A United Front for Barbarity

When I was around the Workers' Power group many years ago, in discussions about Israel's occupation of Palestine one of their activists said this was an acid test for revolutionaries. Coming forward to the present, you can say the same thing in reverse. Buying the lies and the line of poor little Israel is the shit you have to eat to be considered an upstanding member of the political establishment.

Considering the outright falsehoods that circulate freely in politics and how that has been normalised over the last decade, looking at the coverage of Hamas's offensive against Israel and the massacre it was always going to become, the British media have ratcheted up the disinformation to the point where IDF press releases are regurgitated verbatim. Rumours of atrocities against Israelis are attributed without basic fact checking, and in some egregious cases, images of air strikes hitting Gaza City were portrayed as if they were attacks on Israel itself. You'd have to go back to the Iraq War to find such industrial levels of duplicity.

Except then there were famous outliers who stood against the war drive. This time, with one or two honourable exceptions among British columnists, there's a united front of barbarity. This stretches from the soft left who find daft Socialist Worker headlines more objectionable than bombs being dropped on a defenceless civilian population. Then there are the centrists who couldn't ditch their lip service to anti-racism quick enough. The hierarchy of racism among the "sensibles" is in full effect. Israeli deaths, bad. Palestinian deaths - they didn't even merit a meh. And then we have the right, with Suella Braverman agitating for the criminalisation of the Palestinian flag.

In this welter of abhorrence we have the response of the next government. Keir Starmer, the occasionally styled "human rights lawyer" (when it suits) and, equally, "Mr Rules" dumped all that flim flam in his now infamous spell on LBC. In his interview with Nick Ferrari, Starmer said it was perfectly fine for Israel to cut the water supplies and electricity to Gaza. A strategy that will undoubtedly call forth his condemnation when Russia resumes bombing Ukrainian infrastructure this winter. But it is interesting how halting Starmer's response was, almost as if he wasn't properly prepared for Ferrari to ask such an obvious question. Strange is the lawyer who can't think on their feet. But, as has been pointed out constantly online, what Starmer has endorsed is a war crime. In international law, a state it entitled to defend itself (indeed, populations have a legal right to resist occupation) but good luck arguing that firing missiles at civilian hospitals is protected by that definition. Though, of course, Starmer knows he'll never have to. Nor will Netanyahu, his coterie of fascist coalition partners, and those IDF personnel merrily, gleefully "carrying out orders". In geopolitics, might is right and international law is a dead letter. Which makes a mockery of those ex-leftwingers who argue the Hamas offensive is an attack on the rules-based global order.

The facts of Israel and Palestine are known and well understood by those, like Starmer, like the Tories, who are expressing solidarity with the commission of war crimes. Which is why, like Emily Thornberry, leading politicians in both main parties won't entertain acknowledging what they know to be true. They know Netanyahu is a corrupt gangster. They know his governments have encouraged the settler movement, orchestrated the proliferating regime of apartheid humiliations visited on the occupied territories, regularly bombs Gaza with impunity and have murdered Palestinians without redress. And underneath this, they perfectly understand the status quo can never lead to a two state solution. "Stabilisation" rests on the frequent employment of arms and the ongoing brutalisation of a subject population. So let's have no presumptions of the kind that frequently greets the Tories. The press and the politicians lie about the occupation and the realities of Israel's war because it is crucial to the West's collective security. Or, to be more accurate, it's a lynchpin of the system of alliances that keeps the United States at the top of the global pecking order and ensures its satraps enjoy the spoils of this hegemony.

The establishment in this country are blind to or don't care about the consequences their grotesque hypocrisies will have on domestic politics. There will be and has been the usual hand wringing about the apparent rise in antisemitic sentiments and vandalism, but what they should be worried about is how, once again, they are saying Muslim lives don't matter, that brown lives don't matter. In conjunction with the refusal to even consider treating Palestinians as human beings, how is that going to play out among racialised communities who will undoubtedly bear the brunt of the press and the Home Secretary's tub thumping? Sadly, we don't have to look too far into the past to find out.

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