Tag: palestinians

Palestine Recognition is Merely Posturing

Tony Staunton1 Comment

My weekly comment column in the daily Plymouth Herald (23.9.25), reflecting upon the cardboard cut-out commitment to a Palestinian State by Starmer, the kid-starver. There has to come a point where we openly discuss the fact that there is no possibility of a two-state solution to the plight of Palestinians. Apartheid Israel, of whatever colour of political governance, will not and cannot allow for it. Racial supremacy is an anti-human scourge upon humanity and must be deposed.

The unedited version below:

It has to be a definition of hypocrisy to make a pledge you know can never happen. It is just a ploy to maintain the status quo. In this case, recognising Palestine whilst not condemning the genocide of the Palestinian people is the pinnacle of forked-tongue posturing.
It’s nothing new. In 1917 the Balfour Declaration declared its commitment to the Palestinian homeland at the same time as supporting Zionism, the European-contrived political creed of Israeli supremacy, racism and settler colonialism. Why would anyone choose to believe the pledges of the British State?
The resulting Arab revolt of 1936 against British control was violently put down by the British, Zionist militants then using terrorist force to kill Britain’s soldiers, finally taking control of a small patch of land in 1948. Ever since, Israel has forcefully expanded to occupy the land that had been independent Palestine.
The recognition of Palestine by the UK government was a promise made to the Palestinian people more than 100 years ago and repeated, recognising two countries in the region – Israel and Palestine. Under the international accord signed by Israel in 1995 all of Palestinian land occupied by Israel in 1967 was to be handed-back to Palestinian control. Instead, new settlements have been created across Palestine’s West Bank ever since, including hundreds in the last two years alone.
Israel is taking over large parts of the West Bank through military violence and murderous gangs of settlers. These actions, threatening any chance of a sovereign Palestinian State, are politically intentional and supported by the UK.
How can we believe that Starmer supports Palestinians when he refuses to act against the genocide in Gaza? Evidence published in the medical Lancet magazine last week proved that 186,000 Gazans have died since October 7th 2023, largely women and children. 90% of buildings have been destroyed. The indiscriminate blanket bombing is killing the hostages.
We see the serious expansion of settler violence in the West Bank, with the intention of the E1 construction proposal. In Gaza, the murderous clearance of Gaza City is part of the published intention to create a new Mediterranean seaside resort for the super-rich, Trump’s “Middle East Riviera”, quietly supported by the capitalists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Russia all investing in “Mar-Gaza-Lago”.
Gaza is a property-speculators dream built on the crushed bones of hundreds of thousands of poor civilians, administered by a “Palestinian Authority” controlled by Israel and financed by BlackRock, J P Morgan Chase, Bank of America, not to mention finance companies across the City of London. The plan is in much the same vein as the US private contractors running the evocatively named dystopian “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” food aid sites, not to mention America’s own privatised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “mission”.
Israel is using the methods of destruction waged upon Gaza now in the West Bank, destroying buildings and infrastructure to ethnically cleanse area E1 and close down any link between Palestine and Jerusalem, the Palestinian capital.
The annexing of the West Bank is intended to create Greater Israel, eradicating any vestige of Palestinian land and heritage. Last week, Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, repeated the claims of his self-identified fascist cabinet ministers: “The West Bank is our heritage, our land and our security”. The Israeli government says the very idea of Palestine should not be considered, and that there will never be a Palestinian state.
There is no possibility of a two-state solution. It is a foil. Israel remains a military Apartheid State with a racist constitution ensuring Israelis enjoy high levels of human and legal rights, social provision and suffrage above and over any and all other ethnic groups and nationalities inside that country.
Starmer must recognise this is illegal invasion and genocide and act accordingly. Stop selling arms to Israel. Start to prosecute and sanction Israeli ministers. Demand the end of settlements and occupation in tune with the hundreds of resolutions voted upon by the United Nations.
There is a solution – a single secular democratic state in the region where Jews and Arabs and anyone can live together. Coexistence with shared rights irrespective of religion and heritage is the only possibility. For that to happen the current Apartheid State of Israel has to be deconstituted. Impossible?
Internationally, tens of millions of people have protested on the streets in defence of Gazans and against Israel, forcing at the very least mealy-mouthed pledges from governments. Such enormous political mobilisation across nations is unprecedented.
Despite their massive propaganda machine weaponising claims of Antisemitism and funding organised race-hatred based upon Islamaphobia, Israel’s actions have made that State a pariah across the world. More than 153 out 194 nation States have condemned Israel’s actions, the United Nations identifying multiple elements of genocide, ethnic-cleansing, use of illegal weapons, assassinations, incarceration and torture. Countries are sanctioning Israel and its leaders listed as war criminals identified by international courts. Trade unionists are boycotting Israeli goods and blocking trade routes.
Palestine is the flag and campaign of all those demanding human rights, equality and decency. We know, deep down, that if international imperialism get away with mass slaughter in pursuit of corporate profits there, they can and will do it anywhere and everywhere. The political concept of “disposable people” is very real whether considering war, climate justice or fascism. Gaza tells us we are all at risk.
The anti-human Israeli government can be deposed. Palestinians don’t need the empty pledges of cynical politicians, they will survive and prosper through the accelerating actions of millions of ordinary people across the world. Plymouth is sending coachloads of us to the national demonstration in London on 11th October. Free Palestine!

