Is public opinion finally turning as Israel’s lies and atrocities come to light?

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Rishi Sunak: “Netanyahu’s poodle” digs his heels in, during a Parliamentary debate. But how long can he ignore growing public opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza?

Rishi Sunak offered Israel unequivocal support in its “defence” against the Hamas attack of October 7 – a “defence” that has already been more than three times more deadly than the attack itself, while doing nothing to end any threat Hamas poses to that country.

He said he spoke for the British people. But there is growing evidence that, once again, he is speaking only for himself.

Here’s Peter Oborne to explain some of it:

Here’s SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn to explain that, in supporting Israeli war crimes, Sunak can only be speaking for himself. At the end of the clip, Sunak rises to repeat the falsehood that Israel is only defending itself. We can see that this is not true:

It seems the people of the UK are tired of hearing that Israel has a right to defend itself when the numbers coming out of Palestine are so horrific:

We want a ceasefire and we want efforts to resolve this crisis peacefully – and it seems clear that feeling for this is growing among our politicians:

The message isn’t getting through to Israel’s representatives, though. Tzipi Hotovely, that country’s far-right-wing Ambassador to the UK, told Piers Morgan that the UK was happy to bomb civilians in order to defeat Nazis, as if that justifies her country’s actions now.

She’s wrong, by the way. The bombing of Dresden was hugely controversial at the time and became more so after World War II. And morality in the UK has changed in the decades since, to the point where we would not do such a thing again.

We, as a nation, have grown. Why has Israel not?

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The apologists are still out in force, with Israel supporter Andrew Neil giving full-throated support to the latest reel of video clips to come from Tel Aviv, purportedly showing Hamas atrocities committed on October 7:

This Writer actually responded to his post, pointing out that it’s hard to believe a post like this when it starts with a lie. If these people were killed by Hamas, it wasn’t because they were Jewish but because they were Israeli settlers who had stolen Palestinian property (as that group would have seen it).

If this footage was taken on October 7, why was it not released immediately it was taken from the Hamas bodies? Israel was desperate to justify itself in the early days after the attack but resorted to lies instead. Even if it is real, the footage is hard to believe in this context.

Finally – and also on context – I asked: can we see some footage from IDF bodycams of what they’ve been doing to kill – what is it? – 250 Palestinians in the year up to October 7? Or has that all gone missing?

I wasn’t the only one asking the last question – although others were able to add more detail to it:

Here’s another response on similar lines:

We must remember, also, that Israeli propaganda about the way Hamas has treated Israeli citizens is being disproved with every hostage released by that organisation:

So we come back to the possibilities for the future. Jeremy Corbyn stood up in the House of Commons, demanded to know why the UK’s representative in the United Nations had been instructed to abstain on a call for a humanitarian ceasefire, and called for positive steps toward peace – but his words fell on deaf ears. Here are a couple of possible explanations for that:

Let us not forget that violence begets violence. What Israel is doing now will not bring an end to hostilities between that country and Palestinians – it will only make them worse. Israeli politicians know this, and are devastating the area anyway.

Meanwhile, in other countries, Israel’s aggression and accusations are more obviously untrue:

Control of the narrative is slipping away from Israel – and also from its supporters like Rishi Sunak.

If he doesn’t speak for the United Kingdom, then for whom is he speaking?

And isn’t it past time he was made to do what we want?

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Israel should not have any support from us if it really killed its own civilians

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Yasmin Porat: her interview casts doubt on everything we’ve been told about the Hamas raids – and now we have more evidence that Israeli armed forces are the greatest danger to civilians on both sides of the Israel/Gaza conflict.

Did you ever hear of the ‘Hannibal Directive’?

It compels the Israeli army to kill Israelis rather than let them be taken hostage. It usually applies to military personnel, and has been used a number of times in the past.

And there are plenty of indications to suggest it was applied as policy towards Israeli civilians during the Hamas attack on October 7. In other words, the army appears to have preferred to kill both the Israelis and Hamas militants holding them in communities near Gaza rather than try to negotiate a release.

