Joe Biden announced a new peace deal over Palestine from Washington last weekend and claimed it was backed by Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t agreed. Instead he is claiming that he will carry on until ‘total victory’. Whether Biden manages to convince him to accept in the next few days we will see. His hard right allies in government say no, the opposition leader and demonstrators say yes.
But Netanyahu knows he has little future politically once the war ends. And he knows he can defy Biden unless the latter seriously sanctions him by not supplying arms. He also knows that Biden is under pressure electorally and he wants to increase that in order to help Trump. So it continues. The suffering of the Palestinians is low down on the list of the western politicians’ priorities.
But we should also be concerned about the effects of their support for Israel on politics here. In particular we are seeing the alliance of right wing Zionists with the far right and even fascists. The Tommy Robinson demo – which was much bigger than anyone would have wanted – explicitly mobilised in opposition to the mass Palestine demos and was an alliance between these groups. It was full of Islamophobic slogans, and repeated the falsehood that there is ‘two tier policing’ on the demos and that the police are soft on Muslims in what they call ‘Londonistan’.
The Zionists and their backers are very isolated in opinion polls. So they are increasingly turning to aggressive street confrontations to challenge the Palestine movement.
We need to combine direct opposition to these movements with deepening and broadening the Palestine movement to strengthen our support. The trade unions are absolutely central to this and to helping to confront the priorities of both Sunak and Starmer.