MONDAY marks a year since the deadly Hamas raid into Israel: a raid soon followed by Israel’s full-scale invasion of Gaza, the horrors of which continue.
And not just continue, but spread. The daily bombing of a trapped people goes on; the outrages visited on the West Bank grow bloodier; now Israel has invaded Lebanon.
General Michael E Kurilla, chief of US Central Command, has arrived in Israel to discuss its planned strikes on Iran. Revenge for Iran’s missile attack last week: though that was itself revenge for the killings of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Iran’s ally Hezbollah, and the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in the Iranian capital itself.
If the Middle East slides into a major regional war it will be because of ever more extreme provocations by the Israeli government.
Yet our Prime Minister Keir Starmer says Britain stands with Israel.
That is not true, as the weekend’s enormous marches for an immediate ceasefire show.
These marches have been sustained for nearly a year. They still bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets. They are accompanied by a city by city, town by town solidarity movement of demos, fundraising and direct action.
As multiple surveys show, the marches speak for the majority of this country’s people.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not markedly more representative of his people than Starmer. Huge demonstrations have called for a ceasefire in Israel. Relatives and friends of the hostages taken by Hamas a year ago can see that the safe return of their loved ones is not a priority for an Israeli government bent instead on wars of conquest and annihilation.
Months of witnessing the savagery of the Israeli Defence Forces as they conduct what the International Court of Justice says may plausibly amount to genocide has also opened eyes in Britain to their real goal: the destruction of the Palestinian people.
That is the course Israel is bent on, and there will be no justice nor peace in the Middle East until it is diverted from it.
That was the course Israel was bent on before October 7. Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz was braver than most British titles in immediately recognising the context of Hamas’s horrifying attack, stating within 24 hours that it was “the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu” who “failed to identify the dangers he was leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession.”
It was a brutal attack which murdered and kidnapped civilians.
It was also an attack born of desperation, a raid on an occupying power from an impoverished territory held under inhuman siege conditions for 17 years. Israel’s leaders must be made to understand that the occupation must end, and the Palestinians accorded the sovereign state they have so long been promised: there is no long-term security for their own people without justice for Palestine.
Israel’s escalation is not cost-free: as satellite imagery has shown, Iran’s strikes did more damage than Tel Aviv cares to admit, and a protracted exchange of fire may result in bloodshed on both sides.
But Israel’s technological advantage is huge, and it has nuclear weapons. These factors currently encourage Netanyahu to act recklessly.
So stopping Israel’s war machine depends on pressure from its allies. As French President Emmanuel Macron has now acknowledged, we need a total halt to arms supplies. Furthermore, we need a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that forces Britain to permanently end its complicity in the dispossession of the Palestinians.
The political right’s hysterical calls for maximal support for Israel, for its flag to be stamped on British border points and the like, recall the “Hang Nelson Mandela” badges of 1980s Conservative students: an extremism rooted in resentment of an actual, irreversible shift of public opinion against apartheid.
Attitudes to Israel’s occupation have changed, and our task is to bring Westminster into line with the British people.
