Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his goals have expanded to include enabling Israelis who have fled areas near the Lebanese border to return to their homes. With the daily crossfire between Israeli forces and Hezbollah and Israel’s apparent use of pager devices to commit a horrific act of state terror, along with its continued rejection of a permanent Gaza ceasefire plan, a wider regional conflict looms ever closer.
Meanwhile in Gaza, schools, hospitals and refugee camps are being continually bombarded. The Palestinian Education Ministry says more than 11,000 students have been killed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank since 7 October, while a Lancet study estimated the true overall death toll in Gaza nearly one year on may be as high as 186,000.
The sickening bombing by Israeli war planes, likely US-made MK-84s, of displaced people’s tents in the so-called humanitarian “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed at least 40 Palestinians last week. But with people apparently vaporised by the intensity of the blasts – which created three enormous craters – the true death toll is likely much higher.
The use of 2000lb bombs against civilians sheltering in tents, in an area with few large buildings for Israel to claim them as the real target, is an unspeakable act. It tears apart the myth of a distinction between defensive versus offensive weapons that the British foreign secretary David Lammy clings to to justify going on arming Israel.
His recent suspension of some arms licences to Israel actually amounted to fewer than 10 per cent. The reality is that he, Keir Starmer and the rest are continuing the British state’s support for these war crimes and a total commitment to war and militarism.
Their “tough choices” on public spending don’t extend to dropping the government’s commitment to a 2.5 per cent increase in defence spending, which is already one of the highest in Europe. There’s always more money for bombs, but not for heating pensioners’ homes and raising millions of children out of poverty.
So we must continue to demand a total embargo of all arms sales to the apartheid Israeli state and for welfare, not warfare. Which is why we are taking the national Palestine march to Liverpool this Saturday as the Labour party starts gathering for its annual conference.
After the TUC Congress took unanimous decisions, after initial resistance by some delegations, to align trade unions with the pro-Palestine, pro-peace and anti-war movements, and to call for an end to Britain’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and escalation towards a wider war in the Middle East, including by ending all licences for arms traded with Israel, we now need no more prevarication from the labour movement.
The Labour government’s decision to reinstate funding for UNWRA and the abandonment of a proposal to block the ICC’s warrants against Netanyahu are victories for our pro-Palestine movement. Protest does work. But unions must now have a significant presence this weekend and at the following national demonstration on 5 October to strengthen our force for peace.
We are also starting to build for the next national workplace day of action for Gaza on 10 October, which is backed by the TUC, as we step up our efforts to keep the cause of Palestine in the forefront of politics.
We are 11 months into a genocide happening in real time. We cannot look away now. Join Stop the War and our coalition partners on the streets of Liverpool at Labour conference to call on the government to push for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and to immediately stop arming Israel.
Source: Labour Outlook
