“Despite the change of government, despite Starmer and David Lammy’s so-called efforts with world leaders, the fact is that the British state is still supporting these war crimes taking place on a daily basis.”
By Jennie Walsh, Stop the War
Keir Starmer’s claim at his first PMQs as prime minister that “standing on street corners protesting” would not deliver change was an insult to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have, for nearly 10 months, been taking action up and down the country in demand of a ceasefire in Gaza.
If it weren’t for our “street corner” protests, if the record numbers we’ve seen crammed into Whitehall, Hyde Park, outside the UK and Israeli embassies, and linking arms around Parliament, can even be described as that, Starmer would be paying about as much attention to Israel’s war on the Palestinian people as his predecessor.
His government’s early decisions to reinstate funding for UNWRA and to abandon its proposed block on the International Criminal Court’s warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant are undoubted victories for our movement.
The presence of five pro-Palestine independent MPs in the chamber as he made that cheap and tetchy jibe (having also had his own majority significantly reduced by the anti-war candidate Andrew Feinstein) that only diplomatic efforts would achieve anything, held up a mirror to the man’s dishonesty.
Those MPs’ victories did not come out of nowhere – they were built on the grassroots demands that emerged early in national and local campaigning around the “No Ceasefire, No Vote” slogan, seen on many national Palestine demonstrations.
The election proved that Labour has a big problem, and it’s our movement that’s created it. Protests do work!
Yet, and although the mainstream media barely reports it now, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and infliction of terrible collective punishment on the Palestinians continues to accelerate. At least 30 people, many of them children, were killed at the weekend in the bombing of a girls’ school being used as a shelter and field hospital. A Lancet study has estimated that the true overall death toll may be as high as 180,000.
Despite the change of government, despite Starmer and David Lammy’s so-called efforts with world leaders, the fact is that the British state is still supporting these war crimes taking place on a daily basis.
And now we hear that the UK will delay a decision on stopping arms to Israel because it’s looking to only suspend export licenses for specific weapons systems – the ones that can be linked to suspected war crimes. This is a disgrace and quite clearly being done to protect the arms industry and our relationship with the US.
So we cannot, we will not let up the pressure now. We must continue to demand the government suspends ALL arms sales to the apartheid Israeli state, as well as calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the suffering in Gaza.
And we must raise our voices as a movement against further escalation in Lebanon, which threatens a much wider regional conflagration, with even further devastation.
That’s why we’ll be marching through the heart of London again this weekend, on the streets and the street corners, from Park Lane to Downing Street, to tell Starmer and his government: stop arming Israel, end the genocide!
Join us.
- The National March for Palestine takes place Saturday 3 August, assemble 12 noon, Park Lane, marching to Downing Street.
- Jennie Walsh is the Press Officer for Stop the War. You can follow Stop the War on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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