That’s what prizewinning journalist Jonathan Cook fears, in a series of posts on ‘X’, starting here.

He refers to an article on the Mondo Weiss website, by a person labelled “Anonymous Contributor” as they are “fearing for their personal safety due to the intensification of fascist persecutions against critical voices in Israel”.

Let’s make a note of that. We’ve heard plenty about moves to silence people supporting Palestine/Gaza in the UK; it seems those within Israel who criticise its genocide are being silenced, possibly in a far more brutal way.

The article starts by referring to a Haaretz report of the Hamas attack on the Gaza division of the Israeli Defence Force [boldings mine]:

They advanced into the military base, killing and kidnapping the soldiers of the Civil Administration, though a few of them managed to return fire before being hit… Brig. Gen. Rosenfeld entrenched himself in the division’s subterranean war room together with a handful of male and female soldiers, trying desperately to rescue and organize the sector under attack. Many of the soldiers, most of them not combat personnel, were killed or wounded outside. The division was compelled to request an aerial strike against the base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.”

The author of the article draws a logical conclusion:

This dry, complimentary description of the high commander, hiding with a few soldiers in an underground bunker and ordering an aerial bombardment of “the base” where his soldiers were fighting against Hamas militants, maybe wounded and maybe taken as prisoners, has a lot to say about the Israeli psyche in these bloody times.

It is a well-documented official policy of the Israeli army, at least since 1986, known as the “Hannibal Directive,” the “Hannibal code,” or the “Hannibal doctrine.”

It may not have ended with General Rosenfeld ordering the bombing of his soldiers. It will take years until we may (or may not) have a full picture of what happened on October 7 and the following days. But in addition to military deaths, there are also some details regarding the Israeli role in Israeli civilian deaths that can already be found amid the heavy flow of propaganda around the events of the day.

We have already heard that deaths of civilians in Kibbutz Be’eri were caused by the IDF, from the interview with escaped hostage Yasmin Porat (which This Site covered here).

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The article states:

According to her account, the kidnappers treated her and other hostages “humanely,” believing they would be allowed to retreat safely to Gaza due to the protection of the Israeli captives. However, when the Israeli soldiers arrived, “they eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire.”

Her testimony is complemented by evidence from Israeli soldiers who described how the Israeli military shot tank shells into buildings where militants and their hostages were hiding.

Another Haaretz article, available only in Hebrew for some reason, states as described in the article:

This testimony would seem to indicate that many Israeli captives were still alive on Monday, October 9, a full two days after the events of Saturday, October 7. While it might be understandable if captives had been killed in the hectic crossfire of an initial Israeli response to the attack on the 7th, this account would seem to indicate that the decision to assault the kibbutz and everyone inside was made as a clear military calculation.

It is clear Palestinian militants were hiding in these buildings with their Israeli captives as Israeli soldiers were blasting their way in with massive tank shells in close quarters. It deserves to be investigated who caused most of the death and destruction that took place. This is especially important as these deaths are now being used to justify the destruction of Gaza and the killing of thousands of civilians there.

And what about the implications for Gaza and the more-than-200 people Israel claims have been taken hostage there?

Israel, as it has proved many times in the past and as recent events may indicate, may be ready to put the lives of its soldiers and citizens at risk rather than witness the joy of freedom celebrated on both sides of the border.

Going back to Jonathan Cook, his ‘X’ thread refers to the release of two hostages last week by Hamas as an attempt to show the world that there is a willingness to talk:

Hamas knows all about the directive. It assumes Israel will choose to kill all the hostages rather than engage in negotiations for their return.

Hamas therefore also understands that Israel will make the case that there was no chance to bring the hostages home. Hamas is trying to show it is ready to release hostages and do a deal.

The problem for Hamas is that western media is in lockstep with Israeli spin that Hamas is a death cult like Islamic State and can’t be talked to. As a result, many of the hostages are likely to die unnecessarily.

