Ahead of the May local elections in Britain, 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 was 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’. Reports indicated that upwards of 1,600 candidates signed the pledge, of which just over 600 were elected.
In practice, ‘Vote Palestine’ was an electoral campaign for the Greens, who made up well over half the candidates that had signed the pledge and 392 of those elected. These are 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 and expelling anti-Zionist activists from the party. Of the other candidates, several hundreds came from the Labour Party, whose thoroughly Zionist and imperialist character has been made abundantly clear with every consecutive government formed. The Vote Palestine campaign allowed the Labour ‘left’ to wash its hands of the Party’s crimes and rehabilitate itself in the eyes of the Palestine solidarity 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 diverted the already waning energy of the Palestine solidarity 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’ encouraged people to go door-knocking and leafleting on behalf of candidates. Now, the campaign will cease to exist and many will go home satisfied they got a candidate who signed the pledge in. ‘Vote Palestine’ distracted and demobilised the movement, driving it towards respectability, rendering it unable to challenge British support for Israel’s intensifying attacks on Gaza and the West Bank.
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, not within it.
Sarah Guebre-Egziabher
