ON SATURDAY, half a million people marched for Gaza. Very little appeared on the BBC’s many platforms, but the Hindustan Times ran a film that showed daya handful waving a revealing mix of Israeli, Ukrainian and Union Jack flags while hundreds of thousands marched with the colours of Palestine.

It is 77 years since the Nakba. This national tragedy saw the mass displacement of Palestinians. Where demonstrators throughout the world marked the anniversary, they carried replica keys signifying the homes which Palestinian refugees fled in the zionist pogrom that accompanied the 1948 creation of the Israeli state.

The parallels with today’s events in Gaza are lost on no-one, and even our state-affiliated broadcaster has been compelled to modify its narrative.

No-one expects BBC presenters to editorialise, but it is possible to maintain a sufficient level of impartiality in matters of opinion while maintaining a respect for truth, no matter how compromised are any of the disputants.

Where the verities of Establishment politics are challenged, for instance, by representatives of the Trump regime, then BBC presenters now seem willing to frame questions which suggest — unless compelling answers are forthcoming — that we can assume that no exculpatory reasons exist.

Thus, fissures in Establishment thinking give journalists a route to truth-seeking of a kind.

We almost seem to be at that point in the treatment of the Palestinian experience where Israeli accounts are, a priori, discounted, and questions carry the implicit suggestion that Israeli accounts are at best tendentious and lack veracity.

It is in this context that the reputation of David Lammy — a man manifestly unworthy of succeeding the much mourned Bernie Grant as MP for Tottenham — has reached a new low.

It is not rare to find in Westminster Labour someone so clearly prostrate before ambition and place-seeking, and so transparently shallow in thinking. It is quite, however, unusual to find a politician so oblivious to the damage his words and actions confer upon his reputation.

In a moment when half a dozen European prime ministers go public in their condemnation of Israeli actions, he cannot bring himself to depart from Starmer’s morally compromised position. His BBC interviewer corrected his casually mendacious claim to have cancelled arms exports and insisted that hundreds remain.

Some people in Labour’s orbit seem to think that the party leader is compelled by reasons of state to evade criticism of the Israeli genocide and that this excuses his silence.

The suggestion is that his real opinions reside elsewhere, in a “real” persona separate from his words and actions and that he is compelled to behave in the way he does from considerations of realpolitik.

We expect evasions and half truth from bourgeois politicians but when a surrender to the language of the racist gutter, with its clear echoes of Enoch Powell’s demonisation of migrants from colonial Britain’s former slave societies, is married to subservience to the genocidal Israeli state and its US patrons, then the weary toleration bred from low expectations vanishes.

An Israeli nation exists within the settler state. But bear in mind that the 1948 Palestinian exodus found an echo in the forced departure of many thousands of Jewish people from their homes in Middle Eastern states. There can be no peace without parallel national rights reflected in a Palestinian state, and this entails a broader settlement in the region as a whole.

Britain has a route to moral certainty only when the hundreds of arms export licences to Israel are rescinded and our government works for a just settlement based on a full recognition of Palestinian sovereignty reflected in the existence of an internationally recognised state.