UK
ZIONIST RED TORYSIR Keir Starmer's key comments about Gaza in the past three weeks
James Cheng-Morris
·Freelance news writer, Yahoo UK
Updated Fri, 3 November 2023
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer defends his approach to the Israel-Hamas conflict in a speech on Tuesday. (AFP via Getty Images) (DANIEL LEAL via Getty Images)
Keir Starmer remains under pressure over his stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict after two Labour council leaders called for him to resign.
Asjad Mahmood, of Pendle Borough Council, and Afrasiab Anwar, of Burnley Council, said Starmer should go amid unhappiness among numerous MPs and party members over his refusal to back a ceasefire as the crisis continues to escalate.
Sixteen of Starmer's frontbenchers have now defied him by either calling for a ceasefire themselves or sharing others’ calls on social media.
The row has dogged Starmer since a controversial interview with LBC three weeks ago (see further down this page). On Friday, the Labour leader faced repeated questions from reporters about his position on the conflict during an event which was intended to highlight the party’s plans on business, building and jobs.
It has also seen his personal poll ratings drop.
As he continues to face pressure, Yahoo News UK sets out what Starmer has said about the conflict over the past three weeks.
This is when the row started.
In an interview with LBC four days after the onset of the conflict, Starmer said: “I’m very clear Israel must - does - have that right to defend herself and Hamas bears responsibility.”
He was then asked if a siege and cutting off power and water in Gaza was appropriate - and Starmer said: “I think that Israel does have that right.
“It is an ongoing situation. Obviously everything should be done within international law, but I don’t want to step away from the core principles that Israel has a right to defend herself and Hamas bears responsibility for the terrorist acts.”
A backlash followed. Over the next week, a number of Labour councillors resigned from the party.
One, Amna Abdullatif of Manchester City Council, said she was quitting in the wake of Starmer’s “horrifying comments about Israel having the right to withhold fuel, water, food and electricity from the 2.2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, effectively endorsing a war crime”.
Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer has faced weeks of pressure over his stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict. (Owen Humphreys - PA Images via Getty Images)
20 October
In the wake of two by-election victories in which Labour took Conservative seats, Starmer publicly addressed the row for the first time as he denied ever backing Israel withholding humanitarian aid from Gaza.
He argued he had intended to say Israel has the right to defend itself and retrieve 200 hostages “within international law”.
“I was saying that Israel has the right to self-defence, and when I said that right I meant it was that right to self-defence. I was not saying that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines.”
Later that day, pro-Palestinian demonstrators protested outside the party’s London headquarters, with chants including “Labour Party blood on your hands”.
31 October
By this time, Starmer was under growing pressure to call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas after leading Labour figures - including London mayor Sadiq Khan, Scottish party leader Anas Sarwar and a number of frontbenchers from his own shadow cabinet - broke ranks to challenge his stance.
In an attempt to quell the row, he delivered a speech at Chatham House, a foreign affairs think tank in London, defending his approach.
He again resisted ceasefire calls, saying: "While I understand calls for a ceasefire at this stage, I do not believe that it is the correct position now for two reasons. One, because a ceasefire always freezes any conflict in the state where it currently lies.
“And, as we speak, that would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capabilities to carry out the sort of attack we saw on 7 October. Attacks that are still ongoing. Hostages who should be released [are] still held. Hamas would be emboldened and start preparing for future violence immediately.”
He said a humanitarian pause is the “only credible approach” which could see “the urgent alleviation of Palestinian suffering”.
Meanwhile, police were forced to intervene after pro-Palestinian protesters mobbed Starmer’s car on his way out of the building.
3 November
Starmer once again rejected calls for a ceasefire.
He said: “To say to a sovereign country [Israel] when 200 of its civilians are being held hostage that they must give up their right to self-defence, is not for me the correct position."
‘Deal breaker’: Muslims in Leicester mull vote over Labour stance on Gaza
Andrew Anthony
Sun, 5 November 2023
Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
There was a mood of sombre reflection outside Leicester’s central mosque after Friday prayers. The war in Gaza was at the forefront of many worshippers’ minds and many made it clear that it would have an impact on what political party they supported in the UK.
