HISTORY will record British military support for Israel as “complicity with genocide,” Communist Party international secretary Kevan Nelson said at the weekend.

Recent reports indicate that Britain has sent 14 shipments of bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines and F-35 fighter jet parts to Israel since October 2023, while the RAF has carried out more than 500 surveillance flights across Gaza, defended Israeli installations from retaliatory missile attacks and bombed Houthi targets on land and sea.

“The stated intention of the Israeli cabinet is to launch a full-scale offensive to occupy the whole of Gaza permanently, while settler extremists and the misnamed Israeli Defence Force wage war against native Palestinians on the West Bank,” Mr Nelson told his party’s executive committee.

“Israel appears exempt from all international and humanitarian law, while the US, EU states and Britain lecture the rest of the world about human and maritime rights, sending warships and warplanes to enforce Western interests from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.”

He called on the Labour government to follow the example of the Irish Republic, Spain and 145 other countries and recognise Palestine as a sovereign state.

The Communist Party leadership branded Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s refusal to condemn Israeli genocide as “one of the most shameful episodes in Labour’s long and bloody record of supporting British and US imperialism around the world.”

Britain’s communists urged trade unionists to support a workplace day of action for Palestine on May 15 and the London demonstration on May 17 to mark the 77th anniversary of the Nakba (“the Catastrophe”) when almost a million Palestinians were driven from their homeland in 1948.

Mr Nelson’s international report also hailed the May 9 Victory Day parade in Moscow to celebrate the role played by the Soviet Union, China, the Western allies and resistance movements in defeating fascism, and welcomed the 600,000-strong May Day rally in Cuba attended by leaders of Britain’s Young Communist League.