THE last week has seen a step change in mainstream narratives on Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza.
The outcry over the killing of seven aid workers, three of them British citizens, has now forced Israel to fire two army officers and promise to allow aid into regions it has been starving to death.
Alarm at the savagery and recklessness of the Israeli government — which also bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus this week, which looks like a brazen attempt to ignite a wider regional war — is finally beginning to stir the consciences of the ruling class.
Establishment newspapers, including the hard-right Mail and Express, have belatedly joined the Morning Star in putting Israeli war crimes on the front page. Calls for an arms embargo have spread beyond the political left, to Tory MPs and hundreds of legal experts including former Supreme Court judges.
The continued effective endorsement of Israel’s war by Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, despite near-universal outrage at what’s happening, will be remembered. These are cynical politicians, unmoved by the loss of human life even in the scale we have seen in Palestine for six months but so frightened of the millions of British people who want to hold them to account they will try every trick in the book to ban protests and criminalise solidarity action.
Some on the left have objected to the sudden uproar over the deaths of the seven World Central Kitchen workers when hundreds of aid workers, medics and journalists, and thousands of women and children, have been killed in this war without prompting the same reaction.
To that we must respond that our overarching responsibility is to work for unity and apply maximum pressure to end the war.
Of course there are elements of hypocrisy, and even of racism, from some who see this particular bombing as a step too far. But we should not lose perspective.
The majority of British people backed a ceasefire long before this incident — and not for decades have we seen so huge and sustained a street movement as has been marching for peace for six months. What we have seen in the past week is not so much a shift in public opinion, as a bending of the Establishment under its weight.
Every pressure point should be pressed if it helps end the arms sales our government continues to authorise, including by highlighting the fact that weaponry partly built here has been used to kill our own citizens.
The increasing isolation of apologists for Israel’s war should be driven home. Accusations of anti-semitism levelled at anyone critical of Israeli state racism are looking increasingly preposterous: this can be used to hit back at attempts to ban the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and raise awareness of British complicity in the ongoing horror that is the occupation of Palestine, before and after this war.
As the demands of the street movement start filtering through to the corridors of power, the street movement’s own vindication can be asserted.
We can demand MPs call out and reject the crazed authoritarianism of unelected government advisers like Robin Simcox and John Woodcock, who want to permanently erode our freedoms of speech and assembly. We can work to draw trade unions, charities and layers of local and devolved government into formal opposition to Michael Gove’s new extremism definition, itself another authoritarian response to the peace movement, with the aim of forcing its abandonment by this government or the next.
And we can rehabilitate the cause of peace. The Labour right’s attempt to exorcise the ghost of Corbynism by smearing anti-war campaigners as stooges of Putin or China has been allowed to go too far: the Gaza war has opened eyes to the ugly reality of Britain’s role on the “international stage,” and the need to change it.
