SATURDAY’S mass mobilisation for Palestine has a special significance.
It takes place at a key juncture for a ceasefire hanging by a thread. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz and US President Donald Trump used the same word, “hell,” to describe what they would unleash on Gaza from noon Saturday if Hamas even delayed the release of hostages in protest at Israel’s violation of agreements on the delivery of humanitarian aid.
We know this is no idle threat: hell was unleashed on Gaza for 15 months until mid-January, whole cities reduced to rubble, schools blown to smithereens, hospitals assaulted, with hundreds of Palestinian bodies uncovered in mass graves after the Israeli soldiers moved on.
We’ve seen evidence of the deliberate murder of medics, aid workers, journalists. Heard the pleas of a doomed child for rescue after her family were killed around her, in the knowledge that she and her would-be rescuers would be killed shortly afterwards. Watched horrific footage of a teenager on a drip in a hospital bed burnt to death by Israel’s bombs.
These unspeakable crimes have been justified by lies. That Israel was fighting Hamas, not the Palestinian people. That this operation was retaliation for the October 7 2023 attack by Hamas, stripped of the context of the 17-year Israeli siege of the impoverished territory or the decades of illegal occupation of Palestinian land: rather than a genocidal project for which October 7 was an excuse.
From both Westminster front benches, uninterrupted by the change in government, the lies have kept coming. That Britain was putting pressure on Israel for a ceasefire, while we continued to supply them with weapons and send surveillance missions to assist their war. That our government is committed to a two-state solution, a sovereign Palestine alongside a sovereign Israel, even as we supply, shield and grant privileged trading status to an Israel that is steadily colonising Palestinian land.
Now the mask is slipping. Trump is both the bull in the china shop and the elephant in the room.
His unabashed proposal to ethnically cleanse the entire population of Gaza, gleefully welcomed by Israel, shatters the pretence that this war is not about the erasure of the Palestinian people: he hints, at the same time, that he is soon to announce approval for Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
And the British response is to pretend everything is normal. To intone the old pieties about our commitment to a future Palestine, while avoiding any criticism of Trump’s plan. Challenged on it directly, Foreign Secretary David Lammy pleads that we can all agree Gaza needs to be rebuilt — an exercise in evasive cowardice remarkable even for him.
The government’s refusal to acknowledge reality is deliberate. It allows it to continue facilitating Israeli expansionism, now openly backed by the United States, without admitting the fact.
The government’s far greater concern at Trump’s disengagement from Europe adds another dimension. So far, appeasing Trump has involved pledges of ever greater military spending, offers to pay still more for the privilege of riding shotgun on the US war machine. Instead we must turn Trump into another argument for a completely new approach, a peaceful foreign policy independent of Washington.
Meanwhile the speed with which the “respectable” right, having rejected as a left-wing smear the idea that Israel was ethnically cleansing Palestine, now rush to cheer on ethnic cleansing is sobering: a Telegraph op-ed touting the advantages of removing the whole Gaza population to Somaliland no longer raises eyebrows.
It is up to us all to take a stand against a barbarism being normalised in newspaper columns, media broadcasts and ministerial briefings.
The last national march for Palestine was met with police obstruction and mass arrests. This weekend we must show the government, the police and the British state that we will not stop marching until Palestine is free.