“I’ve always been a Labour voter,” said Shebaz Hassan, “but I’ve been emailing my local MP to see if he’s going to support the ceasefire and a peace solution afterwards. And if he doesn’t, then I’m going to have to see what I’m going to vote – and that goes for a lot of people.”
I've been emailing my MP to see if he is going to support the ceasefire and a peace solution afterwards
Shebaz Hassan
His brother, Imtiaz Hassan, said that Keir Starmer’s support of Israel’s right to invade Gaza, following Hamas’s brutal slaughter of some 1,400 Israelis and kidnapping of more than 200 on 7 October, was a “deal breaker”.
Roughly a third of Leicester’s 369,000 population is Muslim, and it’s a community that has traditionally voted for Labour. All three of its constituencies returned Labour MPs in the last election, although Claudia Webbe of Leicester East could stand as an independent after losing the Labour whip.
It’s a city that Labour would expect to romp home in come the next election. But according to Raffiq Mohammed, a Labour councillor for the Stoneygate ward, the party is now “haemorrhaging votes that we’re not going to get back” as a result of Starmer’s stance.
Mohammed was one of seven local Muslim councillors who wrote an open letter demanding that the Labour leader withdraw and apologise for the comments he made in an interview on LBC in which he said that Israel has the “right to do everything it can to get those hostages back”, including withholding power and water from Palestinian civilians.
Starmer later clarified his remarks and has since called for a humanitarian pause in hostilities to enable the distribution of civilian aid, but neither Mohammed nor his fellow signatories believe that he’s gone far enough to satisfy them or their constituents.
Mohamed Sebaj, left, with a friend, has always voted for Labour before but now says he doesn’t know who to support. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer
“I remember campaigning during the Iraq war, and the community has doubled in size since then,” he said. “It’s also more political and it doesn’t rely on the BBC or newspapers for its information.”
Even if Labour believes it is protected by the handsome majorities that it enjoys in the two Leicester constituencies with the highest numbers of Muslim voters, Mohammed says there are many other towns, such as Loughborough, where the Muslim vote could be decisive. But where would these voters go?
Last week the leaders of two Labour councils, Burnley and Pendle, called for Starmer to resign. A couple of weeks ago nine councillors in Oxford quit the party over Starmer’s refusal to call for a ceasefire and are now independents. Are there similar plans afoot in Leicester?
“It depends how the situation develops,” says Mustafa Malik, another Labour councillor in Leicester.
Now that Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, the Labour mayors of London and Manchester, have both called for a ceasefire, and with growing unrest among a number of MPs, Starmer is facing a delicate political calculation.
In reality his influence on the situation on the ground in Israel and Palestine is severely limited. “He might not have that power,” says Shebaz Hassan, “but if he says something, then at least we know he’s saying what we think he should be saying.”
On the streets of Leicester it’s hard to get an accurate picture of exactly how critical the issue is to Muslim Labour voters. The majority of those asked say they’re not interested or don’t want to speak.
In the Highfields area, where a number of Palestinian flags hang from windows, one man, who didn’t want to give his name, said people in the community are worried about expressing their opinions publicly.
“Because it’s such a polarised debate, not many people want to speak up about it, given the fact that they have jobs,” he said. “It could affect their livelihood.”
Mohammed Sebaj says that while he’s always previously voted Labour, the leadership’s response to Gaza means he’s unsure what he’ll do in the next election. “Honestly I don’t have any idea who to vote for.”
Most observers believe an election won’t take place for six months at the earliest. By then all the doubt and frustration that is circulating in towns such as Leicester may have run their course – alternatively they may harden into something more concrete. Starmer will be hoping for a speedy resolution in the tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean 2,000 miles away, or else the disciplined party unity he’s carefully built might begin to crumble.
Labour will work for a Palestinian state
David Lammy
SHADOW FOREIGN SECRETARY
Sat, 4 November 2023
Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images
Fifty years ago, at the height of the Yom Kippur war, there was a deep fear that the wars between Israel and Egypt might never end. With devastating losses in the Sinai and whole armies facing encirclement by the Suez Canal, few expected the narrow diplomatic openings to lead to a lasting peace between the foes. Today we face a situation just as perilous. Hamas’s appalling terrorism against Israel on 7 October led to the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, while the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is playing out on an unimaginable scale, with thousands of civilians dead, streets flattened and more than a million people displaced.
