There is no organisation in Britain more opposed to US plans in the Middle East and its wars around the world than the Stop the War Coalition. Even before Israel, with Western support, began its war of extermination against Palestinians in Gaza following 7 October 2023, the coalition considered Palestine its most important cause.
The New Arab met with Lindsey German, British activist and the coalition’s convenor, at its headquarters in north London.
The region is like a “powder keg”, German warned, as conditions “can be kept under control for a period, but not forever”.
In her view, the main driving factor are two wars: the Israeli war against the Palestinians with Western support and the Israeli-American war against Iran. Moreover, Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza pushed campaigns in defence of Palestine to the top of the coalition’s priorities.
According to German, one of the coalition’s achievements was “linking the Palestinian cause to the broader context of Western and Israeli policies in the Middle East” and what she describes as “American and British imperialism”, whose plans Palestinians in Gaza disrupted.
German believes that “Trump has all kinds of plans for what he will do with Gaza and the Middle East”, but they have not materialised, as he “tried to force Palestinians to go somewhere, but they do not want that”.
Because of this resilience, German believes Palestinians “remain a huge challenge” to the ambitions of Trump and Israel.
German highlighted how Israeli officials at various levels speak of the “Greater Israel” project, which Trump supports and his ambassador to Tel Aviv, Mike Huckabee, promotes, and seeks to seize land from Arab countries neighbouring Palestine and beyond.
She opined that no decisive practical position has been issued by the governments of the Arab countries threatened by the project because they “have strategic relations with the United States and Britain through arms deals and economic interests”, which “limits their ability to adopt independent positions towards Israel”.
Nevertheless, she considered that the project and all of Trump’s plans for Gaza “have led to a clash with the local regimes there, because they take part of this country or that country and force Palestinians to leave their land”.
German argued that Israel’s plans “pose a threat to the Arab regimes themselves”, requiring “political and economic action” to curb Israel’s expansion by “imposing an international boycott on it because of what it is committing” in terms of crimes.
Like others who reject Israel’s crimes and the complicity of the West, including Britain, German frequently drew comparisons between Israel and Russia, noting that if another country had done what Israel has done, “we would have seen a broad international reaction, as happened with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine”.
Why, then, do Arab countries not take such a position towards Israel? Lindsey German answered that “this position does not come from the rulers of the Middle East because many of them have very close relations with Donald Trump and with Britain, France and the old imperial powers, and this keeps them within this Western political framework of double standards.”
She compared the issue of Palestine and the position of Arab rulers towards it with the problem of Britain’s National Health Service, as she believed that “everyone (in the Arab countries) supports Palestine, but we do not see government action that can actually help the Palestinians, or we see very little action”.
“When looking at Palestinians in Jordan, Lebanon or anywhere else, we find that they are treated extremely badly in the camps and are considered second-class citizens. This has been the situation for 50 years, and it seems to me that this is one of the reasons why people do not rise, whether because of the Palestinian cause or because of local issues related to living conditions and wages,” she added.
German said that these living conditions are somewhat similar to what is happening in Britain, but the British have not remained silent.
In her view, the reason is that “opposing the government there is much harder than it is here”, and this “largely explains why there have not been more movements (for Palestine or against domestic injustices) in the Middle East”.
She stressed that the Israeli-American aggression against Iran as an additional factor reinforcing the failure of Israel and America. In her view, Iran “has proved that any resistance to the United States actually has an echo and receives a degree of support” in the Middle East.
Although she sees it as extremely difficult to predict accurately what will happen, she expects that the “result (of the war) will undoubtedly be great disruption and instability”.
The Stop the War Coalition convenor cites the case of the Abraham Accords (normalisation with Israel) as another example of the impact of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza and the war on Iran in thwarting US efforts to impose Israel’s presence and close the chapter on the Palestinian cause.
However, she stressed that “there is no doubt that Iran has stopped this now” because “the efforts for the Abraham Accords have effectively died” and she “does not see any possibility of reviving them”.
She reiterated that credit for this outcome goes to Iran’s resistance to the aggressive war, which “made it impossible” for normalisation to continue.
“If you were in government in any of these countries, the UAE or anywhere else, I should think about what we are actually getting from the Americans,” she said.
Nevertheless, she quickly added, “what is happening is that America launched a war on Iran with Israel, so what was the consequence? America could not, despite its enormous air power superiority, indeed its superiority in all military aspects, defeat Iran”.
Israel’s position in the world after its crimes in the Palestinian territories strengthens Iran’s position and weakens the chances of reviving the project to get rid of the Palestinians, German argued.
It is a state, according to her, that “has now become more isolated than at any time since its founding; its popularity has declined, and its isolation has increased”, even in the United States, which has historically been Israel’s strongest supporter. “This support is declining significantly, even among Jews, particularly young people”.
Israel’s position is no better in Britain.
Previously, according to the picture German described, the country enjoyed particular sympathy among leftists who saw it as a somewhat left-wing socialist state because of the agricultural cooperative communities (kibbutzim) and as a homeland for Jews.
