Photo: Alisdare Hickson / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Since the end of May, many have said that Israel was starting to lose the propaganda war. Politicians and the media have felt less and less able to proclaim their undying support for that country and denounce the mass movement against the genocide. However, a real breaking point seems to have been reached, with the attack on United Nations and World Health Authority facilities in central Gaza on Sunday 20 July being a final straw.
That offensive followed weeks of rising international horror about the ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’, a false aid-relief organisation that the Israeli armed forces had been using to entrap and kill starving Palestinian civilians, as well as Israel’s blatant construction of concentration camps. The capacity of the Western media-political complex to contain these outrages appears to be exhausted.
This was the backdrop to scenes in the British parliament, where the tone of discussion has completely transformed. Barely nine months ago in the Commons, a Tory MP got up to say Israel was not doing a genocide, causing Labour Foreign Secretary David Lammy to agree with him enthusiastically. Now, the very same David Lammy was forced to concede that the weekend’s violence had been ‘grotesque’ and state that he would ‘get on the phone’ to persuade the Israeli government to stop the attacks. He had severely underestimated just how much the mood had changed, however, because when a Tory politician (former minister Kit Malthouse) stood up to respond to him, it was scathing in ways he would never have expected:
I am frankly astonished at the statement of the Foreign Secretary. At a time when we’ve got daily lynchings and expulsions on the West Bank, dozens being murdered as they beg for aid, I’m just beyond words really at his inaction and frankly complicity by inaction at what is going on. He himself said there’s a massive prison camp being constructed in the South of Gaza. He knows that leading genocide scholars from across the world now are ringing the alarm bells and yet he has the temerity to show up to this House and wave his cheque book as if it’s going to salve his conscience. Can he not see that his inaction and frankly cowardice is making this country irrelevant? Can he also not see there is a personal risk to him, given our international obligations, that he may end up at the Hauge because of his inaction. And finally, really, an appeal to the Labour backbenchers: we can’t get your leadership to change their minds, only you can – if you organise and insist on change.”
To hear any politician talk in these terms about Israel’s crimes – let alone one from the political right – would have been barely believable for most of the past two years. To be clear, that’s not because it wasn’t known about, as millions of you can say, but because there was such a rigid elite consensus in favour of support for Israel.
Wrongfooted, Lammy has since tried to improve the way he looks by sharpening up his rhetoric, but what he comes out with is still hopelessly inadequate. He has signed an anti-war statement with a number of other governments, which the Israeli government has already said it will ignore. Otherwise, Lammy argues that Britain cannot do anything ‘unilaterally’ to save Palestinian lives. This is more absolute rubbish from the man.
Britain has many options for acting, such as:
The most vital thing of all would be to stop doing something: cease the export of military equipment and technology to Israel, which Britain has been continuing to supply throughout the genocide. Multiple Labour MPs – notably Sarah Champion and Stella Creasey, who are not considered part of the party’s left – have spoken in favour of halting the supply of parts for Israel’s lethal F-35 Fighter Jets, planes that are being used to bomb innocent people all across the Middle East today.
It cannot be stressed enough that if our movement had given up, or been smashed and repressed away, between October 2023 and now, this sea change would not be happening. The relentless propaganda that the world was subjected to would have buried the truth and enabled the Israeli military quite literally to bury the people of Gaza unnoticed in mass graves. For much of the past two years, politicians, particularly Tories, were labelling our demonstrations as ‘hate marches’ and encouraging the police and fascist thugs to beat us off the streets. Now, a Tory has given a speech in parliament which one of us could have made!
We should also make no mistake that the political class is still attacking our side. If you marched through London on Saturday, you could not have missed the menacing electronic notice boards the police had put up, warning us all that we could be arrested for opposing the criminalisation of the group Palestine Action. As a sort of farcical side-show to everything else that’s happening, Labour’s sad joke of a culture minister Lisa Nandy is still making threats at the BBC over what she claims is a pro-Palestine bias, which recently prompted the high-profile writer/director Peter Kosminsky to say she was acting like a ‘tinpot dictatorship’.
The British state is still complicit in this genocide, whatever a pathetic man like David Lammy says. However, it is precisely for that reason that people in Britain are in a genuine position to make a difference. As listed above, there are real things we could get done to save Palestinian lives: political elites are on the run ideologically and looking for ways to get the heat off them. Our most important challenge now is to use that pressure to force them to do the right thing.
Source: Counterfire