End Israeli state terror
We need our own party
Build the workers’ fightback
Iain Dalton, Yorkshire Socialist Party Regional Secretary
Donald Trump’s pronouncement, that he wants the US to take over Gaza and see it cleared of its inhabitants, has further inflamed the Middle East, giving Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government a greenlight to again escalate its state terror in Gaza.
But the US government has been complicit in the Israeli state’s massacre of civilians in Gaza since well before Trump’s election. ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden continued to sign off billions of dollars of arms shipments to Israel, except from one token shipment.
Keir Starmer’s new Labour has backed the Israeli government throughout too, including Starmer defending the Israeli government’s ‘right’ to cut off food and water to Palestinians.
Desperate for a trade deal with Trump, both Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy couldn’t bring themselves to directly criticise Trump when they joined in the widespread condemnation of Trump’s ‘plan’.
At every step, Starmer’s government seeks to do the bidding of the capitalist elite – whether backing wars to try to secure their profit interests, or bringing down the axe on public services alongside wage restraint and privatisation.
It is under a Labour government and home secretary that police orchestrated the arrest of protest organisers and activists during the January national anti-war demo. Labour politicians should be reminded that Tory ex-home secretary Suella Braverman was brought down after she tried to ban us marching.
To step up the movement to bring a real end to war and occupation, including in the West Bank, unions should lead, drawing on the groundswell of opposition to the war. Collective action by trade unionists could bring a halt to arms shipments and other materials that make the occupation of Palestinian land possible.
The election of four Gaza independents as well as Jeremy Corbyn in the general election was a shot across the bow for Starmer’s Labour – proof that anger at Labour can be translated into electing our own political representatives.
Workers desperately need our own new mass party, one which fights for a socialist alternative to capitalism’s war, poverty and austerity. Trade unionists, socialists and other campaigners standing as working-class representatives in elections against Labour, is an important part of the process of bringing one into existence.
