So Sunak’s government is tacitly supporting the Israeli government’s so-called “special military operation” against the Palestinians on the West Bank.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s deliberate mis-description of this unprecedented attack on Jenin’s refugee camp - with missiles and drones, followed by bulldozers and an invasion by 2,000 foot-soldiers - echoes the words used by Putin, when he sent his army into Ukraine last year.
But never mind that! For Sunak and Co., Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist Zionist government, with its crude brutality and its authoritarianism, is definitely “one of us”!
Meaning, of course, one of the West’s gang of thieves! Because for the working classes of this world - including the oppressed poor of the former colonies, it is the leaders in Washington, the EU and Westminster who maintain the real “axis of evil” in this world. It’s the same old imperialism, which likes to hide its true nature behind a benevolent disguise, but as the capitalist system deteriorates further, finds it hard to stop that mask from slipping...
Yes, it’s an apartheid state
So Sunak asked his good friend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “please exercise restraint”. It’s another way of saying “please carry on, but try to be more discreet in the future”. Remember how Priti Patel secretly sidled up to this same regime, when she was in May’s Cabinet - and had to resign?
For these politicians, it goes without saying that terror perpetrated against the Palestinians is “justifiable”. And by the way, behind the crocodile tears, that goes just as much for Starmer&co.
They choose to go along with Israeli government claims that weapons were “stockpiled” in the refugee camp - provided by... Iran! No doubt there are some people who believe such nonsense. However, if Palestinians have weapons (most are home-made), it is because they need them for defence. The population on the West Bank is increasingly subject to attack, not just from the army, but from extremist Zionist “settlers”, who regularly try to burn them out of their homes. There is no other word for these systematic attacks than “pogroms”.
Of course, the British state knows exactly what imposing a brutal occupation on a population entails, and how to turn a blind eye to pogroms. After hundreds of years of colonising the world, more recently (1969-1998) it re-occupied the apartheid state it had created in Northern Ireland. And just as in Israel today, those opposing the occupation of British troops were labelled “terrorists”, albeit they were made in and by Westminster.
A new opposing force needed - here too!
It is hard to believe reports that only 12 Palestinians have been killed outright in this latest raid, given that 16,000 refugees were crowded into a living space half-a-kilometre square. Israeli bulldozers have now managed to cut off the water supply to the whole area. The army initially denied the Red Crescent ambulance crews access, when they were trying to reach the injured. In effect, Israeli soldiers have not only destroyed most of the camp, but also all the surrounding infrastructure. Three thousand refugees have had to flee once more.
It is obvious that this extreme violence can only provoke yet more resistance from the Palestinian population - especially the youth, who seek revenge. So of course more will join the Jenin Brigades. And “Islamic Jihad” of Gaza (the other overcrowded Palestinian enclave-prison in the south-west) will react. Whether it was Gaza’s Hamas which was responsible for a fatal car-ramming attack in Tel Aviv against ordinary Israelis today, or if this was the result of spontaneous fury, makes little difference.
As the Israeli electorate’s discontent with Netanyahu’s corrupt regime grows, his best bet is to reassert the “need” for his “strongman state”. So a violent reaction from Palestinians is exactly what he wants to provoke. For months, there have been huge demonstrations in Tel Aviv against his reforms, which aim to abolish the independence of the judiciary.
It is a horrific irony that Netanyahu’s patchwork far-right political coalition includes ministers who identify as “fascist”. And that the 2nd class status of Palestinians living on the West bank, behind a huge wall, barbed wire and checkpoints, is comparable to the experience of the Jews in Nazi Germany of the 1930s.
All this makes for a hugely difficult task confronting the working classes - Palestinian and Israeli - divided as they are, by rivers of blood. Finding a way to break down these barriers - this is the task that the workers, the poor, and above all, the youth of the whole region, will have to set itself. It means putting aside historical grievance and religion - and tenets imposed for centuries - to fight their common enemy. There isn’t another way.