Yves here. With even news outlets overseas fattened up on the Biden and now Trump coverage, it seems more important than ever to ignore other big stories. But I have to admit that I found this one in Gaza, Starmer, and Labor to be strange, starting with the first word in the article, “desolation”. Why does it seem necessary to avoid using words that clearly refer to loss of life and horrific human rights violations, such as “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”?
Readers with UK experience please feel free to correct me, but it seems hard to see how Starmer not opposing Israel’s policies is a major obstacle to Labour. As far as I can tell, UK voters who oppose Israel’s bloody campaign against the Palestinians have nowhere to go. Labour, the Conservatives, and the Instant Reform Party all strongly support Israel. The Lib Dems, who won the election, have some MPs who have criticized Israel. However, they were reprimanded by the leaders of the groups. George Galloway’s Workers Party was vocally hostile to Zionism, but Galloway lost his seat and none of the candidates. That failure is due to the fact that Sunak called the election at the beginning of the half (if not more) to thwart the new and poorly organized party. But will it have gas in the next parliamentary contest?
Perhaps I am wrong in seeing the UK electorate as having nothing to do with Israel and therefore Starmer’s support for Israel’s appalling behavior as cheap and worthless. If so, it would be very helpful to find out why.
By Paul Rogers, Distinguished Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at the University of Bradford, and Distinguished Fellow in the Joint Service Command and the Staff College. He is an international security correspondent for openDemocracy. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPROgers. Originally published on openDemocracy
The Labor Party’s landslide victory in the general election on 4 July has been compared to the party’s previous victories under Tony Blair in 1997 and Clement Atlee in 1945. But Keir Starmer won a much smaller share of the vote than Blair or Attlee again, unlike in 1997 and 1945. , the spirit of the victors was far from happy – a squib more damp than a fireworks display.
The party’s success was not based on the widespread popularity of Starmer’s policies, but the opposition concentrated on 14 years of Tory rule, helped by Nigel Farage’s Reform Party taking votes from the Conservatives, the collapse of the SNP vote in Scotland and the party. unusually low national polling.
Labor was also stymied by a large number of voters who abandoned the party – many of whom were inspired by its advocacy of Israel’s attack on Gaza. The mainstream media attributed this to the majority of the UK’s Muslim minority, portraying it as a sectarian issue – ignoring the anger and hurt felt by many on the left.
Independents were heavily represented on the pro-Gaza ticket in many areas in the north of England, the Midlands and London. Five were elected – a record for a general election – and many came close, notably Leanne Mohamad in Ilford North, who managed to reduce new health secretary Wes Streeting’s majority from 5,218 to just 528.
In total, in 57 constituencies, Labour’s main challenger was an independent or from the Green Party or the Workers Party. The Greens’ leap forward was more remarkable – they came second with 40 seats, all held by Labour, up from three in 2019.
As the new independent election has repeatedly said during the election campaign, Gaza is one of the reasons for not supporting the new Starmer regime. Many Labor traditionalists are also unhappy that the party is going right and embracing Big Business, as revealed last week by openDemocracy. Labor now looks set to end up as a centre-right party – displacing a few million people.
However, Labour’s position in Gaza was undoubtedly a major factor in its loss of majority in many seats. It presents a problem for Labor in general and Starmer in particular that will never go away – and it has several components.
The first is that Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his far-right Knesset supporters have long supported the view that defeating Hamas in Gaza requires punishment for all people. It is this doctrine called Dahiya that has a major impact on the horrific loss of life for the Palestinian people.
The number of dead in Gaza is at least 37,000, with 10,000 missing, most of them buried under the rubble, and more than 70,000 injured. The world’s leading health journal, The Lancet, recently published a book suggesting that if unintentional deaths – including those caused by disease, malnutrition and increased infant mortality – mean the number of lives lost could reach 186,000.
The second is that the current war is never ending. There are times when it looks like negotiations are starting but they repeatedly end up failing, as has happened in the last six months at least. The suffering of Palestine is great but the leadership of the Hamas army believes that it can endure, especially since the claims of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) that most of Gaza has been removed from Hamas turned out to be false.
The current Israeli leadership has little interest in long-term disarmament. Netanyahu will continue his attack on Gaza until at least the US presidential election in November, now hoping that Donald Trump’s survival from the latest shooting will help secure his victory. Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing invasion of Palestinian land and the people of the West Bank is a further sign of its long-term insistence on permanent control “from the river to the sea”.
Finally, there is another aspect that is rarely understood. The sheer scale of the loss of life and widespread Palestinian suffering as a result of Israel’s attack on Gaza has already caused a long-lasting – perhaps permanent – shift in attitudes towards Israel and support for Gaza in the UK, which reaches far beyond Muslim communities.
This shift is likely to increase as more evidence emerges about Israel’s military conduct. Last week a well-informed foreign journalist, Chris McGreal, published a report on the IDF’s repeated use of cluster munition shells in densely populated urban areas. Perhaps the most damaging of all such legislation is Israel’s M339 tank shell, which its manufacturer, Elbit Systems, describes as “highly dangerous to children who drop it”. It is no doubt even more against children.
The deliberate impact on people, especially children, is shocking and causes injuries that would be difficult to treat even in fully equipped and operational hospitals – which are no longer in Gaza due to the Israeli bombing campaign.
More similar reports will follow McGreal’s and the cumulative effect will last for years, greatly increasing calls for international legal action against Netanyahu and his government.
This is where Starmer is most vulnerable. Thanks to the work of several investigative journalists, especially Declassified UK, we know more than the British government would like about the UK’s close ties with Israel – including the many roles of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus in helping Israel and hundreds of thousands. of pounds flowed from the Israeli lobby to Cabinet ministers.
Unless there is a major change in policy towards Israel with Starmer in Downing Street, the attack on Gaza will remain a Labor issue for the foreseeable future. Add to this the wider perception that Labor is moving significantly to the right and the parliamentary majority may not be as stable as it first appeared.
Source link