Today we will see if what’s left of the Labour Left has the Courage to Defy Starmer and Support the SNP Call for an Immediate Ceasefire

For over a month Brighton and Hove Labour Group, which controls the Council and was hand selected by a special National Executive panel, (Labour members could not be trusted to select their own candidates) kept its silence whilst Israel perpetrated a horrific massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Nearly two weeks ago I wrote to them asking why, when over 600 Labour Councillors nationally had written to Starmer calling on him to call for an immediate ceasefire, many of them resigning because of Labour’s support for genocide in Palestine, not one member of the Labour group had felt able to add their name. In contrast 7 Labour councillors in nearby Worthing had added their names to a petition.

Brighton & Hove Trades Council Demonstration at The Level

The statement that the Labour Group issued is, as my Open Letter states, pathetically weak in every respect. It recognises the ‘right’ of Israel to bomb and maim Palestinians in Gaza but asks it to take care it doesn’t overdo it. It recognises Israel’s ‘right to self defence’ but accords no similar right to the Palestinians. Thus it condemns the October 7 breakout from the world’s largest open air prison but has nothing to say about  17 year suffocating siege.

During Israel’s attack on Gaza, Israeli Palestinians are being subjected to Police attacks and racist attacks on them as a fifth column

This is why Brighton and Hove Trades Council is calling the demonstration. The Labour Group includes a number of openly racist Zionist supporters including Julie Cattell, a member of Sussex Friends of Israel and Emma Daniel, who managed Starmer’s leadership campaign in Brighton.

Labour Councillors Pretend that the Conflict Began on October 7th 

There was a time, though it now seems in the distant past, when councillors like Francis Tonks, who is now in his 90s, could be relied on to support all manner of anti-imperialist and progressive causes.  No longer. The Labour Group is consistently reactionary in every respect.  It is made in the image of Labour’s robotic leader Starmer.

Devastation in Gaza

The Labour Group statement calls for the moribund and defunct apartheid two state solution. The same formula that has acted as a cover for the continual expansion of settlements on the West Bank. There is not a cat in hell’s chance of such a solution being adopted by an Israeli cabinet dominated by those who want to transfer the Palestinians out of Palestine altogether.

Perhaps Hamas was operating from the world’s third oldest church too?

But even if Israel’s politicians were to adopt the two state solution then I would oppose it. A Jewish state is an anachronism. It is a Jewish racial state, granting supremacy to Jews over non-Jews.

There was a time in Europe when there were also Christian ethno-religious states – Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Croatia. They were without exception the most anti-Semitic states which eagerly participated in the Jewish holocaust.

Israel has done its best to distort what happened on October 7 when the majority of civilians were killed by the Israeli military

Croatia was the only state to have its own extermination camp, Jasenovac, which was mainly for Serbs but still murdered thousands of Jews. Slovakia was the first state to deport its Jews. Romania’s treatment of its 600,000 Jews, half of  whom it murdered, was so bad that Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland remarked that the Nazis practiced surgery not butchery. Hungary saw, thanks to Zionist collaboration in the form of the Labour Zionist leader Rudolf Kasztner, the extermination of 400, 000 of its Jews at the wars end.

Israeli doctors play the same role as the Nazis’ SS Doctors played – advocating the bombing of Gaza’s hospitals

When Zionists proclaim that there is only one Jewish state in the world my reply is that this is one too many. Religious ethnic states are a throwback to medieval Europe. It was one of the achievements of the French Revolution in 1789, that it granted emancipation and equality to its Jewish citizens. Zionism was founded on a rejection of Jewish Emancipation.

Rabbi Dov Lior, Police Minister Ben Gvir’s spiritual mentor, one said that a Jewish fingernail was worth more than a thousand non-Jewish lives – 

Ignoring Jewish genocidal racism in Israel is essential if one is going to support a ‘Jewish’ state. The fact is, as I point out in the letter, that half of Israel’s Jewish population want to expel the Arab minority. 93% of Israeli land is off-limits to Israel’s Palestinian citizens but this and much else is simply ignored as is the fact that the favourite chant of the Israeli Right today is ‘Death to the Arabs’ a variation on the old Polish/Nazi chant of ‘Death to the Jews’.

Tomorrow Labour MPs have the chance to defy Starmer and vote for the SNP amendment calling for an immediate ceasefire. I suspect that most of what is called the Socialist Campaign Group will meekly troop into the lobbies behind Starmer’s amendment calling for humanitarian pauses. Unfortunately most of the SCG lack what most normal people have – a backbone.

Blood on the ambulance from Israeli bombing

What Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza has highlighted is how Starmer is signed up to the imperialist agenda. International law has gone out of the window. Yesterday 23 International Law academics wrote to Starmer pointing out that Labour policy tramples over international law concerning collective punishment. That Starmer is supposedly a human rights lawyer merely compounds this.

Tomorrow at 6 pm we will gather outside Hove Town Hall in protest at the Labour group’s support for Israel’s genocidal attack on the Palestinians.

Tony Greenstein