Peter Hain speaks truths that Labour has lost sight of
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
This article by Peter Hain on the war on Gaza is remarkable in a number of ways.
It engages with real problems and suggests ways of thinking about them. It states “some long overdue truths”. It comes from an elder statesperson in the Labour Party.
Its unemotional solidity and clear seriousness stands in sharp contrast to what Starmer and other leaders of today’s Labour Party are saying or, rather, not saying.
What a shabby shower they are.
RK
This article was originally published by the Guardian on Tue 2 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
Israel and its allies must face facts: peace talks are the only way forward, and they will have to include Hamas
I’m a friend to both Israelis and Palestinians, and all my experience tells me this: tough negotiation will achieve what bombs cannot
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The final two sentences state the whole case with wonderful brevity.
It is the supremacist, colonialist mentality – an intrinsic feature of Zionism – which prevents a settlement with Palestinians. This drove the creation of Israel and the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, and the subsequent conquest of the remainder of Palestine and the Golan Heights in 1967 and their ongoing colonization. One longstanding goal of some Zionists is the seizure of the waters of the Litani river.
I don’t know what “confederal” means, but there is another way: a single democratic country with equal rights and votes for all. It happened in South Africa, as Peter Hain must know.
I can understand how Hain can be a friend to non-Zionist Israelis who oppose racism. But not a friend to the terrorist State of Israel.
Well said the most common sense I have read from a member of the establishment everyone else seems to just repeat narratives like Israel has a right to self defence. No country has a right to bomb hospitals churches Mosques schools and universities with impunity. In my opinion the western alliance of The EU Australia Canada UK and the USA are all collaborators in war crimes and should all face charges under international law. How will anyone ever take the western alliance seriously again this has made the whole world less safe, this is not just a disaster for Gazans and Palestinians its a disaster for the whole world now.
I fear things have gone beyond this. The aerial slaughter in Gaza is greater than anything since Vietnam. A new generation of fighters are being created. They will look – rightly – to Russia and China. The fight in Israel is ultimately against US domination. Israel is just a spoiled client state.
Sadly there has been too much collusion with countries whose weapons manufacturering businesses have prospered greatly!
These are the weapons & white phosphorus that has murdered over 22.000 Palestinians & children that we know of, but how many thousands still lie beneath the bombed concrete ??
It is the Western & European Leaders who have supported this annihilation as for Britain it’s become a Zionists friend shaking Netanyahus hand is a sign of weakness! WHY is everyone frightened of upsetting Zionists?
Zionism is NOT JUDAISM yet the power, demands & threats that Zionists command is horrific! This form of genuflecting is abhorrent & people are losing their jobs & reputations by criticising Zionist Israeli violence, tortures, illegal imprisonment & Genocide.
Illegal settlers come from the US & UK whose idea of law comes from the Talmud they say & quote ancient text that killing Arabs & Arab children is their right!!!
Jewish & non people are protesting in their thousands to stop this insanity yet no government is listening!
Netanyahu is a psychopath who has been given permission by his supporters to exterminate everything Palestinian & get to Gaza for the oil & gas that has been discovered!
An atrocity has been committed & supported by shameful leaders!
Of course, it is welcome that an establishment figure should state the obvious truth, that the ending of oppression/resistance in Israel/Palestine should be by negotiation leading to a just and fair political solution. However, there are some parts of the article that need to be called out.
Just like Sunak, Hain calls the attack of 7 Oct a “pogrom”, a term that traditionally describes the attack of a powerful antisemitic majority on a defenceless Jewish minority. The use of this word buys into the Israeli/US/European narrative that Palestinians are motivated purely by racial/religious hatred and pose an existential threat to all Jews, while Israel is the innocent victim. If the term is going to be used in this context, it should be applied to the vicious attacks by armed ‘settlers’ against the people of the occupied West Bank.
Rachel Lever has rightly commented above on Hain’s expression “confederal state…..in which Palestinians have self-government and Israel enjoys security”. That sounds much like the outcome of the Oslo accords: an ineffectual and powerless Palestinian administration under Israeli military domination. We know how well that has worked. What about a democratic state with rights and justice for all its citizens?
