THE TUC’S call for an end to all arms sales to Israel and immediate recognition of the state of Palestine must immediately be translated into direct pressure on ministers.
We are almost a year into Israel’s brutal invasion of Gaza. It has involved the brazen mass murder of civilians, exposed in mass graves uncovered after Israeli troops moved on from their assaults on the al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals.
It has involved the deliberate targeting and killing of journalists. More than two-thirds of all journalists killed worldwide in the last 12 months have been victims of Israeli military action, and more than a tenth of all journalists in Gaza are now dead.
It has involved the systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, hospitals, schools, libraries, roads. It is a war not against Hamas, but against the Palestinian people — something made even clearer as it has recently been expanded to a new front in the West Bank.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is indifferent to expressions of concern over the loss of civilian life from the Western allies which continue to arm his genocide. He is determined to ignore the enormous protests which have swept Israel itself demanding a ceasefire. He is a reckless and dangerous man who authorises bombing the Lebanese capital Beirut and assassinations in the Iranian capital Tehran, casually provoking a major regional war to save his own wretched career.
He has to be stopped and the only way to do it is to cut off the flow of arms. Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s limited restrictions on the export of a minority of British arms components to Israel must be turned into a total ban. Britain must close its airspace to US weapons deliveries to Israel and stop the US using RAF bases on Cyprus for this purpose.
But the longer-term demands agreed by the TUC are vital too. Israel’s leaders make it abundantly clear in innumerable public statements that they have no intention of ever allowing an independent Palestinian state; their colonial expansion over Palestinian land is accelerating.
Western leaders must no longer be allowed to hide behind lip service to the two-state solution: they must take concrete actions to deliver an independent Palestine. Until last year Labour was committed to immediate recognition of the state of Palestine: it needs to be pressed to do so urgently, and to engage with the proposal by China at the security council for a UN-backed international conference on establishing a viable and secure Palestinian state.
Britain’s refusal to take these measures is revealing. Ministers who reluctantly pause some arms sales in response to months of mass mobilisations on the streets hypocritically slap sanctions on Iran for allegedly supplying Russia with weapons.
Those who give Western governments the benefit of the doubt on their motives for arming Ukraine should look to their conduct over Palestine: these are not people whose foreign policy is determined by human rights or the defence of democracy. Britain’s role in prolonging the Ukraine war, with Boris Johnson intervening to wreck a proposed peace deal back in 2022, has been publicly confirmed by our own allies (Turkey and, ironically, Israel).
Lammy and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hint at loosening restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-supplied weapons to strike targets deep inside Russia: a further escalation in a war that could easily turn into direct conflict between nuclear-armed powers, with Britain foremost in the deployment of special forces to Ukraine who are directly involved in attacking Russian targets.
As with Palestine, this is a war that could not be prosecuted without the supply of Western arms. Peace should be a priority for all socialists. The TUC is right to demand it for Palestine, but the anti-war movement has work to do in building a wider understanding across unions of the need for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine.
