ON Thursday October 3, Israel bombed the Tulkarem refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The strike, which targeted a busy cafe and killed 18 people, was conducted with an Israeli war plane using a heavy missile.
 
“We’ve grown used to the sound of drones,” recalled one Tulkarem resident. “But we haven’t seen a bombing from a fighter jet since the Second Intifada.” the West Bank, where one child has been killed every two days since October, is just one of the multiple fronts on which the Israeli regime is escalating its violence.
 
In this effort to foment regional war, Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli state do not act alone. Their war effort is sustained by Western imperialism in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen.
 
As survivors searched for bodies among the rubble of Tulkarem’s tower blocks, the British and US militaries carried out their own bombing 1,500 miles to the south.
 
Plumes of smoke rose above Sanaa as the Yemeni capital was struck from the sky. No stranger to British bombs, Yemen has already been the target of numerous RAF raids this year as part of the US-led Operation Prosperity Guardian.
 
Three days earlier, while Israeli tanks rolled into Lebanon, Keir Starmer strained to perpetuate the lie that Israel was acting merely in “self-defence,” claiming that “no-one wants a regional war.”
 
Before the week was out, London joined Washington to further destabilise a nation where more than two million children are suffering from acute malnutrition.
 
Britain has stoked escalation in Lebanon too, where more than 1.2 million people have been displaced in the last two weeks. Over 80 military transport planes have flown to Beirut from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus since last October, reports Declassified UK.
 
The people of Lebanon were marking the 44th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre when Israel’s pager attack left thousands injured last month. Even former CIA Director Leon Panetta was left in no doubt that this indiscriminate act constituted terrorism.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” said Mark Twain. It rhymed In 1982, in 2006 and in 2024, Lebanon is razed to the ground by Israel’s war machine with the consent, and assistance, of its Western allies.
 
“We did in Beirut exactly what [the Israelis] are doing in Gaza,” recalled one participant of the 1982 invasion earlier this year. “We turned off the water, the electricity, everything. But there was no social media so people didn’t know so much.”
 
Today, Israel’s genocide is live-streamed straight to our phones and yet, in late September, Washington sent an $8.7 billion military aid package to Tel Aviv.
 
In 1958, South Africa’s foreign minister told the US ambassador that although his country was becoming a pariah state, it would not matter as long as apartheid South Africa retained US support. He was correct.
 
As the tools available to those who seek peace and justice in Palestine fail to halt Israel’s war, his words are worth remembering. From pressing international institutions to treat Netanyahu with impunity to licensing the assassination of diplomats on foreign soil, the role of imperialism in fuelling a wider war is transparent to all who care to look.
 
US weapons exports hit a record high in 2023. Between September 2023 and April 2024, the global capitalisation of the 14 biggest arms companies grew by 20 per cent. We stand on the edge of regional war and those pushing the Middle East over the precipice inhabit the halls of Westminster and the West Wing, as well as the Knesset.
 
“Forget about rules, forget about world order,” said one G7 diplomat last October. “They [the global South] won’t ever listen to us again.” The last 12 months have laid bare the inescapable reality that, for Western governments, some lives just do not matter. Humanity is not universal. Human dignity extends to some, but never others.
 
In the newspapers, Palestinians “die.” They are never killed. Hospitals are no longer a sanctuary for the wounded but a legitimate target for fighter jets. Schools and universities are levelled to the ground in controlled explosions.
 
International law has been emptied of any meaning it held. If more than 40,000 people can be erased without consequence, what really is a war crime? All of this, and more, retains the “ironclad” support of the supposed free world.
 
However, perceived Western moral authority has not just been erased on the global stage. In domestic terms, the detachment of government and Parliament from popular opinion has bred political crises for the British ruling class.
 
The violent removal of young protesters demanding that Starmer, an esteemed human rights lawyer, enforce international law at the Labour Party conference is only the latest example of this intellectual insecurity.
 
The weaponisation of Islamophobia is another. Seeking to portray muslims as inherently violent, the British state and mainstream media manufacture consent for their complicity in Netanyahu’s drive for wider war.
 
Asked by one Conservative MP about his government’s suspension of 8.5 per cent of British arms licences to Israel, Starmer took refuge in legal advice. His decision was not political, but technocratic. He had no choice but to follow his lawyers’ guidance.
 
Similarly, asked about giving up the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, Starmer shunned politics once more to reiterate the importance of maintaining the joint US-UK base on Diego Garcia. Of course, when the Tory leadership hopefuls accused the government of surrendering British sovereignty, they failed to mention the enduring presence of the US military boot print.
 
Starmer’s denial of agency on foreign affairs reflects his domestic anti-politics. Precluding the possibility of independent foreign policy, this attitude confirms Britain’s adherence to Washington’s agenda and the Israeli regime’s reckless escalation.
 
In these times, the primary task of the anti-war movement remains unchanged: to exploit the contradictions that stem from Starmer’s policy and break the chains of complicity that sustain Israel’s war.