We must not look away. Instead, once again diplomacy must work urgently to find those narrowing openings. This week, at meetings with foreign ministers in Amman, Doha and Cairo, it became clear to me that an immediate humanitarian pause in the fighting is the most realistic way to immediately alleviate the suffering of civilians in Gaza, and secure the release of the hostages. That is why our position is shared with our major allies, the US and the EU.
I understand why so many are calling for a ceasefire now. We all want the bloodshed and suffering to end. But a ceasefire now would just embolden Hamas. They would still hold hundreds of innocent hostages. They would still fire rockets into Israel. And they would still have the capacity and determination to repeat the horrors of 7 October “again and again”, as a Hamas official boasted last week.
The truth is that Hamas is not seeking negotiations but looking to use Palestinian civilians as human shields and widen the conflict to second and third fronts. A ceasefire will hold only when 7 October can never be repeated.
But even wars have rules. The way Israel fights this war matters. It must uphold international law. The Palestinian people are not Hamas and the children of Gaza must be protected. It is unacceptable that the siege conditions on the strip have not been lifted. The number of dead Palestinian civilians (including children) is shocking and, as Antony Blinken said, Israel must take “concrete steps” to protect innocent lives. And we must redouble our calls to end illegal settlement activity, intimidation and violence on the West Bank
We reject the alternative to a peaceful settlement that is playing out on our TV screens and will pursue two states: a sovereign Palestine and a secure Israel
The Palestinian tragedy extends beyond Gaza. Visiting Ramallah in July last year, I came face to face with a generation in despair. I met young, peaceful Palestinians, totally opposed to Hamas terrorists, who were as impressive as they were eloquent. But their lives told a bitter story of diplomatic failure. Children during the now-forgotten hopes of the Oslo process, their adolescence scarred by the second intifada, they were now facing adulthood under a seemingly permanent occupation, with vanishing economic prospects and ever-encroaching settlements.
Afterwards, I met Mohammed Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, who said the international community, including the UK, seemed to have abandoned serious efforts towards a lasting settlement. I thought of those young lives, and of the fear of a young person I had met earlier in Israel, who had become accustomed to running to bomb shelters in fear of Hamas rocket attacks. With this in mind, I promised that if Labour wins power, we will strive to recognise Palestine as a sovereign state, as part of efforts to contribute to securing a negotiated two-state solution.
Britain, on this essential issue, has lost its way. It is intolerable that no government has put in sustained effort towards a two-state solution since New Labour. Recent Conservative governments have, at times, been dangerously irresponsible, leaving the two-state solution out of their recent UK-Israel road map and announcing plans to move the UK embassy to Jerusalem. The task will be hard and Britain’s influence in the region has limits, but Labour recognises Britain’s historical responsibility. We will appoint a new special envoy dedicated to Middle East peace and recharge diplomacy with all parties in the region to gain maximum influence.
This gets to the core of Labour foreign policy with me and Keir Starmer: our progressivism will be founded on realism. Progressive because our foreign policy will be founded on the belief that every human life is of equal value. This is why we reject the alternative to a peaceful settlement that is being played out on our TV screens and will pursue two states: a sovereign Palestine and a secure Israel. Realist because we will focus on making practical, tangible progress with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
This means working with not only the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, but our partners in the Gulf, Jordan and Egypt. Tentative conversations have already begun over post-war Gaza and reviving the Palestinian Authority. These narrow openings must be turned into a pathway for a two-state solution.
No one should doubt the difficulty of the diplomatic task ahead, but a committed international community has moved the dial even on this conflict in the recent past. Even at the height of the second intifada, the Bush administration brought Ariel Sharon to the table with Mahmoud Abbas, with Britain contributing meaningfully to the overall effort.
It must not be forgotten, as a result of this concerted push, how close Ehud Olmert and Abbas got in making final status proposals at the Annapolis conference. As war raged in 1973, few would have dared to hope that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would visit Jerusalem only four years later. It was not an inevitable arc of history that brought this about. It was at first quiet, then intense, diplomacy. This is a habit that needs urgent revival.
