LAST Friday the UK and US governments combined at a meeting of the UN Security Council to veto a draft statement calling for an investigation into the murder of 17 unarmed Palestinians and the wounding of 1,500 men, women and children by the Israeli army.
Earlier on Friday, a peaceful demonstration of 30,000 Palestinians at the Israeli fence on the Gaza strip had been met with tank fire, CS gas delivered by drones, and random shootings by 100 Israeli army snipers with orders to fire at will. The UK and the US are complicit in this atrocity.
By vetoing the demand for an inquiry into this massacre of innocent Palestinians the Tories gave their full support to the murderous, illegal Zionist occupiers and their total disregard of Palestinian lives. This was backed by the bourgeois media which relegated the story of this massacre to the back pages and were quick to parrot the Israeli lies that these unarmed demonstrators, marching to protest at the theft of their land by the occupiers and demanding the right of return, were all violent terrorists.
While Palestinian lives were being dismissed as barely worthy of comment these same papers were much more concerned to splash across their front pages yet more lying slanders against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. For weeks there has been a coordinated campaign of slander against Corbyn with accusations that he is an anti-Semite, indeed the entire Labour Party is a hotbed of anti-Semitic racism presided over by him.
This campaign of vilification reached its low point last week with the demonstration organised by the ardent Zionist ‘Board of Deputies’ called to denounce Corbyn. This group, which makes the outrageous claim to represent every Jew in the country, was joined by over 15 Labour right-wing MPs plus assorted Tory MPs keen to get in on the smash Corbyn operation and return the Labour Party to the safety of a Blairite leadership campaign.
For this is exactly what this campaign of vilification is all about – a witch-hunt to remove Corbyn or provide the basis for a split in the parliamentary Labour Party and the formation of a right-wing group of Labour MPs who will join with the Tories in a coalition government. This strategy is unfolding rapidly as this Tory minority government is splitting apart and teetering on the edge of collapse. This smear of anti-Semitism is just the latest in a campaign to remove Corbyn.
Earlier this year he was denounced in the Tory press as a spy for the former Czechoslovakia. Then he was a spy for Russia and traitor to Britain over his justifiable refusal to go along with the hysterical war drive against Russia over the unproven accusations that Russia had poisoned the spy Sergei Skripal.
What links these campaigns by the Israeli government and the British ruling class together is the fear that this hated Tory government is on its last legs and that a Labour government under Corbyn poses a threat to both since it would not be able to control the working class. For the Israelis, the threat was contained in the Labour election manifesto which pledged to recognise the independent state of Palestine and the support Corbyn has given in the past to the international boycott of Israel campaign.
For the British ruling class, the fear is that its plans to whip up war hysteria against Russia and plough billions into building up the armed forces will be difficult to achieve with a Corbyn-led Labour government. It would mean ending completely any spending on the NHS and the welfare state and diverting billions into war preparations. Corbyn could not deliver this. Neither can a weak Tory regime.
This is a job for a National Government. This can only be achieved through splitting the Labour Party and using a manufactured massive Russian ‘red scare’, a supercharged version of the ‘Zinoviev Letter’, to bring in a ‘whiteguard’ government of national emergency.
To defeat this joint conspiracy, Corbyn must end immediately his attempts to reach conciliation with the right-wing and Zionists, condemn the murder of Palestinians, re-affirm Labour’s commitment to recognising the free independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital, and call on the mass of workers and youth to kick out the Tories, and bring in a Labour workers government!