Continued Support for Palestinians is Essential

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

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.

We Have to Keep protesting for Gaza!

Tony StauntonLeave a comment

My weekly column published in the Plymouth Herald on 5th December 2023. I am in tears and choked by the horror of the genocide in Gaza, the Second Nakba (Catastrophe) in which twice the numbers of Palestinians have now been displaced compared with the first Nakba in 1948, and 5 times the number of civilians killed, including at least 6,000 children. This will never be forgotten, but, as the bombing and destruction starts again, with 1.9 million people suffering without food, water or shelter, I can only voice my outrage and call everyone onto the streets.

It’s no good. We have to talk about Gaza.

There can be no greater expression of absolute power than in having fighter planes, drones, ships, tanks and super-armed militia pummel civilian neighbourhoods and then stop, let in tiny amounts of water and food, and then begin the killing all over again.

You may say “It’s War”. You may point to an enemy hidden amongst the civilians. You may choose sides. 

But, by any reckoning, 14,000 casualties in 7 weeks, set against 1500 (max) Israelis, is asymmetrical, in military terms, 10:1.

And for every person killed in Gaza there are at least 3 others injured with life-changing, debilitating wounds and without any decent hospital treatment as the fuel and medical supplies have run out. Now amounting to 38,000 injured – more than the entire population of Barnstaple.

The Israeli government this week declared that the entire region of Gaza is now subject to their military occupation and assault. This will not stop, they say, until all their goals are achieved. Their published goals include the extermination of the Hamas governance and infrastructure, but they do not disclose their entire plan. What happens afterwards?

There remains more than 2 million Gazan Palestinians – human beings by the way, now corralled into Southern Gaza, an area measuring 12 miles by 7 miles – smaller than our PL postcode area which crams-in fewer than 320,000. These people, to repeat, these 2 million people, include more than 1 million offered no more than crowded tents in winter weather conditions. They are now being continuously strafed by fighter planes, bombed, with reports of incendiary weapons that continue to burn on contact with skin, and targeted if they dare to move.

There are over 1,000 bomb craters visible from space in Gaza, the result of over 8,000 bombs drops on 12,000 targets in an area of just over six square miles – the size of Plymouth’s Devonport.  

We should remind ourselves that more than 5,000 of the dead are children below the age of 13, and 45% of those killed are women according to the United Nations medical officials there on the ground. The world has watched, the West supporting the death and destruction, the Global South (the majority of the world’s governments) condemning the deaths yet all nations united in doing nothing to end it. 

This so-called “war” is to continue at least over our Christmas period. In fact, it is intensifying. The United States have suggested that Israel should lower the proportion of civilian deaths during their “exercises”, but last Saturday, in one single day, 700 were killed. 

Most crucially for us, the UK has ramped-up its military support to Israel and activity in the occupation of Gaza. The Royal Air Force is conducting the drone surveillance flights using Shadow R1 reconnaissance aircraft over Gaza to track and target movements on the ground, whilst Commandos are deployed and Vanguard-class nuclear submarine supports two US aircraft carrier convoys in the southern Mediterranean Sea.

Such a huge use of military might against the impoverished and besieged people of Palestine is not only questionable, it is unconscionable. 

The British trade union movement called early-on for a ceasefire, mindful of the inequality in the level of military power and consequential one-sided civilian casualties. We cautiously welcomed the “lull” of last week, giving hope that it could be made permanent. The sheer horror of the continuation of the mass killing is made all more unjust by the sheer proven fact that it can be stopped at will. 

Specifically, the UK must stop arming Israel. Now! We have nothing to do but shout-out our opposition. The trade unions’ Day of Action on Thursday 7th December will see many workplaces and students stage walkouts for an immediate cessation to the killing.

The demand for a ceasefire is the only humane approach. The fact that our MPs and local politicians refuse to call for an end to the mass killing of children and civilians is the most seering indictment of their complicity, their support for UK military involvement tantamount to support for genocide, a war crime. 

For our part, we shall continue to protest and expose the hypocrisy and warmongering of our elected leaders. We can only ask that everyone of conscience and with any moral compass join us.