The line from Labour spox pushed out the door to do the Sunday morning shows has been consistent with David Lammy's efforts at articulating Labour's position. And it's as wretched as you'd expect. Blithely skipping from the Yom Kippur war to the present, it's almost as if absolutely nothing happened between 1973 and 7th October of this year. As brutal and disgusting Hamas's attack was, how can this be separated out from and not be rooted in decades of assassinations, bombings, and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians? If horror is visited upon a colonised population, that they could bite back with ferocity and atrocity is always a possibility and one Israel's politicians invited. It was they, after all, who funded Hamas as a fundamentalist alternative to the PLO - a policy Netanyahu has carried on faithfully in an effort to divide resistance to the occupation. All of this will be known to Lammy, but because of Labour's historic fidelity to the bourgeois consensus on the Middle East this has to remain the great unsaid. Everyone was innocent prior to 7th October and responsibility for what came after falls squarely and solely on Hamas.
Lammy goes for the faux sympathy toward those who call of a ceasefire. We understand. "We all want the bloodshed and the suffering to end." Except, "we" don't. Does Netanyahu, who's stringing out the military campaign to forestall efforts at removing him from office? Do the murderous extremists of the settler movement using the cover of war to force Palestinians residents on the West Bank out of their homes? How about those wanting North Gaza annexed as a step toward their blood soaked fantasy of eretz Israel? Nor, actually, does the UK government and by extension Labour and the shadow foreign secretary. Lammy writes that a "humanitarian pause" is preferable to a ceasefire because Hamas will still hold hostages and fire its pitiful rockets at Israel. If he truly believes that's the case, then won't that happen anyway during the "pause"? If there was any honesty about the man he'd say what everyone already knows. The Labour leadership don't really care about Palestinians dying, and so are happy to wait for the White House to make the running. Humanitarian pauses are a form of words that mean nothing, but are a way of trying to appear concerned so Labour does not cop too much political damage.
When Lammy gets on to the subject of Palestinian casualties, the language used is Delphic to the point of obscenity. The siege conditions Gaza is under are "unacceptable". The spiralling number of dead is "shocking". Who's responsible? And when he does make a concrete demand of Israel, the coward hides behind Antony Blinken and his suggestion the IDF should make efforts to protect innocent lives. He goes on to describe a group of young Palestinians he met in the Summer whose lives were blighted by the occupation and settler encroachment. These weren't members of Hamas, but so moved was he by their plight that they got nary a mention in this year's party conference speech. Nor did Israel/Palestine figure in the year previously. But still, this is authentocrat posturing that shows he cares while limbering up to the big announcement - and one the leadership must be hoping will stem the crisis in core Muslim constituencies: that Labour in power will join most of the non-Western world and recognise a Palestinian state.
Language matters, and this "pledge" has more caveats than Rachel Reeves's book has plagiarised passages. "We will strive to recognise", not "we will". And this can only take place in the context of "efforts" to secure a two-state solution. The viability of which recedes further into the fanciful with every passing day. In fact, the only concrete promise Lammy makes is the appointment of a Middle Eastern envoy to restart the peace process. Or to put it into the Starmerish-to-English translator, they are not going to break with Washington's desires for the region. Everything is to be done within the constraints decided by the state department. Britain gets to bask in the imagined glory of brokering talks and being seen to take an interest in a seemingly intractable issue, but any settlement that is imposed cannot substantially change the status quo because of how Israel is constituted as a colonial project. The settler movement is too big and politically entrenched to be reined in without severe social dislocation and violence. They're not going to put away their guns and avert covetous eyes for the Palestinian village the next hill over because Uncle Sam or Keir Starmer tells them to. Nor is a Palestinian state viable on the meagre and disjointed territories occupied by Gaza and the Fatah-run cantons in the West Bank. And lastly, the US needs Israel as an ally/dependent to enforce its hegemony over the Middle East. It has no interest in ensuring a just outcome.
These are the immediate issues any settlement has to deal with, and both bring into play the unmentionable C-word. Lammy's piece speaks about how he and Starmer are "realists" and we have to deal with the world as we find it. Yet here we are, incapable of even speaking about what Israel is, and what it has done and is doing to Palestine and Palestinians. And because they can't even speak of this, how is anyone supposed to take Starmer/Lammy's commitment to doing anything about it seriously? They're selling a pup and no one's buying, least of all Britain's Muslims.
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It would be an interesting case study to follow the projectory of Lammy's career and identify the factors that moved his positions. He follows a very long line of Labour worthies - Darling, John Reid, Angela Eagle - who seem to 'grow up' when wealth and a little power, or at least its trappings, are available.
ReplyDelete"Strive to recognise"? What does he think it is, an eye test?
ReplyDeleteMcIntosh - reminds me of the old song (to the tune of the Red Flag):
"The working class can kiss my arse,
I've got the boss's job at last!"
Realpolitik suggests Labour’s actual foreign policy challenge is hypocrisy amongst would be supporters. There are many active conflicts across the Muslim world, many far more murderous than Hamas vs Israel, many involving the imperialist ambitions of Iran and/or Saudi and their various proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah. Is it the absence of Jews that reduces the salience, or is widespread Muslim on Muslim violence simply too unremarkable to concern those same British Muslims? As for sections of the British left, well, it’s the wrong sort of imperialism, obviously!
ReplyDelete@Kamo
ReplyDeleteBritain has a unique role in the Israel-Palestine conflict as chief enabler of the destruction of Palestine and the rise of a Zionist settler colonial state. Britain took over the area after defeating the Ottomans in 1918, and was assigned the League of Nations mandate under which they were to establish a homeland for Jews. That this mandate did not specify how this was to be managed, nor what provisions should be made for the majority Arab population is a matter of shame for all involved. The successor body, the UN did come up with a partition plan in 1947 whereby 56% of the land went to 32% of the population - the Jewish, mostly recent incomer part. Britain then withdrew without establishing any sort of solution when the escalating violence of primarily Jewish 'terrorist' groups became too uncomfortable. In the ensuing war the well-armed and trained Jewish militias then overwhelmed the Arabs and drove them out of many towns and villages. The UN and the West looked on as a series of massacres took place, and the map was redrawn through military force and a series of wars between the new state of Israel, and neighbouring Arab states. In all of this the needs and rights of the Palestinians were largely ignored by everyone. When the dust settled, Israel occupied all the land that had been agreed to be Palestinian by the UN. And this occupation has continued up to today.
So, the reason this resonates in Britain is that we have a large part of the responsibility for the situation and the plight of the Palestinians. A people oppressed and occupied for 75 years, denied all basic rights, and above all, denied a country and a nationality. Even what little land they have is being stolen from them piece by piece. It is the biggest injustice of our age. To then add a genocide of the people of Gaza to the list of injustices and abuses explains why people feel so strongly.