TOMORROW, Palestine solidarity actions will take place the length and breadth of Britain. Next weekend, huge numbers will join the next national demonstration for Palestine.
A strong turnout is needed. The government must feel the depth of anger over its refusal to call out Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza. It must no longer be allowed to hide behind talk of a two-state solution while helping Israel crush any prospect of a Palestinian state.
It is also vital to march in defence of our own rights, given the Metropolitan Police’s mass arrests at the last national demo.
State repression aims at dispersing the biggest peace movement this country has seen since Iraq — both to free Keir Starmer from pressure to stop collaborating with Israel’s genocide, and because exposing Britain’s role calls into question our so-called special relationship with the United States, ending which should no longer be taboo.
But it is also part of a wider authoritarianism reflected in the extraordinary jail sentences imposed on climate activists, in police aggression at picket lines, in the sharply reduced tolerance for dissenting voices in the Labour Party itself. As last month’s Defend the Right to Protest rally urged, the movement for Palestine must also become a movement for the repeal of the Public Order Act and for democratic rights.
Palestine is the most promising ground for the left to begin to fight back, and we need to. The far right are on the march.
The government bears a heavy responsibility for the surge in support for Nigel Farage. Its attacks on children in poverty and pensioners are unpopular and cruel. Its connivance at energy and water cartels hiking prices reinforce perceptions that Establishment politics is a crooked racket.
While fuelling the alienation the far right feeds on, Labour amplifies its claims about immigration. The Yorkshire & The Humber Labour Party advertising campaign, bragging about a five-year high in “migrant removals,” even uses Reform UK’s turquoise colour scheme, making clear who is shaping the narrative.
Palestine is where we begin to fight back. It is an anti-racist movement, both because it opposes a modern-day apartheid state and because those attacking it use Islamophobic propaganda to do so: claiming peace marches represent a takeover of Britain’s streets by elements hostile to our national culture, insinuating that Muslims are a threat to Jews, and associating them with terrorism.
And it is a popular movement. A majority of the public share marchers’ horror at the televised slaughter in Gaza. The far right’s alignment with Israel is a political weakness, particularly as it exposes how much they have in common with our current rulers, undermining the pretence they are a radical alternative.
The received wisdom is that foreign policy doesn’t influence voters, but the received wisdom in Britain has been proved wrong again and again in the last decade. And the streets are exactly where we must take on Reform: social media tends to preach to the converted.
Street stalls, fundraisers and local meetings are where the left has an opportunity to engage with those drawn to Reform and widen the conversation to other issues.
We should unpick concerns over housing, job security, NHS waiting lists or school places that the right blames on immigration, expose Farage’s anti-working class economic agenda, and win people to working with the left to battle the next wave of cuts, especially to local government. In the process people can be radicalised — in the right direction.
Some will say a peace movement focused on solidarity with a majority-Muslim country is not best-placed to reach potential Reform voters. But that underrates the complex play of motives driving support for an ostensibly “anti-Establishment” option.
And there is no movement in Britain right now bigger or more universally present in towns and cities than Palestine solidarity. It should be the crucible of a resurgent left.
