Demonstrators marching through central London last month in solidarity with Palestinians. Photograph: Vuk Valcic/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock
Hundreds of thousands of pro-Palestine demonstrators are expected to march through central London on Saturday in the UK’s first national demonstration since the UN’s international court of justice ordered Israel to ensure its forces do not commit acts of genocide in Gaza.
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Last Friday, the international court of justice ordered Israel to ensure its forces did not commit acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In an interim judgment, the president of the court, Joan Donoghue, said Israel must “take all measures within its power” to prevent acts that fall within the scope of the genocide convention and must ensure “with immediate effect” that its forces do not commit any of the acts covered by the convention.
Earlier this month, the PSC organised a march of hundreds of thousands of people through central London. Little Amal, a 4-metre puppet of a Syrian child refugee, accompanied protesters as they marched towards Parliament Square. The following weekend, hundreds joined a multi-faith peace march in solidarity with people affected by the conflict.
The Gaza health ministry says at least 27,131 Palestinians have been killed and 66,287 have been injured in Israeli strikes on Gaza since the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and about 250 abducted. Satellite images analysed by the United Nations Satellite Centre show that 30% of Gaza Strip’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged. Unicef estimated on Friday that 170,000 children in Gaza were unaccompanied or had been separated from their families.
This will be the eighth National March for Palestine organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign since October.
Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. UK halts aid to UNRWA in Gaza over Israeli allegations that 12 staff from a total of 13,000 were involved in the 7 October 2024 attack on Israel.
Inequitable distribution of income has severe consequences.
The Post Office scandal has once again exposed the shortcomings of performance related pay for company directors. The company had remuneration committees staffed by hand-picked obedient non-executive directors. None opposed the rewards accruing from wrongful prosecution of more than 900 subpostmasters and dutifully rewarded directors. Paula Vennells, chief executive from 2012-2019 picked up bonuses of £2.2m for wrecking lives.
Performance related pay has boosted the remuneration of directors even when performance is negative, as exemplified by the 2007-08 financial crash, collapse of Carillion, BHS, London Capital and Finance, Patisserie Valerie, Debenhams and others.
The bottom line is a key feature of most performance related remuneration schemes. The median tenure of a FTSE100 CEO is about 3.75 years and temptation is to grab higher pay in the shortest possible time. Profits can be boosted by depressing wages, dodging taxes, postponing repair and maintenance; cutting investment and spending on innovation; and by using novel accounting practices. Directors are rewarded for such tactics as shareholders chase short-term returns. Little attention is paid to the long-term damage and social cohesion.
Workers invest their brain, brawn and life in companies but have become just another disposable commodity. In the words of former US President Abraham Lincoln: “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
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Inequitable distribution of income has severe consequences. Millions struggle to have access to good food, housing, education, pension and other essentials. Inequalities are a threat to democracy as the rich are able to control media, buy lobbyists and fund political parties to advance their interests, to the exclusion of the vast majority of the people.
“I have never been more upset and disappointed in our current government”
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“I think a ceasefire is crucial,” one audience member said, adding: “What I also think is crucial is that the UK government is held to account for their role in licensing arms to Israel at the moment.” Her contribution was met with applause from the rest of the audience.
Another member of the audience echoed her comments, saying: “I have never been more upset and disappointed in our current government, with how they have dealt with the situation.”
He then went on to say: “Whether it’s the Conservative Party, and even the Labour Party – it’s an absolute disgrace. How many lives need to be lost? We have been 25-30,000 Gazan lives, people who have done nothing wrong. I completely echo what you say. Israel do have a right to defend themselves – absolute. But at the risk – not at the risk – the death, murder of 25-30,000 people who have done nothing wrong, I can’t understand this.”
Four years on after Britain left the European Union, a damning new poll shows just how disillusioned the public are with Brexit, with the majority believing it to be a failure.
