WE ARE part of the axis of war fighting to deprive the Palestinians of their birthright. We have been for decades. We are not just passive observers, supporters and suppliers — we are active participants in that war.

Most obviously, we supply and buy arms, but more importantly we co-operate on signals and other intelligence, on military systems we provide operational support and equipment, we allow the use of Cyprus as a supply base, we use the air force and navy for flyover and other logistics support. We trade, we supply unfettered access to finance and we fund and aid the occupation.

We need much more than an arms embargo — although it would be a start. We need Britain to withdraw from its long-standing alliance with the US and Israel to eliminate Palestine from the political and, now, the physical global map. We need to decouple from the US and decolonise from Israel.

Donald Trump’s “plan” is not new, it has just never been so openly stated by Israel’s allies. Blurted out by Trump, it may have been — but it reveals the real agenda that has long been the war’s objective. This is the war that this Labour government is a part of — consciously and deliberately. This is not an accident inherited from the last or previous governments, it is the direct consequence of government actions and decisions. Cowering behind platitudes on the two-state solution are meaningless when actively participating in a war designed to make such or any other solution impossible.

Starmer is going to go down in Labour history as as much a warmonger as Tony Blair. It was Blair’s messianic belief that he was right over Iraq that contributed to his downfall and destroyed any positive legacy he might have hoped for. In the same way Starmer’s belief — notwithstanding his claim to be an atheist, that Israel can do no wrong — is going to prove to be his nemesis. 

It is the issue that will dog him throughout his premiership. Just like the Palestinians, it will not go away, it is going to haunt him throughout the life of this government and beyond — on the doorstep, in the polls and within the party. 

He should not take the current acquiescence within the party to be agreement, many loyal MPs and members are remaining quiet — not least out of fear of retribution — but are deeply unhappy with the role Labour is playing in this war. 

In an excellent article on Hamas, by Tom Stevenson in the London Review of Books — one of the first reasoned and rational analyses I have seen in the British media — he identifies that “any violence committed by Palestinians justifies all violence by Israel, and no violence committed by Israel justifies any by Palestinians.”

Hamas have described Trump’s proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza as racist. In this instance they are right — it is a plan born and bred on anti-Palestinian racism, it is Islamophobic, it is yet another example of Western “Orientalism.” Regarding all Arabs as infidels, terrorists and lesser beings who can be treated in a subhuman way. Ethnic cleansing is — by self-definition, racist, it is yet another war crime in which the Labour government is becoming complicit by its continuing actions in support of the war on Palestine.

And behind all the headlines about “clearing out” Gaza, we should not lose sight of two other issues that were identified by Mustafa Barghouti recently as priorities for the solidarity movement in Britain. First, Israel’s opening of a second war front in the West Bank. Transferring the methods of Gaza to Jenin and elsewhere, with virtually every town and village in the West Bank now under lockdown and curfew. 

The West Bank is following in the footsteps of Gaza, another open prison on which jet fighters offload, with impunity, bombs deliberately aimed at known civilian targets. 

Second, the threat of the annexation of the West Bank is becoming ever more real. The world did nothing when East Jerusalem was annexed in 1967, the annexation of the West Bank would achieve the zionist objective of a greater, Eretz Israel encompassing the whole of what Benjamin Netanyahu consistently refers to as Judaea and Samaria, rather than Palestine.

Traditionally, the solidarity movement has been reluctant to actively call for recognition, feeling it impinges on the Palestinian right to self-determine the nature and form of the Palestinian state — the historic “one state, two state” debate. 

However, Trump has changed the debate. It is no longer one about the shape or form of a future Palestinian state — it is about whether there will ever be a Palestinian state or not. In this context, Britain unilaterally and with immediate effect recognising the state of Palestine, joining the 146 countries who already do, would be a very significant step. A potential “line in the sand” saying to the US and Israel, we have come this far along the settler colonial route, but no further — we are not going to be a party to the elimination of Palestinian self-determination. 

It would be a small step for Labour, but a giant one for Palestine because of Britain’s historic and current active role in the war, it would reverberate around the world in a way that most of our actions no longer do — thankfully. It could also signal the start of the beginning of ending our war on Palestine.