Thousands of people protested outside parliament as Ed Miliband loyally voted against an immediate ceasefire (Picture: Guy Smallman)
On 15 November 2023 Israeli forces stormed Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza where 600 Palestinian health workers, patients and refugees were sheltering.
They demanded over a loudspeaker that all men aged 16 to 40 years old come to the courtyard. They ordered them to surrender—and stripped many naked.
That was the very same day that Ed Miliband chose not to vote for an immediate ceasefire in the House of Commons.
He was a loyal minister in a Labour government that backed Israel’s “right” to cut off water and electricity and kept the arms flowing.
Due to the immense pressure of the Palestine solidarity movement, Labour prime minister Andy Burnham has been forced to announce some action against Israel. He knows that Palestine played a decisive role in breaking Keir Starmer’s premiership.
Miliband, now the foreign secretary, is fronting the shift. He has announced a ban on trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967. These settlements are illegal under international law. Unauthorised outposts are even illegal under Israeli law.
Yet settlers use violence and harassment to try to forcibly remove Palestinians from their homes and land. And they are allowed to do so with impunity. Last week, Israeli snipers killed two teenagers, Omar al-Nassan and Khalil Abu Alia, who were trying to resist settlers’ attempts to steal sheep from their village.
The settlement plan unveiled by Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is intended to divide the West Bank in two and therefore “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
The Labour government fears that settlements in the West Bank will undermine a “two state solution”.
This was a sham that allowed the West to back Israel while claiming a Palestinian state could one day exist on a small portion of the stolen land.
It is outrageous to accuse Miliband of “Jew hate” for the new sanctions, as US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee has done. Not only is Miliband Jewish, but this condemns all Jews by claiming that colonialism is somehow part of what it means to be Jewish.
But this doesn’t mean the Palestine movement should let Miliband off the hook or give the Burnham government left cover.
Where was Miliband during the past three years of genocide in Gaza? Where was he when Israel slaughtered more than 76,000 people? When it bombed 36 hospitals? Or when it left nearly two million people displaced?
British diplomats have privately told US counterparts that the new sanctions on Israeli settlements “are largely symbolic and will have no material impact on Britain’s wider relationship with Israel”.
As Miliband refused to vote for an immediate ceasefire, the then Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) director Ben Jamal spoke at a thousands-strong protest outside parliament. He said “all Labour MPs” who voted against an immediate ceasefire “should be held accountable”.
The demonstration outside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on Saturday 26 September is an opportunity to do that.
Let’s demand Labour stop arming Israel, impose a trade embargo and expel the ambassador.
Interview with a member of French revolutionary socialist group Autonomie de Classe
MioCare strikers in Greater Manchester want answers about proposed National Care Service
