EVERY morning, Lubna Masarwa repeats the same task. She views footage and photographs and decides what her news outlet will publish. Except that these are no ordinary images. These are the pictures coming from Gaza and now the West Bank, and, according to Masarwa, they can be summed up in a single word: horrible.

“I have never witnessed such a thing,” said Masarwa, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the news website Middle East Eye, who has been covering Israel’s genocide in Gaza since it began.

The material she is forced to view includes “mothers grieving near Nasser hospital trying to recognise the bodies of their children,” says Masarwa, children who are often only identifiable by the shoes they were wearing that day or even their teeth. “I would say Israel went mad,” she said.

Masarwa was the opening speaker of a day-long conference last Saturday in London, hosted by the Peace and Justice Project (PJP), an initiative launched in December 2020 by Jeremy Corbyn and his wife, Laura Alvarez. The PJP said Corbyn was designed to be “a political home for the politically homeless.”

Much of the focus, inevitably, was on Gaza and the West Bank, but even those horrors, asserted Marxist historian and journalist Vijay Prashad, pale compared to what the US military can wreak on its own.

Recalling his experience covering the war in Iraq, Prashad said: “The US doesn’t just attack a country, it attacks the society, it destroys everything. They bomb everything — hospitals, power plants, schools.”

While “Israel is the B-team,” Prashad said, “A pathetic little military that are bombing and destroying a people largely unarmed,” the US is “The A-team of genocide. What they did in Afghanistan was genocidal, bombing entire villages.”

The US use of depleted uranium-tipped weapons in Iraq has led to ongoing birth defects even today, Prashad said. “It’s striking that we don’t call what the US did in Iraq genocide.”

But as Indigenous Indian activist Binalakshmi Nepram from Manipur was quick to point out, these are by no means the only ongoing genocides in the world. In her north-east region of India, once its own country until it was seized by India in 1949 — “a forced marriage” — there has been an ongoing war that has killed 50,000 people.

As we continue to march for Palestine, she urged the audience not to forget “the one hundred and seven other conflicts in the world that you don’t hear about.”

The conference covered a wide range of topics, both domestic and international, including the fate of unions where membership is dwindling, international workers’ rights, the brutality of economic sanctions, and the draconian prison sentences of climate and pro-Palestine activists.

The vicious cuts imposed by the new Labour government under Keir Starmer — “that Tory stooge” as his election opponent Andrew Feinstein called him — came in for some of the harshest criticism.

“We should not ask if there is enough money for the NHS,” said Patricia Pino, who hosts the MMT podcast that unravels the complexities of economics. “We should ask ‘are there enough doctors and nurses’?” She added that “unemployment is unnecessary,” and should not be used “as an inflation control tool.”

And always, there were the wars. “Where there’s death there’s money,” Corbyn reminded the audience. “Where there’s war there’s money to be made.”

All of this pointed to the inevitable question of whether there should be a new party for the politically homeless left who cannot stomach the current Labour Party.

That question was partially answered the next day when Corbyn was among those who addressed a meeting of organisers hoping to establish a new left-wing party under the name “Collective,” although his team told reporters Corbyn was there to lend ideas and has not officially endorsed the idea. Corbyn’s first People’s Forum for his Islington North constituents was due to be held later the following week.

As the PJP conference came to an end, the closing remarks were given to Erkan Bas, the leader of the Turkiye Isci Partisi (Workers Party of Turkey) and a member of the Turkish parliament. Bas quickly brought us back to Gaza as he paid tribute to the slain Turkish-born US activist, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi.

“While we are here, I would like to promise Aysenur something,” said Bas, who noted that her funeral had just taken place in Turkey along with a protest on her behalf outside the Israeli embassy. “Until peace and justice rules in the world and Palestine is free, our struggle will continue.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland, currently covering events in London.