My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald newspaper (8.10.24), the day after the one-year commemoration of the current occupation and destruction of Gaza. For the record, the mainstream media led by the BBC focussed upon the threat from Iran and it’s allies, detailed the plight of Israeli families suffering the loss of their relatives, and persued unashamedly a narrative of the threat from Islam and all Muslims.

By contrast, my Comment may appear mild to those activists in the know, but was something of an antidote to all the lies and misinformation, the Zionist flag-waving and warmongering rallies. The point was “Stop Arming Israel”, their headline shying away from my original. But at least our side got something into print.

Stop Arming Israel!

Three-hundred-and-thirty thousand people marched in Britain’s capital cities last Saturday calling for a ceasefire in Palestine and Lebanon. We marched in Plymouth and held a vigil for the dead.

Placards warned of genocide, war crimes and the potential for nuclear war. Speakers at the rostrums identified the human toll and threats to the entire world from escalation and the impacts of regime change.

We who call for Peace are no tiny minority. Nor are we the terrorist extremists painted by far-right politicians. We are speaking Truth to Power.

Since Palestinian fighters broke-out from their decades-old open-prison a year ago, the resulting deaths of a thousand Israeli settlers have been met with military destruction of the entire infrastructure of the Palestinian State of Gaza, 60% of buildings completely destroyed.

The statistics should not depersonalise the human tragedy. 2 million Gazans homeless, 43,000 including 17,000 children killed by weaponry, 200,000 Gazan civilians dead as a result of the year of Israeli assault, disease and starvation, 12,000 Gazans seized and imprisoned in Israel without trial.

This is no proportionate two-sided war. Guerilla fighters snipe at Israel and fire small explosives to be intercepted by sophisticated weaponry. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have the most technologically advanced and trained battalions systematically wielding weapons of mass destruction.

Israel’s military action in Lebanon has not been restricted to defending its border. The bombs pounding the North as well as its Capital city, Beirut, destroy far inside a sovereign nation. It is an invasion with over 2,000 Lebanese civilians killed in the past year.

The villages and towns of rural southern Lebanon have been strafed by white phosphorous shells and bombed with uranium-tipped rockets, polluting the lands with a toxicity that will prevent agriculture and any return for the displaced refugees for generations to come.

None of this destruction could have happened without the extraordinary level of financial and military support from the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Israel does not have an economy of the size and scale to fund such warfare. It has been the military base for USA in the Middle East since its violent establishment in 1948, borne of terrorist attacks upon British protective forces in Palestine, forcing 700,000 Palestinians into exile in the first catastrophe.

The UK’s special relationship with the USA means Britain is arming and funding Israel to support western corporate and strategic ambitions across the Arab World. It is as if the Big White West consider their right to control the people and resources of another continent unquestionable and unchallengeable. Ownership and control of oil and precious resources in lands far away from your own economy and birthplace is to be seized and maintained by military force – such is the definition of Imperialism. Arabian countries have been carved-up by imperial powers of France, Britain and US over the past hundred-plus years, by military and economic force including two world wars.

And so we now face a war with Iran, an advanced Capitalist nation, oil and technology rich, with a nuclear industry. Israel has nuclear arms. For the first time in human history we face a war between countries with illegal weapons of mass destruction.

The majority of British people oppose this escalation to wider war let alone the third-world war, and consider that Israel has already gone too far. Our movement to stop the war, including unequivocal condemnation of the escalation by our Trades Union Congress, has forced some restraint by the allies of Israel.

Right now, our focus must be to demand the UK government and military corporations stop arming Israel completely and immediately.