Hain calls for a regional summit and states that “there will be no stability in the region unless all parties are included” and then lists the potential participants including, bravely, Iran. But who is missing from his list? Yes, it’s the Palestinians, who presumably are once again to be discussed and decided on in absentia.
I praise Hain for speaking out and recognise that he does so in a difficult political and media environment (in the UK, presumably less so in South Africa), but he should consider some of the limitations of his own thinking.
“I write this from Cape Town where decent South Africans of all races and creeds are contemptuous of what they see as profound double standards by global north leaders – wanting backing for Ukrainian self-determination, but being complicit in the denial of Palestinian self-determination and culpable in the horror in Gaza. The geopolitical breach with the global south is deepening, and will cost Washington, London and Brussels dearly in an increasingly turbulent world.”
I think this part of the article tells us what Hain’s real concerns are. It reminds me of David Miliband’s recent claim that the invasion of Iraq was wrong but only because it made it more difficult to promote the war in the Ukraine to a sceptical global south.
@ Richard and all:-
I’ve now read about half (44 pages of an 84 page document) of South Africa’s “case” that Israel is committing genocide (see https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf).
What surprised me was that ALL the alleged genocidal tactics Israel have used in their current onslaught against Gaza and the West Bank have been used – and documented and witnessed – in a number of previous attacks on the Palestinians. There have been ongoing investigations against Israel for genocide and war crimes long before 2023 – I knew nothing about these.
I’d been expecting to read a dry legal case. It wasn’t. South Africa’s well-known history of oppression under Apartheid guides them on where to look for evidence, how to appraise it and the important part the Public Relations cover-up plays in allowing wrongdoing to continue.
Has the “L” in JVL become “Liberal” as in Peter Hain’s affiliation during the “Stop the Seventy tour”?
It doesn’t deserve much linguistic analysis, but the terminology in the opening paragraphs gives the game away: Hamas is accused of “terror”; Netanyahu is guilty of “retaliation”. This looks very much like the “everything was OK until October 7th” line. Israel was merely responding to a serious disturbance of what they would have the rest of us believe was “peace”.
Then we hear that Netanyahu is guilty of “extremism”, locking us into the moderation-versus-extremism paradigm. There is no “moderate” Zionism. It all leads to dispossession via ethnic cleansing at best and annihilation at worst.
We read about “Rightwing Israeli governments.” The settlement builders in 1967 were led by Levi Eshkol of the Labour Party who have shown just as much commitment to land-theft as any other grouping in Israel.
I don’t even dare to offer comment on the Irish material and the “painful pill” of the Unionists. How difficult it was to think that Catholics might try to get a job at Harland and Wolff!
This piece never gets beyond the surface of anything; there is little here that Starmer would object to.
Are we forgetting / ignoring the (particularly US) Christian Zionist and Evangelical drive to see Jews “recolonise” “Palestinian Zion”? This is a move that will pave the way for the Second Coming. You’ve got to find a way to persuade Joe Biden and other Christian Zionists that Jesus does not rely on mere mortals to fulfil such man-made prophecies The next prophecy involves the demolition of Israel’s third-most holy shrine on “Temple Mount” to make way for the Third Jewish Temple. Please don’t let’s go there!
Common sense talks and negotiations are never going to persuade Zionist Israel to give an inch. They’ve had one aim since 1948 and it hasn’t changed an inch over the past 75 years. Like S Africa, it would have to be forced to change and it took economic sanctions and boycotting, ie no International Sport, it worked. The difference is Israel has the backing of the US, 1. It sees Israel as its own Fully Armed, Middle East Military Base. 2. The recently discovered Gas field in the eastern Mediterranean, which stretches under Gaza, there are fortunes to be made out of it, especially from Europe since the US blew up the Nordstream Gas Pipelines, it’s almost certainly why the US is so silent on the Genocide that’s being carried out. Israel gets the Gaza Strip and the US gets to make fortunes out of the Gas. At this point, all I can see is the complete Ethnic cleaning of Palestine and the dispersal of the remaining Palestinians.
I would love to see a glimmer of hope but I cannot see one, the prizes for the US and Israel are too great AND the rest of the Western World bends in the direction that the US tells them.