THAT there is a sense of inevitability about Keir Starmer’s abandonment of Labour’s commitment to recognise a Palestinian state should not diminish outrage at the move.
Ditching the pledge, first made under Ed Miliband’s leadership of Labour, is all of a piece with the party’s unequivocal support for imperialism under Starmer’s leadership.
It comes as other policies — to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia or to give MPs a vote before Britain undertakes military action — are also junked in a bonfire of progressive demands.
But the abandonment of a commitment to join 139 other countries around the world in recognising the state of Palestine is particularly brutal and cynical.
It comes as the Israeli drive to ethnically cleanse the territory of historic Palestine through death or expulsion is in overdrive, with the slaughter in Gaza proceeding with practical British endorsement.
At the same time murder, repression and land grabs in the occupied West Bank are proceeding among some international hand-wringing but no actual action. This is making the two-state solution to the crisis nothing but a pipe dream.
In this situation to abandon a policy Labour has championed for a decade is not to assist the cause of peace, it is to green-light Israeli aggression.
Cynical insult is added to considerable injury when Labour’s shadow foreign office minister Wayne David — previously on record as saying the party should ditch “anti-imperialism” as a value — states that recognition of Palestine should only occur when it is “acceptable to the state of Israel.”
That, as everyone understands, kicks the policy into the longest of long grass. There is no prospect of any Israeli government emerging in the foreseeable future which would concede a Palestinian state except under consistent and unyielding international pressure.
Labour opposes such all forms of such pressure, too. It has set its face firmly against the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.
And it opposes the move by South Africa to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its genocide in Gaza.
For Starmer and David, the Palestinian people have no right to do anything other than sit and wait for Israel to impose a “settlement” of its own choice.
That would most likely be a mixture of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, annexation of part of the West Bank with a Palestinian Bantustan as foreshadowed in the notorious Trump plan on the remainder.
Labour is actively abetting this perspective. Its refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, alongside Starmer’s earlier backing for Israeli war crimes like the deprivation of food and water from two million Palestinians, and its opposition to BDS and the ICJ case establish that beyond peradventure.
Starmer has also, of course, given unequivocal backing to the bombing of Yemen by the Royal Navy, despite the already-horrific suffering in that country, the risks of wider war across the Middle East and the woeful history of British military aggressions in the region.
None of this is about making Labour electable, the excuse Starmer often gives for his policy U-turns.
It is about reassuring the British Establishment and world imperialism that he will govern in their interests. Justice for the Palestinian people is just so much collateral damage.
From the point of view of working-class internationalism, the ultimate measure for socialists, Starmer’s Labour is not the lesser of two political evils. It is simply an evil.
The idea of the hundreds of thousands marching for Palestine being dragooned into voting Labour is simply laughable. The abandonment of the Palestinian cause by Starmer will instead power the demands for an anti-imperialist alternative.