And now we have evidence from another freed hostage that Hamas treated them humanely:

It seems clear that the greatest danger – not just to innocent civilians in Gaza, more than 5,000 of whom have been killed by Israel, but to innocent Israeli civilians as well (who knows how many of the 1,400 claimed deaths were caused by Israel’s armed forces?) – is Israel itself.

Why are western nations like the US, UK and (today) France still supporting these mass murderers?

Source: A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack – Mondoweiss

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Israeli President Isaac Herzog is latest to lie about conflict with Gaza (and other stories)*

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Isaac Herzog with the document he said was about making chemical weapons but was actually a biography of a failed bomber: if Israel’s cause is so just, why do its political representatives feel the need to tell so many lies?

*All items in this article are taken from the social and mass media during a time of conflict between Israel and Gaza and may therefore be based on propaganda-fuelled lies. Feel free to comment if you think any of my own conclusions are false – with supporting evidence, obviously, otherwise you may be made to look very silly indeed.

Norman Finkelstein, below, is having a laugh – at the expense of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Read the tweet responding to him and see if you get the joke:

The story is that Herzog was claiming that a dead Hamas operative, found after the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, was carrying instructions on how to make chemical weapons that were published by al-Qaeda. He claimed Hamas was working with that organisation and ISIS.

There’s just one problem: the document appears to be a fake, for the reason explained above – al-Qaeda material in Arabic was never circulated with their name spelled out in English.

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Furthermore, as Jonathan Cook explains, the manual is not about how to make chemical weapons. It is a short online biography of Ramzi Yousef, who was jailed for trying to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

You just can’t believe a single word that comes out of the Israeli government, can you?

Suella Braverman must be fuming over this.

She’s only just spent a day or so scuttling between UK police chiefs, demanding that they arrest and prosecute anybody chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, and now the Dutch have ruled that it is not anti-Semitic.

According to Novara Media,

The ruling upholds an earlier decision by a lower Dutch court… That court concluded that the pro-Palestinian slogans … “are subject to various interpretations” and “relate to the state of Israel and possibly to people with Israeli citizenship, but do not relate to Jews because of their race or religion”.

The article continues:

“From the river to the sea” is one of the most popular and longstanding pro-Palestine slogans. It’s also one of the most controversial.

In a recent Twitter thread, home secretary Suella Braverman claimed that the slogan was “widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel” and “remains a staple of antisemitic discourse”.

This interpretation of the chant has become definitive among Jewish communal organisations and the right wing media – and has been forcefully rejected by Palestinians and their supporters. They point to the slogan’s origins in the 1960s as part of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s attempt to push for a secular, democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

Today, the phrase is often used to acknowledge the fact that nowhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea – not in Gaza, nor the West Bank, nor Israel proper – do Palestinians enjoy full and equal rights with Jewish Israelis.

As to the claim that the slogan expresses a desire for Israel’s “destruction”, the historian of Palestine Maha Nassar has suggested that this eliminationist interpretation may derive from a post-six-day-war Israeli propaganda campaign that asserted that Palestinians wished to “throw Jews into the sea”.

So now you know: another pro-Israeli lie debunked. You’re welcome.

Once-great British actress Maureen Lipman appears to be living in a dream world of her own devising:

The right of return is a principle in international law which guarantees everyone’s right of voluntary return to, or re-entry to, their country of origin or of citizenship.

Many nations have laws conferring the right to return there on people whose ethnic origin is there – including Israel, although because that country was created artificially by the United Nations in 1948, the right to return there is conferred on all Jews and people of Jewish ancestry up to at least one grandparent.

So Ms Lipman really does need to look no further than Israel to see the right of return in action.

Keir Starmer is living in a nightmare he created for himself after alienating Muslims across the UK with his support for Israel’s war crimes – cutting off Gaza’s food, water and power, and forcing Gazans to abandon the north of the region – and his claim that Israel had a right to commit this naked aggression against innocent people because it has a “right to defend itself”.

