LAST Saturday, at least 88 Palestinians were killed and over 289 injured by Israeli bomb strikes on the displaced peoples camp in Khan Younis, an area that had been designated by the Israeli military a ‘safe’ zone for Palestinians in Gaza.
The day after this latest act of genocidal murder, the new Labour Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, made his first overseas visit to Israel where he shook hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and offered not one word of condemnation of the war crimes being committed daily by the Zionist regime.
The United Nations Palestinian Relief organisation UNRWA reported that the past week was ‘one of the most deadly’ in the war on Gaza – but none of this was reflected in Lammy’s craven crawling before Netanyahu. Instead, all Lammy could offer was to parrot the usual anodyne words about ‘ceasefire’ and a promise of more ‘humanitarian aid’ to Gaza.
Exactly the same meaningless set of words used by the US government and the previous Tory government as a cover for their cast-iron support and arming of the terrorist Israeli regime that in the past eight days alone has attacked five separate schools in Gaza killing dozens of people sheltering in them – most of them women and children.
Lammy has said that he and Labour embrace a doctrine of ‘progressive realism’ – which translates into doing what the UK’s imperialist master in the United States tells it to do.
This has emerged in a report on Monday in the Israeli newspaper Maariv that Lammy had given assurances to Israel that Labour would carry on with the objection to the application by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant.
The legal objection to the ICC application was made in the dying days of the Tory government under instruction from the US which does not recognise the ICC and has no ability to veto its decisions. The aim was to delay the arrest warrant while Israel carried on with complete legal immunity for its war crimes.
Before the general election, Lammy had indicated to the press that Labour would drop this objection but it now appears that, like every other one of Starmer’s right wing Labour government’s promises, this is to be junked on instructions from the US.
Meanwhile as Lammy was embracing Netanyahu, at home Labour’s new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper announced she will be chairing a meeting of a ‘Defending Democracy’ task force in response to the ‘alarming rise’ in harassment, intimidation and abuse towards candidates in the election.
The majority of these accusations of intimidation relate to the anger expressed by workers and youth about the Labour leadership’s complicity with the Israeli war machine.
Cooper, a well known supporter of Israel, has been spurred on by a dossier handed to her by Lord Walney – formerly right-wing Labour MP John Woodcock and chair of Labour Friends of Israel – who was appointed by the Tories as their ‘extremism advisor’, a position he maintains under the new Labour government.
Walney has reportedly told Cooper that the campaigns that saw Israeli-supporting Labour candidates losing their seats to independents standing in support of Palestine and against genocide in Gaza was the result of a ‘concerted campaign by extremists’ who represent the ‘dark underbelly of abuse’.
Walney has previously called for the banning of Palestine Action and ‘far left’ groups.
The defeat of leading Labour Party MPs, including shadow cabinet minister Jon Ashworth, by pro-Palestinian independents has caused shockwaves and underlined just how vulnerable Starmer is, despite his massive majority, to a mass movement of workers and youth who, while hating the Tories, are not prepared to tolerate complicity with genocide from a Labour government.
All attempts to crush support for Palestine and the Palestinian revolution must be met immediately by the organisation of a general strike to bring down the Starmer-led capitalist government, replacing it with a workers’ government that will end all military and political support to Israel replacing it with military support for Palestinians and the independent state of Palestine.
Forward to the British socialist revolution and forward to the state of Palestine.
