Over 300,000 workers, students and youth marched on Downing Street last Saturday in a massive demonstration of support for Palestine and demanding an end to the genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza.
It’s a genocidal campaign that has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, and which the Zionist regime is now extending to Lebanon.
All over the weekend, Israel pounded Lebanon’s border areas with it, while carrying out indiscriminate bombings and missile attacks on the capital Beirut.
Attacks on the Lebanese capital were significantly increased yesterday, to the extent that bombs rained down on residential areas on an hourly basis. Lebanese officials report that over 1,400 people have been killed so far by Israel.
What is clear is that the Israeli regime, backed and financed to the hilt by US imperialism and its allies in the UK, is desperately driving towards a war to exterminate the Palestinians and all resistance to the brutal occupation of their land.
All the calls emanating from the White House and Downing Street for ‘de-escalation’ and ‘negotiated ceasefire’ are just sanctimonious words designed to cover up the complete support of the imperialist powers for a genocidal war.
They back a war to crush all resistance to imperialist domination of the Middle East, and for the Palestinians to be an ‘irrelevancy’ controlled and subjugated by an invincible military Zionist state.
That invincibility was shattered a year ago, and has been exposed as fiction by the continued failure of the Israeli military to inflict any defeat on Hamas or its Hezbollah allies.
The situation has developed to the point where millions of workers and young people across the UK, Europe and the US understand that the burning issue of the hour is not just building solidarity with the Palestinians, but taking action.
Israel is enabled to carry out its genocidal campaign by the support and encouragement of the imperialist nations, and workers are demanding that the time has come to put an end to this support.
At the demonstration on Saturday, masses of workers and youth took up the demand of the WRP and Young Socialists for the trade unions to get off the fence and mobilise the full power of the working class in a general strike to kick out the Starmer Labour government.
In taking up the call for a general strike, workers see this is the only way to put an end to Labour’s complicity with genocide, and with its continually parroting support for Israel’s ‘right’ to self-defence and to hell with the rights of Palestinians not to be massacred by bombs dropped from planes whose vital components come from the UK arms industry.
The recent annual TUC congress unanimously passed a resolution calling for a one-day workplace action this Thursday 10th October.
This has been interpreted by the large Unison trade union as a call for lunch time meetings to express solidarity with Palestine, call for a ceasefire and for members to write to their local MP.
The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has announced it is holding a trade union conference on Saturday 19th October to ‘build solidarity with Palestine’ in the trade unions. Solidarity with the Palestinians doesn’t have to be built through yet more one-day conferences.
The working class and youth have already demonstrated their solidarity – what they are now demanding of the TUC is action!
They are demanding the TUC end all its inaction by making Thursday the start of an indefinite general strike to bring down this genocide-supporting Labour government and replace it with a Workers’ Government that will not only end all support for Israel but recognise the independent state of Palestine and give this state all the material support it requires for victory.
Any one-day conference must be held under the auspices and with the authority of the TUC general council to immediately organise this general strike.
The working class has the power to put an end to imperialist war and Zionist genocide by bringing down the Starmer regime and taking power by going forward to a Workers’ Government and socialism.
This will win the support of workers across the US and Europe and be a major leap forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution.
