My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (18.3.25), identifying the end of the fragile ceasefire in Gaza. I had to cut it right down to 600 words for the print, and still there’s more to say than in the full 900 words I offer here. Burning refugees alive in their fragile tents overnight is beyond barbarism, in many ways beyond words. All we can do is protest and expose our government. Stop Arming Israel!

Last Saturday saw fifty thousand people march to London’s seat of government, Whitehall, on the 25th national demonstration demanding a permanent ceasefire and reparations for the people of Palestine. Millions have marched here, across Britain and indeed the world since Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, home to over two million Palestinians, reducing it to rubble after October 7th 2023.
On that day, Hamas fighters had broken-out of the open-air prison of Gaza and reportedly killed or captured over 1,000 Israelis in nearby territory, land recognised by the United Nations as Palestine and illegally occupied by Israel. 17 months later, at least 50,000 (that’s 50 times the horror of 7.10.23) Gazans are dead, at least 200,000 horrifically injured as living casualties, and one-million-eight-hundred-thousand human beings displaced, homeless, unable to leave and facing disease and starvation.
The disproportionate killing and suffering inflicted by one side on another, happening whether in Gaza or anywhere in the world, should warrant outrage and protest. Trade unions here and everywhere have long recognised the injustice of the treatment of Palestinians since 1948 as immoral and illegitimate.
As part of the trade union quest for social justice we have always exposed and challenged crimes against humanity, our purpose being the political struggle for human rights and equality.
Trade Unions have consistently said Never Again to challenge anti-semitism, remembering and organising against any repeat of the industrial murder of at least six-million Jewish people by Hitler’s fascists in the Second World War.
At the same time, following the formation of Israel by European Jews migrating to the Middle East after the War, we have witnessed this colonisation as the ethnic clearance of Palestinian lands by military force, called in Arabic the Nakba or “catastrophe” ,and we have lobbied for a just solution.
It’s possible to do both. We can commemorate both Holocaust Memorial Day and the Nakba as crimes against humanity. The targeting and mass killing of a specific ethnic group, forcibly removing a people from their homelands or murdering them en masse is unconscionable – racist, predatory and barbaric. For the sake of all, this is not the way humanity should proceed.
Palestine Solidarity groups have been long established across Britain, supported by trade unions. We have never been under greater attack than today. There was a time when almost every Labour Party member supported Palestine but now their Party of Government is shutting down all criticism of the Israeli military. The right to protest for Palestine is being curtailed , Police instructed by politicians to close down the spaces.
At street stalls there is more challenge, supporters of the actions of the Israeli government claiming Palestinians (and indeed Arabs) to be less than human and supporting their “extermination”, up to and including slogans of “nuke ‘em all’. Fascist groups in the UK, caught in the political cleft stick of hatred for both Jews and Muslims, favour Israel at this juncture as if it is a war between Black and White. We observe that the fascist hatred of Jews has not gone away, their theories of a global Jewish conspiracy still everywhere across the Internet.
It is not by accident that Israel has been created at a focal point of geopolitical and financial power, a crossroads of global networks, the precisely constructed centre of the Middle East, funded by Europe and the United States to maintain the power of western imperialism in the Arab World and into the East. Little wonder that Trump, Starmer and the EU states support Israel’s actions and seek to shut-down active criticism. It is about western power and control.
Whilst we, the humanists and socialists of the international workers’ movement, care about and campaign for human rights across the West and in Russia, China, Yemen, India, Sudan, Syria, the Congo and many other examples of human suppression, Palestine overarches all other injustices. The Palestine protests sum-up the international working class struggle against exploitation and oppression.
Some attend the demonstrations for the sense of international solidarity with the oppressed, some argue from a moral wish for peace and reconciliation there and everywhere, some attend as a statement against imperialist domination of peoples and regions. Palestinian protesters amount to a tiny proportion of our mass mostly because there are so few in the UK and they are rarely granted asylum under British law, despite the facts.
Jews across the world are also protesting against the military actions of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Defence Forces. Hundreds are occupying Trump Tower in New York demanding the release of Palestinian protester Mahmoud Khalil, a US resident and student now incarcerated and threatened with deportation for peacefully speaking-out for Palestinian rights.
And in Palestine itself the situation is deteriorating faster than ever: the ceasefire talks cancelled; the Israelis once again blocking food aid, cutting of all electricity and therefore essential water and medical services; ethnically cleansing the Palestinian West Bank as now part of “Greater Israel evicting more than 40,000 from their homes; reports of torture and rape of civilians by IDS soldiers; and shooting and bombing civilians crouched amongst the rubble every day.
The size and scale of opposition to the actions of the Israeli State have never been larger nor more profound. The great majority of the world’s countries and people’s support the Palestinians. Historically, those with power always explain their massacres in terms of righteousness. The continuation of that support, especially here in the West, breeds hope, both for the Palestinians and for peace with social justice.