Heather Rawling, Socialist Party national committee
The latest cruel and barbaric attacks on Rafah, where 1.2 million have been sheltering, indicate that the Israeli government will stop at nothing to achieve its unrealistic aim of ‘wiping out Hamas’. Many suspect that what it really means is wiping out the Palestinian people.
Many around the world feel helpless in the face of such military might that unashamedly and, with impunity, breaks international law. Israel has received international condemnation for prosecuting genocidal acts, either through direct slaughter or slow, painful death through starvation and disease.
The International Court of Justice, part of the United Nations, ordered Israel ‘to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah’ on 24 May. And yet the IDF continues with attacks on a largely defenceless population. US imperialism, and to a lesser extent Britain, Germany and others too, continue to supply the Israeli state with arms.
Capitalist hypocrisy
Capitalist leaders’ condemnations of the most outrageous acts of Israeli state aggression are driven by their fear of the international working class and masses mobilising against the atrocities: the encampments in the US and elsewhere; protests around the world; and above all, they fear the possibility of war escalating in the Middle East radicalising a whole region.
A mass movement of the Palestinians would be echoed across the region – threatening the capitalists’ rule, in the Arab states and in Israel too.
In Britain, Socialist Party members have campaigned for the trade union movement to mobilise its seven million members in the anti-war movement, and for the trade unions representing workers in arms and logistics industries to discuss and decide actions that can be taken to help stop exports destined for the murderous Israeli war machine.
We need a political voice too. The massive protests in London brought down the right-wing populist Tory home secretary Suella Braverman. But one down is not enough. We need all the Tories out. But Labour’s Keir Starmer has blood on his hands too.
Let’s use the general election to build a working-class, socialist alternative to the warmongering politicians on both sides of the House of Commons.
The Socialist Party will be out campaigning for candidates that represent the interests of the working class nationally and internationally, including standing candidates as part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, arguing for the building of a new democratic mass party of the working class.
The Socialist Party is fighting for:
- End the siege – for the permanent withdrawal of the Israeli military from the occupied territories
- For a mass struggle of the Palestinians, under their own democratic control, to fight for liberation
- For the building of independent workers’ parties in Palestine and Israel and links between them
- For an independent, socialist Palestinian state, alongside a socialist Israel, with guaranteed rights for all minorities, as part of the struggle for a socialist Middle East
- No trust in the capitalist politicians, internationally or in Britain. Fight to build a workers’ party in Britain that fights for socialism and internationalism