“I had Jewish friends who saw it as the place they wanted to be”, and “most of us tended towards Israel when the 1967 war broke out, because we saw it as a small country, and because we realised the scale of the terrible suffering that Jews had gone through, we asked: Why are people attacking them again?” she recalled.
This situation has now changed, German added, because “apart from very hardline Zionists and far-right currents – including fascists and the far right in this country (Britain) – very few people really want to defend Israel”.
Among the questions now being raised more insistently than ever, particularly after the Israeli-American aggression against Iran on the pretext of preventing it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, is, according to the coalition coordinator, “Why the focus on Iran? Israel already possesses nuclear weapons, while Iran is still far from possessing such weapons”.
When Andy Burnham took over as head of the British government, he announced a commitment to his predecessor Keir Starmer’s policy towards the illegal war, allowing the US military to use bases inside and outside Britain to launch attacks that it considers “defensive” against Iranian territory.
“This (use) is part of the war and not self-defence, and there is no need to think about whether it is right or wrong. The bases are being used to launch offensive operations” inside Iran, German stressed.
She said that the British government’s promotion of the claim that the use of the bases is “defensive” is merely part of a “disinformation campaign promoting the idea that the British rejected Trump’s request” to participate in the war.
But German further said that they “did not actually reject it. They allowed Trump to use RAF Fairford, which is the only base in Europe capable of accommodating and operating the large long-range B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers”.
She pointed out that “it is also clear that they (the British and Americans) cooperate in areas such as intelligence sharing and the like”, which indicates that this reflects “some of what is happening behind the scenes”.
The Stop the War Coalition was established in 2001 to prevent the Iraq War and was the main driving force behind the million-strong demonstrations that filled the streets of London.
However, the coalition and many anti-war activists were unable to prevent the invasion, and Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, took Britain into it alongside America.
Even so, the coalition did not tire over the following 25 years of organising protests against wars, particularly Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians and the Israeli-American aggression against Iran.
German believes that without the anti-war demonstrations, Britain and America would have repeated the Iraq experience.
She said the coalition “succeeded in changing the British public’s view of wars”, and therefore “Britain has no longer been able since the invasion of Iraq to repeat the model of direct military occupation”. Later interventions in Libya and Syria “took different forms as a result of growing popular opposition”.
As for Palestine, Lindsey German credited the popular pressure exerted by the coalition and others with “pushing the Labour Party to modify some of its positions towards Palestine”. Here she is referring to Burnham’s widely known video about Gaza and his admission that Labour was wrong in how it initially dealt with the war in the territory, as well as his indication that he intended to take a “balanced” position on what is happening in the region.
However, she acknowledged that this will not bring about a fundamental change in the rhetoric or policy pursued by the British government, as it “will continue to arm Israel and maintain diplomatic relations with it”.
Despite the growing pressure, she expected that the “Burnham government will continue to avoid talking about genocide because it does not favour using this term”.
She predicted “more attempts to acknowledge that Israel has committed some bad practices, without any real change in fundamental policy, given that Britain, ultimately, has very close relations with Israel”.
The Stop the War Coalition is among the pro-Palestinian organisations most affected by the conduct of Britain’s ruling establishment towards the ongoing protests against Israel’s extermination campaign.
Its chair, Alex Kenny, is awaiting a criminal trial on charges related to an alleged breach of the conditions for protesting in support of Palestine.
His deputy, Chris Nineham, is also awaiting an appeal hearing, alongside Ben Jamal, former director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, against a previous ruling that convicted him on the same charge.
This is “ridiculous in every sense of the word”, according to German, who attributes the ruling establishment’s position to “how frightened they are” by the impact of the protests.
She added another piece of evidence of this fear, saying, “the unprecedented massive level of arrests related to Palestine over the past 25 years”.
“We now have political prisoners,” German said, bitterly. The tone became more bitter when asked about the Palestine Action movement and its members detained pending investigations or those who were tried for allegedly committing criminal acts but were sentenced by the judge, contrary to the law, under provisions set out in terrorism laws under which they had not been tried.
“I look at all those people who are being arrested. Many of them are retired from the technology sector, doctors and lawyers with prestigious standing, and people who have never committed a crime in their lives. They are all being treated as criminals simply for supporting the Palestinian cause,” she remarked, describing all this as “madness in every sense of the word.”
She warned that criminalising protests could push some activists to adopt more escalatory methods such as “direct action” to stop the extermination, and that history will not forget.
“Be sure that this will be considered in the years ahead, and people will say that it was a complete miscarriage of justice,” she said.
The coalition’s priority now remains to continue building a broad mass movement that includes trade unions and various sections of society, because the major demonstrations, in her assessment, were the main factor in raising public awareness of the Palestinian cause and pushing the Labour Party to review some of its positions.
Source: New Arab
Article translated from Arabic by Afrah Almatwari. To read the original, click here.