It seems he is visiting Muslim communities in an attempt to rebuild trust… but it isn’t going well:

Oh, and he lied about what he said:

I’d say “As ye sow, so shall ye reap” – but as that’s a Christian phrase it would not be appropriate with reference to either the UK’s Muslim community or (obviously) Starmer.

The UK’s Parliament has again discussed the Israel/Gaza conflict – and this time it seems the debate became rather more spicy than previously:

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to repeat the already-hoary old lie that Israel is doing all it can to conform to humanitarian laws and avoid harming civilians. Here’s one post on ‘X’ that provides visual contradiction of that claim:

If you want to complain that the image on the right doesn’t show harm to civilians, just be glad I did not use images that do.

For a sensible commentary on how Israel wages war, here’s US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and I bet she spoke more sense than 99 per cent of the MPs in Westminster:

Particularly outstanding was her comment that, while we hear figures of civilian deaths that increase daily, we are given no reason to believe that any of Israel’s assaults on Gaza have neutralised a single Hamas operative.

She made a lot more sense than the leader of the UK’s own national church – Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby – who had nothing to say against the atrocities being heaped on the people of Palestine for no reason other than that they are cooped up in the same open-air prison as the terrorists the Israeli military claim to be ham-fistedly trying to find:

If he’s saying Gaza should “turn the other cheek” while Israel doesn’t just take “an eye for an eye” but everything else away from them too, then he has misread his Bible.

More than 2,000 ‘Artists for Palestine UK’, including Tilda Swinton, Charles Dance, Miriam Margolyes, Maxine Peak and Steve Coogan, have signed an open letter demanding that governments “end their military and political support for Israel’s actions”, stating that they are “not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them”.

The letter has come under heavy criticism because it does not directly mention the Hamas attack on Israel, that took place on October 7 – prompting Mr Coogan to state that it “goes without saying that what Hamas did is evil beyond imagination – it was horrific and brutal”. He added that it was in “no way inconsistent” to “express grave concern for the lives and welfare of innocent Palestinian civilians” at the same time.

That wasn’t enough for Maureen Lipman, it seems:

If anyone can provide a rational explanation for her stance, please try.

Going back to the pro-Palestine chant mentioned above, it seems Jewish people in the UK are claiming that it – as used on the pro-Palestine demonstrations that have taken place across the UK on the last two weekends – is making them feel unsafe and unwelcome here.

Why? It is a complaint against the way Israel has treated the people of Palestine, not an attack on Jews. That is clear from the Dutch court ruling mentioned above, and from the factual information provided in the report below.

If British Jews are genuinely in fear, it is extremely regrettable. Anybody putting them in such fear would be guilty of causing harassment, alarm or distress – which is a crime under UK law. I look forward to hearing of prosecutions in the future.

Here’s the clip. What do you think?

For a balancing view – and as a last entry in today’s commentary on Israel/Gaza, here’s a post that is not to be taken entirely seriously, followed by a comment on one of the characters mentioned in it:

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It turns out that an election IS what the country wants, Rishi Sunak!

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Dr Death: do you think the public’s appetite for an election to get rid of Rishi Sunak might have something to do with his ideas being responsible for killing loads of us during the Covid-19 crisis?

I know – it doesn’t matter what a politicians says; a pollster will always be able to show public opinion opposes it. Let’s just enjoy Rishi Sunak’s discomfort anyway:

Most Britons want a general election by May next year, with little appetite to hold on until January 2025, a new poll shows.

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Weeks after Rishi Sunak said an election is “not what the country wants”, More in Common found voters want a poll sooner rather than later due to high levels of “dissatisfaction with the current state of politics”.

Three in four Britons want an election because they want a change in government, the polling group found.

Source: Britons want Rishi Sunak to call general election in May — and don’t want to wait until 2025 | The Independent

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Is this evidence that the UK government has been restricting free speech online?

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This is damn peculiar.

Last night I was very tired and went to bed early, so there were no new stories to boost the Vox Political site’s hit count overnight. But I just checked site stats and have already had more hits than I had in the whole of yesterday.

