The near-universal opposition to the genocidal war that the Israeli state is waging against the Palestinian people has deepened the political crisis that Western imperialism faces. In the US, extensive protests against the Biden administration’s cover for Israeli war crimes threaten a loss of electoral support for the Democrats which may allow Donald Trump to win the November presidential election. In Britain, the most determined defender of the Zionist state along with the US, demonstrations in support of Palestine numbering hundreds of thousands have continued into the New Year while both Tory and Labour parties continue to oppose an unconditional ceasefire. They are steeped in the blood of the Palestinian people – a further 20,000 have been slaughtered since the House of Commons dismissed a ceasefire in any form on 15 November 2023. Yet the pro-Palestine movement remains stuck in calling for a ceasefire without explaining how that might be achieved, especially now the International Court of Justice has declined to order one.
First Gaza…
Despite the massacres, mostly of women and children, despite the massive destruction in Gaza, despite the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and over 50,000 tons of bombs, the Israeli state is nowhere near victory. Talking to senior Israeli commanders, the New York Times reported on 20 January ‘After more than 100 days of war, Israel’s limited progress in dismantling Hamas has raised doubts within the military’s high command about the near-term feasibility of achieving the country’s principal wartime objectives: eradicating Hamas and also liberating the Israeli hostages still in Gaza.’ Underscoring this, 24 Israeli troops were killed in a resistance ambush just two days later. When US and British imperialism dusted off the long-dormant two-state solution to avoid a complete rupture with its Middle East allies, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unceremoniously threw the proposal out, rejecting any form of Palestinian state.
Then Yemen
Decades of war have weakened Western imperialism’s grip on the Middle East. Now Yemen, the poorest nation in the region, has caused consternation by telling Western imperialism which ships can pass along the Red Sea and which cannot. The temerity of Yemen’s Ansar Allah – more popularly but inaccurately known as the Houthis – in first seizing the container ship Galaxy Leader, partly-owned by an Israeli, has magnified the crisis. It has now decided British and US ships have become legitimate targets following missile and bombing attacks which started on 11 January. The lengthier shipping route via the Cape of Good Hope has already hit British manufacturing supply chains, with S&P Global predicting that inflation will remain ‘stubbornly higher’ at 3-4%.
The rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia brokered by China in 2023 shows how influence has shifted in the Middle East. One result has been the negotiations between Saudi and Ansar Allah to end the former’s brutal onslaught from 2015 which had been backed by both Britain and the US with munitions, aircraft and targeting support. In a sign of its diminishing influence, the Biden administration has had to approach China to urge Iran to stop Ansar Allah from continuing its attacks on commercial ships. Now both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which had collaborated in Saudi’s war on Yemen, have pointedly refused to join the naval alliance set up by Britain and the US to protect their shipping interests in the Red Sea.
Neither US nor British imperialism can afford to alienate the Zionist state for fear of having their grip on the Middle East loosened even further. This is all the more the case given Western imperialism’s disastrous proxy war with Russian imperialism in Ukraine. The US ruling class is split over continued support for Ukraine and its relations with Europe; the British and German ruling classes are now having to step up their efforts and make a bid to lead the European support for the stalling Ukrainian war effort – hence Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s contribution of £2.5bn in military aid. The war is in stalemate, and Ukraine faces a shortage of recruits as well as munitions. The combination of sanctions and proxy war has failed to defeat Russian imperialism and only deepened its economic relationship with China.
The evident double-standards of the Western imperialist powers in relation to Ukraine and Gaza have weakened their alliances further. Their demand that the ‘Global South’ should take a stand in support of Ukraine had anyway fallen on stony ground given the results of Western aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Added to that was the far greater concern the imperialists have had for the relatively few civilian casualties in Ukraine compared to their indifference towards the tens of thousands murdered in Gaza. The alienation of the poorer countries was evident in the UN General Assembly vote of 12 December when 153 countries voted for a ceasefire, with just nine siding with Israel, and then in the degree of international support for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
While Sunak struggles to show that Britain remains a global power and that it can substitute for US imperialism, he peddles an illusion. Its economy entered recession in 2023/24 quarter 2, and is likely to remain there in quarter 3. Nearly one in five councils face bankruptcy over the next 15 months while public services become more and more threadbare. Political distraction has become essential to the survival of the Tory government: stopping the boats and supporting war in Ukraine have been part of this. It has been unable to exploit the war on Gaza in a similar fashion. The ‘Hamas are terrorists’ narrative has never got any traction outside the most reactionary and racist layers of the electorate because the fictions spun by the Zionists were so obviously false. The liberal press, in particular The Guardian, have also failed to rouse significant pro-Zionist sentiment with their continuous repetitions of alleged Hamas war crimes on 7 October.
Labour imperialism
True to its imperialist character, the Labour Party has unconditionally endorsed the onslaught. Commitment to immediate recognition of a Palestinian state has been ditched; according to Shadow Minister for the Middle East Wayne David, it was anyway ‘T-shirt politics’, and its earlier position of immediate recognition would have ‘counted for very little apart from antagonising some people’. From now on it would feature as ‘part of the peace process’. Labour has always opposed an unconditional ceasefire and has tailed the government in talking about a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ which in practice requires the surrender of the Palestinian resistance and the return of the stooge Palestinian Authority to Gaza.
Not only have Starmer and the Labour leadership marched in lockstep with the government over Gaza, they have been equally supportive of military action against Ansar Allah. Like the Biden administration and the Tories, Labour has denied that the Ansar Allah actions have anything to do with the Yemeni support for Palestine. Instead, it has said the attacks ‘must stop…we must stand united and strong’. At a conference of the Zionist Jewish Labour Movement on 14 January, Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy echoed the current imperialist narrative which is demonising Iran: ‘It’s Iran that sits behind the Houthis. It’s Iran that sits behind Hezbollah.’ However, taking on Iran is a completely different scenario from launching missile attacks on Yemen.
Building an anti-imperialist movement
The mass of those protesting on the streets of Britain against the Zionist onslaught will have no truck with the Labour Party because of its rotten pro-imperialist character. Yet this has not stopped the Palestine Solidarity Campaign from bringing supposedly left wing Labour MPs onto its platforms – Zara Sultana and Apsana Begum, for instance, and of course Jeremy Corbyn – by emphasising the slogan of ‘Ceasefire now’. This call however leaves open what the conditions for such a ceasefire might be: does it require the resistance to lay down their arms? Would it involve the withdrawal of Zionist troops from Gaza, or an end to their 18-year-long siege? Hopes have been dashed that a positive ICJ ruling on a ceasefire would help.
What is quite clear is that the Zionist state is not going to give up on its genocidal war unless it is forced to, and that means breaking the support provided by Western imperialist powers. That means the movement in Britain has to focus on the role of the British state: that is the principal enemy we face rather than the Zionist state itself. We have to demand that British imperialism breaks all links with the Israeli state by imposing full economic, political, diplomatic and cultural sanctions. This cannot be achieved by making concessions to left Labour MPs as their interpretation of a ceasefire lets them cover up for the pro-Zionist and pro-imperialist character of the Labour Party. People know that in government, Labour will be as relentless enemies of the Palestinian people as the Tories are now. Sanctions against the Israeli state are the precondition for any ceasefire that serves the interests of the Palestinian people. We have to fight for them.
Isolate the Zionist state! No to imperialist plans for Palestine!
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 298 February/March 2024