The poll, carried out by Ipsos for the Evening Standard, found that 57% believe Brexit has been more of a failure than success, while only 13% say that it has been a success.
Younger adults, Londoners, and graduates are more likely to say that Brexit has been a failure.
A breakdown of the survey results showed that 70% of 18 to 34-year-olds think Brexit has been more of a failure, as do 64% of 35-54s, compared to 38% of those aged 65+.
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Many of the promises made by Brexiteers have failed to materialise, including grater control of borders, free trade deals with America and of course who could forget the promise to invest £350 million more a week into the NHS after Brexit.
Palestinians flee from the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza after an Israeli ground and air offensive on January 29, 2024
A UNITED NATIONS envoy to Gaza today called out the “double standards” of governments that have suspended funds to the world body’s agency for Palestinian refugees.
About a dozen mostly global North countries have suspended funding to the UN’s Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), even though an investigation has yet to be completed into an allegation that 12 former staff members (of about 30,000) took part in the October 7 attacks on Israel.
UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said that while the governments have suspended aid “the same governments have not suspended ties with the state whose army has killed 26,000 people in Gaza in 3.5 months, though the [International Court of Justice] said it may plausibly constitute genocide.”
She said: “Double standards? Yes, big time.”
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During a UN briefing in Geneva on Tuesday, UN humanitarian spokesman Jens Laerke said UNRWA is “irreplaceable in the humanitarian operation.”
Jan Egeland, secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said it was “telling” that UN bodies and non-governmental organisations agree that defunding UNRWA “means a collapse of humanitarian work among Palestinian women and children in their hour of greatest need — when they’re under this relentless, indiscriminate bombardment and when there is so little capacity for humanitarian relief.”
“There was never much talk about politics before but now everyone cares, lots of people are speaking up,” he said last week. “We’ve been brought up in an environment where we were blindly supporters of Labour, old and young. But now people are opening their eyes a bit more.”
The issue that has opened the eyes of Muslims in Walsall and elsewhere across the country is Labour’s failure to explicitly demand a permanent ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. The party’s position has shifted in recent weeks but, with more than 25,000 casualties in Gaza and a growing humanitarian catastrophe, it is too little and too late for many Muslims.
The anguish and anger felt by Muslims in the UK over the Israel-Gaza war could spell trouble for Labour at the next election. An opinion poll carried out in November by Savanta found strong support for Labour among Muslim voters, with 64% backing the party. But more than 40% said Keir Starmer’s response to the war had made them less likely to vote Labour, while 20% said it had made them more likely to do so. One in three Muslim voters rated the conflict among their top three issues in deciding who to vote for.
Western critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and far-right government are frequently accused of antisemitism, but leftist and left-liberal Israelis have been decrying the country’s descent into fascism for years. In this article, Alberto Toscano argues that fascism is embedded in the logic of Israel’s colonial project.
Green-lit by Western governments and described by myriad human rights law experts as demonstrating clear ‘genocidal intent’, the State of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s Al Aqsa Flood October 7 attack has also elicited talk of fascism in multiple quarters. In a collective statement, the Birzeit University Union of Professors and Employees has spoken of ‘colonial fascism’ and of the ‘pornographic call to death of Arabs by settler Zionist politicians across the political lines’; in their own declaration, the Communist Party of Israel (Maki) and the left-wing coalition Hadash ‘put the full responsibility on the fascist right-wing government for the sharp and dangerous escalation’; meanwhile, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro described the onslaught on Gaza as the ‘first experiment to deem all of us disposable’ in a ‘global 1933’ marked by climate catastrophe and capitalist entrenchment. Even quoting these lines probably falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has served as an important instrument in efforts to curtail peaceful international solidarity activism against Israeli apartheid, especially in the guise of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
And yet the recognition of an incipient fascism in the latest Netanyahu government and even Israeli society at large seems, if not mainstream, certainly prominent in public discourse in Israel itself, not least in the wake of protests against the recent judicial reforms aimed at eviscerating the vaunted autonomy of Israel’s Supreme Court. Four days before the Hamas attack, the newspaper Ha’aretz published an editorial under the heading ‘Israeli Neo-Fascism Threatens Israelis and Palestinians Alike’. One month earlier 200 Israeli high school students declared their refusal to be conscripted thus: ‘We decided that we cannot, in good faith, serve a bunch of fascist settlers that are in control of the government right now.’ In May, a Ha’aretz editorial opined that the ‘sixth Netanyahu government is beginning to look like a totalitarian caricature. There is almost no move associated with totalitarianism that has not been proposed by one of its extremist members and adopted by the rest of the incompetents it comprises, in their competition to see who can be more fully full fascist,’ while one of its editorialists described an ‘Israeli fascist revolution’ ticking off all items in the checklist, from virulent racism to a contempt for weakness, from a lust for violence to anti-intellectualism.