Checking the stats, I see the vast majority of hits are for the home page – at the time of writing, 1,786. Top article has 180. Top REFERRER is Twitter, for the first time in years, with 817 views – but checking Twitter’s (well, ‘X’ now) own analytics, it shows 0 new tweets, 46 impressions and 2 link clicks.

So where are all these hits coming from?

Do you think it might have something to do with the Freedom of Information request I sent to two government departments a week ago?

It asked whether the government had written to the social media platforms, asking them to restrict Vox Political’s reach – the number of people able to see links to my site and its articles.

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On Thursday, I had a response asking me to narrow down my request – to cover particular dates and types of communication.

I had a think about it and sent an email yesterday (Sunday, October 22) at 10.37pm, agreeing to limit my request to communications sent between the government and social media platforms during 2023.

According to my stats, the increase in my hit count started around five or six hours ago, at the start of the working day today.

Does it seem to you that, having received my response, officials made a change of some kind that made it possible for more people to see Vox Political?

And does it seem to you that my experience shows that the UK’s government is restricting free speech in the UK – for no reason other than political advantage?

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100,000 – or was it 300,000? – march in support of Gaza

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Turnout at a demonstration in support of Palestine is being disputed, with organisers suggesting 300,000 turned out, while the Metropolitan Police reckon it was 100,000.

Either way, a lot of people were in London to show their support for the besieged and beleaguered people of Gaza – and thousand more attended other demonstrations across the UK for a second consecutive week, in Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff and Salford.

Here are video and images of the London event:

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(Apparently the Met’s information is disputed by the BBC, which says 10 arrests were made, for firework and public order offences, and for assaulting an emergency services worker.)

The BBC said:

The demonstration was organised by several groups who are calling on the British and Welsh governments to insist on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for “full humanitarian aid” to be sent in.

Maggie Morgan, from the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign Cardiff, said: “We are taking to the streets as a show of solidarity to the people of Gaza, to show our support for them, but also to make the government listen, and say ‘not in our name, we’re not having this.'”

Of course, for some it was a completely different matter – but these people are ridiculous:

None of the marchers – no matter how many there were – said they supported Hamas.

None of them said they wanted “rid” of former Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard and/or any Jews.

As a journalist, he is expected to report facts, not foist unsubstantiated claims on the public – especially not while supporting genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.

But the demonstrations in the UK were only part of the story this weekend. Other marches were taking place elsewhere in the world – including this one, in Washington DC:

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Apologies from news corporations won’t help them if they keep trying to mislead us

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Yara Eid: this Palestinian interviewee rightly made mincemeat of Sky News’s inaccurate framing of the Israel/Gaza conflict – a framing that is all the more false after the same channel had to apologise for misleading viewers about the conflict almost from the moment it started.

Isn’t that right, Sky News?

It seems that, after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Kay Burley repeatedly stated on that channel that Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, had said “Israel had it coming”.

And the fact?

It’s entirely understandable that Dr Zomlot called for “accurate and responsible” reporting – and sad that Sky News did not take his words to heart.

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Instead, we get this:

The first thing to note is that Yara Eid was entirely correct to point out the misleading language in the Sky reporter’s introduction: “You said more than 1,400 people have been killed in Israel and more than 4,000 in Palestine have died… As a journalist, you have the moral responsibility to report on what’s happening. Palestinians don’t just die, they get killed.”

Second: “You also mentioned that this is a Hamas-Israel war. This is not it, and framing it as such is very misleading… It poses the thing that Israel is an equal power – but it is an occupying power, and it actually has the responsibility of protecting all civilian lives and children in Gaza.

“But what we have been seeing is more than 1,700 of those who are killed are children.

“So this is not really a war against Hamas… So many Israeli spokespersons went on TV and said this is a war against Palestinians in Gaza.”

Third: “This is a 75-year-old occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians and you need, as a journalist, to report on what’s happening and say it as it is.”

And the response? “When Hamas launched the attack on Israel… what did you expect would happen next?”

