“We need to continue to build, focus and develop the strength and impact of our work”
By Hugh Lanning, Labour and Palestine
They think it is all over.
Read the press, listen to the supposed leaders of the world congregating in Sharm El Sheikh, and you’d think Israel’s war on Gaza and the Palestinian people had ended. That we had peace in our time. The breaches and bombings by Israel already show that they regard this ceasefire as the same as all those that went before – there to be broken at their discretion.
The true intent of Trump’s plan can be seen from those queuing up behind him to make money out of the genocide. Trump’s son-in-law – Jared Kushner, is organising companies through his investment business, Affinity Partners, to be ready to grab a large share of the business of reconstructing Gaza. Not to be outdone, the British Government has hosted a 3-day PFI gala in London with the same purpose.
It is transparently obvious that this is not about the self-determination of the Palestinian people. It is about creating a new neo-colonial infrastructure overseen and controlled by the US and Israel, that Palestinians, as long as they are well-behaved, will be able to inhabit. But it won’t be an independent state in any meaningful sense.
This isn’t an abstract, technical issue about the nature of a nation-state; for Palestinians, it is a very real one. For the last 70 years, Israel has been constructing an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. It is based on stolen Palestinian land enforced by Israel’s military might, funded and supplied by the West and the US in particular.
The truth of the agreement signed in Egypt over the heads of the Palestinians can be easily judged. Do the Palestinians get their land back? Does Israel withdraw from the 60% of Gaza it has militarily occupied? Will the military occupation of the West Bank end? Will Palestine be able to have its own security forces, laws and courts?
Then there is the issue of what the borders will be. Israel has never set any limit to its borders; it has never recognised the right of Palestine to exist. Netanyahu and his Government have repeatedly stated there will never be a Palestine they will recognise, and made it clear they want a ‘greater Israel’ from the “river to the sea”. A claim not decried by Starmer as racist and anti-Palestinian. A two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital is a million miles from Israel’s mind.
If not a million miles, then a million settlers. Is Israel promising to remove a single settlement or settler, all illegal under international law? Quite the reverse, Israel wants this process to result in the normalisation and international acceptance of its colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Leaving the Palestinians in a string of unsustainable Bantustans dependent on external aid and trade. No mention of the wall being taken down or removed to within the 1967 borders. It will continue to enclose and imprison the Palestinian people.
Will Palestine have control of its own borders, as most Western countries are currently saying is so vital to protect their democracies from invading migrants and refugees? Will it be allowed to expel its unwanted Israeli ‘immigrants’, withdraw their ‘leave to remain’? Will Palestinians be able to travel, trade, import and export freely – restoring their airport, rail and sea links?
We know the answers to all these questions – none of them are positive. The two states the Western powers are pretending to be interested in is nothing but a wafer-thin cover story used in order to mask the reality of the war crimes they have committed. These crimes cannot be undone by a phony peace agreement that entrenches Israel’s power.
If the truce, pause or ceasefire sustains itself for days, weeks or months, it will never undo the many red lines of international law that have been crossed. It is not only Netanyahu and his criminal colleagues that need to be arrested and held to account in the Hague, but the British and Western Governments complicit in these crimes. This wasn’t just a crime of sitting on their hands, doing nothing while the genocide went on – it was the active collaboration of our arms industry, our intelligence services and our armed forces. We were, indeed, still are, part of Israel’s war machine.
In addition to these issues, there is a growing body of evidence, not only of Israel’s genocide, but of its ‘ecocide’. It has deliberately destroyed Palestinian agricultural land, its olive trees, its farms and animals. It has poisoned the land, polluted the water and aquifers. Destroyed its water, electrical and sewage systems.
In this context, it is not the time to wind down our campaigning in support of Palestine; we need to continue to build, focus and develop the strength and impact of our work. Whilst Labour tries to find more and more ways to limit the right to protest, it is fighting a losing battle. The tide of global opinion, justice, the younger generation, voters are all against this totalitarian “Iron Heel” agenda Labour is rolling out as part of its ongoing sectarian onslaught on all its critics. Unless, of course, you happen to be a racist, right-wing reformist.
The agenda we should be supporting is the decolonisation of Israel’s apartheid regime – brick by brick, settlement by settlement, until there is a genuinely free, viable, secure Palestine recognisable as a state not just in name, but in reality, too.
- Hugh Lanning is an officer of Labour and Palestine, former Chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and former Deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union.
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- WATCH: Hugh and others speak at Freedom for Palestine – the defining issue of our time.
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