These recent polemics and prognoses were anticipated by prominent intellectuals like the renowned historian of the far Right Ze’ev Sternhell, who wrote of ‘growing fascism and a racism akin to early Nazism’ in contemporary Israel, or the journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery, who escaped Nazi Germany at age ten, and who, not long before his death in 2018, declared that
the discrimination against the Palestinians in practically all spheres of life can be compared to the treatment of the Jews in the first phase of Nazi Germany. (The oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories resembles more the treatment of the Czechs in the “protectorate” after the Munich betrayal.) The rain of racist Bills in the Knesset, those already adopted and those in the works, strongly resembles the laws adopted by the Reichstag in the early days of the Nazi regime. Some rabbis call for a boycott of Arab shops. Like then. The call ‘Death to the Arabs’ (‘Judah verrecke’?) is regularly heard at soccer matches.
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But the fascism ‘godfathered’ by Netanyahu cannot just be reduced to fundamentalist settlers and their stratagems of dispossession (including the deep tendrils into the state of Smotrich’s settler NGO, Regavim, and its lawfare against Palestinian land and property rights); it is also firmly anchored in the business interests and legislative maneuvers of billionaires who, in Israel as in India or the US, are happy to combine national-conservative mobilisations against decadent metropolitan ‘elites’ with the ruthless defense of profit and privilege. In a recent interview, the Israeli Holocaust historian Daniel Blatman observed:
Do you know what the biggest threat is to the continued existence of the State of Israel? It’s not Likud. It’s not even the thugs who run wild in the territories. It’s the Kohelet Policy Forum [a reference to a conservative, right-wing think tank supported by wealthy U.S. donors]. […] They are creating a broad social and political manifesto which, if adopted eventually by Israel, will turn it into a completely different country. You say “fascism” to people and they picture soldiers cruising the streets. No. It won’t look like that. Capitalism will still be extant. People will still be able to go abroad – if they are allowed into other countries. There will be good restaurants. But a person’s ability to feel that there is something protecting him, other than the regime’s good will – because it either will or not protect him, as it sees fit – will no longer be there. Israeli society was ripe to receive the present government. Not because of Likud’s victory, but because the most extreme wing pulled everyone after it. What was once extreme right is today center. Ideas that were once on the fringes have become legitimate. As a historian whose field is the Holocaust and Nazism, it’s hard for me to say this, but there are neo-Nazi ministers in the government today. You don’t see that anywhere else – not in Hungary, not in Poland – ministers who, ideologically, are pure racists.
Its insights notwithstanding, this passage also painfully demonstrates what liberal Israeli polemics against the rise of fascism bracket. Namely, Palestinians. Soldiers do cruise the streets in Israel and occupied Palestine. Millions of people ruled by Israel cannot go abroad. Or indeed return home. The ‘pure’ racism voiced without compunction by the likes of Smotrich and Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir is a product of the racism that structures and reproduces colonial domination, for bad faith liberals as much as for giddy fascists.