Ms Eid came back well: “You are misleading by saying it’s a Hamas attack. You need to say what’s been happening. We can’t look at it just by looking at what’s happened on October 7. Why are you not talking about all the other attacks, on worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, kidnapping women and raping them in Israeli jails, all these Palestinians who are being killed in the West Bank? Why are you not asking me about them?”

There was no answer. The reporter, realising Ms Eid was not going to provide whatever message the channel wanted, ended the interview.

What good is an apology if the lesson is not learned?

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Greta Thunberg’s support octopus is not an anti-Semitic trope

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This Writer is amazed that we’ve reached a point where I have to write headlines like the above, but for clarity here is the story in a nutshell:

I had to cast around for information about this and found an article in Rolling Stone that corresponds with my own thoughts about this – from the start. It states:

TWO WEEKS INTO the horrific war between Israel and Hamas, the state of online discourse has descended from “generally bad and stupid” to “unfathomably dumb and borderline dangerous.” Case in point: recent allegations that environmental activist Greta Thunberg, after posting a “Stand with Gaza” sign and demanding a ceasefire, was actually posting a Nazi dogwhistle. Later, the official X account for the Israeli government piled on, too.

On Friday, Thunberg posted a photo on social media of her holding a “Stand with Gaza” sign accompanied by other activists holding similar pro-Palestinian messaging. The caption on her post on X read, “Today we strike in solidarity with Palestine and Gaza. The world needs to speak up and call for an immediate ceasefire, justice and freedom for Palestinians and all civilians affected.” In the original post, she was seen with a light-blue stuffed octopus on her shoulder.

Predictably, many criticized her post for failing to condemn the terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 surprise on Israel, which left at least 1,400 people dead, many of whom were civilians. Perhaps less predictably, however, others focused on the octopus, interpreting it to be a kraken, a mythical, multi-tentacled sea beast that was occasionally used in Nazi iconography.

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“What does the Kraken next to you on the couch mean @GretaThunberg?,” one account with more than 1,000 retweets wrote. “The Kraken was, and is, a well-known sign of the Nazis for the anti-semitic term international finance judaism.”

In a follow-up tweet, Thunberg, who is autistic, clarified that the plush octopus on her shoulder was not a reference to a (frankly, somewhat historically obscure) anti-Semitic canard, but to a common toy used by neurodivergent people to express their feelings. “It has come to my knowledge that the stuffed animal shown in my earlier post can be interpreted as a symbol for antisemitism, which I was completely unaware of,” she wrote. “The toy in the picture is a tool often used by autistic people as a way to communicate feelings. We are of course against any type of discrimination, and condemn antisemitism in all forms and shapes. This is non-negotiable. That is why I deleted the last post.”

This explanation did not, however, prevent the state of Israel’s official Twitter account from calling out Thunberg for her post. “@GretaThunberg, Hamas doesn’t use sustainable materials for their rockets which have BUTCHERED innocent Israelis,” the post reads. “The victims of the Hamas massacre could have been your friends. Speak up.” The post contained images of missing Israelis such asAgam Berger, Nik Beizer, and Roni Eshel, who are all 19.

Of course, Thunberg was not making a point about whether Hamas’s munitions manufacturing practices are green-compliant; she was calling for a ceasefire to prevent more people from being killed, a position that is shared by many peace groups all over the world.

The idiocy of the attack on Ms Thunberg is perfectly encapsulated in the second of the following two ‘X’ posts:

Yes indeed. I await the Israeli government’s attack on that energy firm for its anti-Semitic iconography. Or is it a case of an octopus being just an octopus because political opportunists can’t get a headline out of it?

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Keir Starmer’s response to Israel/Gaza is against Labour values

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Complicit in genocide: do you agree with this description of Keir Starmer.

A devastating open letter to Keir Starmer from a group of British Palestinians who are Labour Party members has slammed his response to the Israel/Gaza conflict for opposing their party’s values.

The letter calls on Starmer to “rediscover your humanity”.

