YESTERDAY Labour prime minister Keir Starmer, French president Emmanuel Macron and Canadian prime minister Mark Carney issued what was called a stark warning to Benjamin Netanyahu to halt his ‘egregious’ actions in Gaza.
The use of the word ‘egregious’ in relation to the genocidal attacks by the Zionist state of Israel and the deliberate starvation of over two million Palestinians in Gaza is very revealing.
The dictionary definition of egregious is something ‘extremely bad in a way that is very noticeable’.
Starmer apparently hasn’t noticed the fact that over 55,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been massacred in Gaza or that Netanyahu’s government has long boasted of its intention to starve Palestinians to death in order to eradicate them from the Gaza Strip.
Starmer’s Labour government has always denied that a genocidal war is taking place every day of the week in Gaza by Israeli occupation troops and fighter jets that rely on UK technology to carry out their murderous attacks on hospitals and refugee camps.
Indeed, last week Starmer’s government, in a submission to the High Court in London defending authorising $169 million of military equipment to Israel, stated that it had found ‘no serious risk’ of genocide in Gaza.
In less than one year Starmer’s Labour government has supplied more military equipment to the Israeli state than the last four years of the Tory government.
Now Starmer and his fellow leaders have been forced to issue a statement that belatedly recognises what tens of millions of workers and youth have long known, that genocide and starvation are taking place and being ‘live-streamed’ to the world making it impossible for them to ignore.
The three governments say that they ‘strongly oppose the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza’ and warn they will take ‘concrete actions’ over the ‘intolerable’ human suffering being inflicted on Palestinians. Of course, exactly what these ‘concrete actions’ would be or when they would be introduced, if ever, was not specified.
Even US president Donald Trump was forced to give a grudging acknowledgement that starvation and genocide is inflaming US workers and youth and bearing down on his presidency, saying ‘a lot of people are starving’ in Gaza, claiming he would ‘take care’ of the situation.
Immediately this caused Netanyahu to panic and say that the situation in Gaza was taking Israel towards a ‘red line to a point where we might lose control’.
The attempts by Netanyahu to stop Israel from losing control amounted to permitting nine trucks containing food and water a day into Gaza to provide aid for two million Palestinians.
Yesterday, the UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, speaking on BBC’s Today programme, denounced this as only a ‘drop in the ocean’ and that 14,000 babies in Gaza could die in the next 48 hours if aid doesn’t reach them.
Starmer and the heads of France and Canada are clearly attempting to divert the massive opposition from millions of workers and youth with their sudden recognition of genocide in Gaza, but their hollow promise of concrete action sometime in the future will fool no one.
The heroic resistance of the Palestinian people has caused a massive crisis for the imperialist powers and its tame Zionist entity – a crisis that is spiralling out of control as the mass movement of workers demand action not just words to put an end to genocide made possible solely through the support of their capitalist governments.
The working class must immediately force the trade unions to take their own concrete action by calling general strikes throughout the EU, US and in Britain to bring down their genocide-supporting governments replacing them with workers’ governments.
Workers governments will immediately end all support for the Zionist regime, recognise the independent state of Palestine and provide all the material aid required for victory over the genocidal Israeli state.
This means building up the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required to put an end to imperialist-backed genocide with the victory of the world socialist revolution.