply chain, and that it would not be possible to determine which would be destined for F-35s being supplied to Israel. The tiny number of licence suspensions was a deliberately empty gesture, with Lammy emphasising that the underpinning review did not and ‘could not arbitrate on whether or not Israel has breached international humanitarian law’.
While the Labour government has thrown a couple of concessions to critics of its support for the Israeli state – restoring funding to UNWRA and dropping a challenge to the International Criminal Court’s right to pursue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – it abstained on a 20 September United Nations General Assembly vote demanding that the Israeli state end its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem within 12 months. Given that this has been UN policy for decades, and that the former Tory government had been prepared to vote for a similar resolution in 2016, did not matter. Labour’s abstention shows how committed it is to defending the Israeli terror state: it has been fervently pro-Zionist since it endorsed the Balfour declaration in 1917. It therefore was quite happy to allow BAE Systems and the major US defence contractor Northrop Grumman, both weapons suppliers to the Israeli state, to organise separate fringe meetings at the Labour conference. In sharp contrast, Labour banned the PSC from including the words ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ in the title of its own fringe meeting: however much the rest of the world agrees with such language, Labour will not tolerate it so as not to upset its Israeli ally.
STWC/PSC claimed turnout of 15,000 – the leadership had told The Guardian two days earlier that they in fact expected tens of thousands to attend – was a cynical attempt to present the event as more significant than it really was. The principal chant on the day was ‘Ceasefire Now’, as it has been on such demonstrations for the last 12 months. That this is already Labour government policy STWC and PSC leaders never mention: they are content to continue with the call precisely because it has no meaning or purpose and therefore will not antagonise the Labour Party leadership. No one advocating the demand has ever been able to explain how it might be achieved, or whether it is also a call on the Palestinian resistance to also lay down their arms.
The weakness of the STWC/PSC demonstration is the consequence of a commitment to political respectability over the last 12 months and their refusal to confront the imperialist Labour Party. From their immediate condemnation of the 7 October Palestinian military action, their censorship of any support for the Palestinian armed resistance which extended to suppressing a Zoom meeting which would have been addressed by Leila Khaled, their constant courtship of Labour MPs who along with Jeremy Corbyn have refused to denounce Labour’s support for Zionism while condemning Hamas, all this has alienated those who want to take a stand against British imperialism.
Not all this spirit has been crushed though: FRFI supporters joined hundreds in booing and heckling Liverpool MP Kim Johnson as she spoke. Johnson had grovelled before the Labour leadership in an abject apology to parliament for calling the Netanyahu government ‘fascist’ in February 2023. More recently, she boasted of voting to keep the two-child benefit cap and abstained on the withdrawal of pensioners’ winter heating allowance. At the end, dozens of people took photos of the FRFI banner ‘A vote for Labour is a vote for genocide’: a political opinion now widely shared. FRFI will continue to fight for the total isolation of the Zionist state through the imposition of economic, political, diplomatic and cultural sanctions, the only way that will force British imperialism to cut its support for its genocidal ally.
Robert Clough
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 302 October/November 2024