It states [boldings mine]:

We are horrified by your refusal to condemn Israel’s current indiscriminate bombing, imposition of a complete siege and planned land invasion of Gaza as war crimes. You appear to be supporting, if not encouraging, Israel in its genocidal actions against Palestinians, especially those in Gaza.

Rather than calling for an immediate ceasefire and lifting of the siege, you keep parroting ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’, a conveniently non-specific phrase.

Is killing more than 1000 children (to date) Israel exercising its right to defend itself? Is cutting off electricity, water, food and fuel following a 16-year siege so that we are on the brink of mass starvation and a collapse of Gaza’s health system examples of Israel defending itself? Is telling 1.1 million people to move from north to south Gaza and then bombing them when they have moved, a legitimate example of self-defence?

Or are they war crimes?

None of these actions are justified by the killing of civilians by Hamas.  We teach our children that two wrongs don’t make a right but this simple message seems to be beyond you. Instead, you encourage Israel on an eye-for-an-eye revenge path which will only lead to more violence and deaths on both sides. This is not the way forward to peace.

You also have had nothing to say about the Palestinian villagers in the West Bank who are being harassed and driven from their homes by armed Israeli settlers with the Israeli army standing by to crush any Palestinian resistance. The number of Palestinian fatalities there this year had exceeded 250 before Hamas’s attack on 7th October. Since then, these attacks have increased with at least three villages having been cleared//near-cleared and demolished, and an increase in the body count of more than 50 in a week.

Your statements and actions on the current tragic situation in Palestine-Israel are dramatically opposed to the values of peace, justice, equality and humanity that the Labour Party is supposed to uphold. You have badly damaged the reputation, perhaps fatally, of a Party that claims to support people fighting for freedom from occupation and oppression.

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Even in terms of the base morals of what needs to be done electorally to win power, your actions are irrational. Even if you win the next general election, you will have alienated minority ethnic communities that identify with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

To add insult to injury, you have now banned elected Labour representatives and branches from attending protests in solidarity with the Palestinian people and said no motions can be discussed which oppose the leadership’s position on the current situation in the Middle East. The leadership’s position is totally at odds with that adopted at Labour Party conference last year.

In effect, you are aiming to silence Palestinian voices, including the estimated 20,000 British Palestinians living in Britain. And you are telling us that we can’t explain to fellow Labour Party members or the wider public how Israel in 1948/9 denied our father the right of return from studying in Britain back to Nazareth, where he was born and grew up, because he was an Arab, not Jewish but a Christian. This was not  an isolated incident but the policy that was applied to around 750,000 Palestinian refugees in the same years, often using brutal force, and a policy that continues to this day despite UN resolutions calling for the right of return of refugees.

You are saying that we cannot explain how our Palestinian relatives are discriminated against and are facing threats of ethnic cleansing. You are saying that we cannot argue for support for the non-violent BDS campaign which argues for Boycotts, Disinvestment and Sanctions to be applied to Israel until it ends the occupation and dismantles the Apartheid Wall, gives Palestinian citizens of Israel equal rights and supports the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

We understand that your policies have created an internal Party crisis with many Labour Councillors resigning or threatening resignation. We, however, will not resign, adopting the Palestinian tradition of steadfastness (sumud), and will fightback for Labour to return to the principles of internationalism, anti-racism, equality for all humans, anti-colonialism and choosing peace over war. We will work to have you removed from the leadership of the Party unless you genuinely return to these principles. Even if you expel us, we will continue to fight for Palestinian rights, for the only sustainable peace – peace with justice and equal rights for all who live in Palestine-Israel – and against Israel’s policies of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Source: Open letter to Sir Keir Starmer from 4 British Palestinians | Jewish Voice for Labour

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Something for the weekend: It’s the End of the Tories and they Know It (do you feel fine?)

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Kudos to Politics Joe and Swedemason for putting this together.

In one of my other lives, I play a cover of the REM version of this song in a band; now I’m wondering if we can change the lyrics…

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