UK
A Labour government must stand up for Palestine
Hugh Lanning
Labour and Palestine’s Hugh Lanning urges all those in Labour to take the struggle for Palestinian self-determination into the Party. We reproduce his speech from last Wednesday’s May Day rally hosted by Arise Festival and Labour and Palestine.
When the general election happens, every candidate of every party is going to be asked: what did you do in the war on Gaza?
They will all be judged by what they did and didn’t do – did they call for an immediate ceasefire, or support continuing the supply of arms and the “industrial carnage” in Gaza in the name of self-defence? Israel’s war on Gaza is going to haunt today’s generation of political leaders in the UK and across the globe.
We must start challenging the view that the survival of one group of people can be won at the expense of another. It took the death of white aid workers for Western governments and their media to start saying ‘enough’ – hypocritically so, after they had supplied the means to enable the massacres to take place.
This is not now and never has been self-defence. Israel is using it as a long-awaited opportunity to seek to eliminate a Palestinian Gaza from the map. This is not just an occupation, it is a full-scale colonisation of historic Palestine. We need to be calling for the decolonisation of Palestine, not just the piecemeal condemnation of individual acts of occupation and settlement by Israel. We must start upholding international law “to fully realise the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.”
The pro-Palestine solidarity movement has been the biggest continuous political mobilisation this country has ever seen. How do we translate this incredible mobilisation into a movement?
One of the critically important arenas where this work needs to focus – particularly those of us still in the Labour Party – is to put Palestine upfront on the agenda of the Labour Party and every other political party. At the forthcoming general election, we are all hoping there will be a change of government, our aim must be to ensure that this results in a change of UK policy on Palestine.
As it stands, on Palestine, a Starmer government could be just as bad as a Sunak one. Many CLP’s have, but we need many more local constituencies to reclaim the right to discuss Palestine. We have therefore launched a motion for CLPs to use to discuss Palestine within their constituencies.
It says that international law is the central, legitimate framework that Labour must adopt, together with the need for actions to bring about Israel’s compliance. Not just an arms embargo of selling arms, but ending the totality of the arms trade, including the security and military collusion with Israel’s military machine. It also calls for Labour to support Palestine’s right to self-determination.
Please table and get this motion discussed in as many constituencies as possible. From day one, the pressure must be on a Labour Government for a dramatic shift in the UK’s stance.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives; many more will die. We cannot allow that generational sacrifice to be in vain. We must ensure that Israel is made to feel that it can never again act with international impunity.
Together, we must ensure that Labour is standing up for the oppressed, not standing arm in arm with the oppressor.
- Hugh Lanning is an officer of Labour and Palestine and also a former Chair of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and former Deputy General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union
- Read the motion here.
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