Labour and Palestine, signs of a shift
JVL Introduction
With reports that funding to Unwra has been renewed and likely restriction on arms sales to Israel, there is room for cautious optimism that Britan’s policy toward Israel might be about to see some rebalancing as Labour rediscovers, and perhaps fears, international law.
Don’t be carried away, warns Evan Robins in the latest issue of the Pickle.
The funding for Unwra is at pre-October levels, with the need now vastly greater.
And what will the arms ban really amount to? Canada’s much-vaunted embargo in February didn’t amount a hill of beans.
Or maybe simple fear of falling foul of complicity in genocide will put some steel in Labour’s backbone.
In any event, some action will be more than welcome.
RK
PS: Subsequent to this article appearing, the Guardian has reported that “Britain drops its challenge to ICC arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.“
This article was originally published by Vashtimedia/The Pickle on Fri 26 Jul 2024. Read the original here.
Evan Robins
Assessing Labour’s week of Palestine policy
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It’s western civilisation that’s failed, isn’t it. I was never convinced by those who said our much-vaunted Enlightenment was never what it was cracked up to be. I used to throw Kant, Beethoven, Goethe and the rest back at them but that only made things worse. They told me that while all that talk was going on, so was the Atlantic slave trade.
Nobody with the real power to do anything about it is seriously tackling the climate crisis, which the mainstream media is reporting as minimally as it can. Talk about bread and circuses! Now it’s the Olympics all the rage. And wars, wars adding to the carbon and the destruction of the planet.
I think I once used to care somewhat about Israel (as I was taught to). I spent some time trying to find an old Times article Bernard Levin once wrote, “I owe no allegiance to Israel” and much more that I wish I could remember. But Israel is less than nothing to me now, its very name disgusts me.
It’s brought nothing but misery to so many and because it claims to act and speak in the name of all Jews, it’s not always easy to persuade even people of goodwill that it’s not true, that it sets to make those who have no control over what its governments do and who despise their actions, to make them complicit.
Starmer, Kamala H. have been forced to see at least some of the writing on the wall. They’ll pour a little water into the mix to dilute the poison but no more than they have to. The myths and the lies will not only endure but be cheered to the rafters as the US Congress shamefully showed us the other day in its orgiastic frenzy of self-congratulation and its war-fevered blood lust.
Indeed, the west is finished and barring some kind of miracle, it’s looking by the day as if the human species is too, taking much of the rest of the living world with it.
I truly doubt Starmer remembers he is a ‘human rights’ lawyer. As shallow as a puddle. He was just the convenient entryist, the Manchurian candidate -there at the right moment for the Labour right, who are as vicious and punitive as anything in Torydom. Their mantra is to win at any cost (because you can’t do anything unless you have power) and their method – compromise, aided by ruthless top-down anti democratic discipline – they throw principles over the side of a morally empty, slow-sinking boat. They have been complicit in grotesque Gaza murders of thousands of children already and that can never ever be forgiven or forgotten
toe the line
Frankly. Any UK Government “shift” is like moving the salt-pot on the political table. Its unquestioning support for the illegal Zionist entity and its criminal leaders remains steadfast and firmly intact.
This all looks very much like manoeuvring around ineluctable and multifarious forces. Jockeying towards advocating a ‘two state solution’. Trying to turn the clock back to Balfour and the 1947 partition map, with a strong and heavily-armed Israel led by ‘Liberal Zionists’.