Lindsey German speaks at a Palestine demonstration in London (Picture: STW)
How big a turning point has the last year been for Middle Eastern—and global—politics?
The events after 7 October have been a game-changer with a very big impact on world politics.
When the war started a year ago, most of us didn’t think we would be in this position a year on—that there wouldn’t be a ceasefire, that there would be more than 40,000 Palestinians dead and no end in sight.
Everyone is now saying the peace talks will go on until after the US presidential election in November.
The situation has been very dangerous all year—and we may be about to see an even more dangerous one arising.
We know that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always wanted a much wider war in the Middle East and all the time he’s been driving towards it.
We are now, effectively, in a war between Israel and Hezbollah and that has really big consequences. It has very big consequences for Lebanon—where Hezbollah is in the government—and it will have a devastating impact on its society as have Israel’s previous wars.
It has very big consequences for the Middle East, where Hezbollah is allied with various other groups including in Iran and Iraq.
Israel’s invasion and bombing of Lebanon, its targeted assassinations and terror attacks, have now led to the wider war predicted for a year now.
Iran is being pulled into direct conflict. While it is hard to know the exact outcome of this, Israel’s continued repression of the Palestinians and its attacks on several countries does not bode well.
How do you see Palestine linked to the question of imperialism in the Middle East?
Palestine is central to the Middle East. If you want to understand Palestine, you have to look at US imperialism and British and French imperialism before that.
You have to look at Western imperialism and ask how support for Israel fits into that. The West also supports Saudi Arabia, which is one of the most reactionary regimes in the world. And Egypt receives the biggest amount of military aid after Israel from the US.
You have to ask yourself, what’s this about? And it’s about imperialism protecting its interests in the Middle East.
Therefore, the Palestine movement is a challenge to that and is seen as such.
We now have a new Labour government. Does this make any difference?
Labour has essentially followed the Tory policy—we have a bipartisan consensus when it comes to British foreign policy.
Certainly, Labour governments in the past have never broken with it and nor is this one. In fact, Keir Starmer is identified with being very much in defence of Israel. We had his earlier statements saying that Israel having the “right to defend itself” meant it could cut off water and electricity to the Palestinians in Gaza.
Apart from a few cosmetic changes, Labour policy has remained the same—100 percent support for Israel,
I’m sure Starmer, David Lammy and Joe Biden and the others are unhappy with some aspects of what Netanyahu is doing. But they are not willing to break with their own interests of the West dominating the Middle East.
Starmer’s lost a serious number of votes in the general election in July as a result of the discontent among former Labour supporters. We saw that with the election of five independent MPs in July.
This means Labour is under pressure from all sorts of way from the movement and the general feeling in Britain. But Labour is not prepared to fundamentally alter its pro-imperialist policies.
Pressure from the movement has forced it to pay lip-service to a ceasefire and suspending some arms export licenses.
Yet Labour doesn’t make any fundamental difference to what’s happening with Israel. Britain is still supplying parts for F-35 jets. It still supports the idea that Israel is entitled to vast amounts of weaponry from the US.
But the hostility to Labour over its support for Israel’s genocide hasn’t gone away and it continues to be a major dividing line.
We’ve had upsurges for Palestine before, for example, in response to Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2009 or its assaults on Gaza in 2014. What’s different about the mass mobilisations in the last year?
We’ve had very big demonstrations for Palestine and against war in Britain—and they’ve had an impact.
For example, when Tony Blair was forced to say he would stand down as prime minister in 2006, that was in response to Israel’s war on Lebanon. You had even Labour MPs thinking, “He’s going to take us into yet another war and we can’t have this.” We had very big demonstrations over Lebanon at the time.
However, what we’ve seen in the last year haven’t just been very large demonstrations—ranging from 100,000 to 800,000. They have been sustained over a year—the one we had outside the Labour Party conference last month was the 19th national demonstration—and that is unprecedented.
Take the demonstrations against the Iraq war in 2003. The demonstration we had on 15 February in London, which was up to two million people, was bigger than anything we’ve had over Palestine.
During that year, we had that demonstration and three demonstrations after the war broke out—the first of which was half a million people as well.
We had one against the then US president George Bush, which was a week-day demo and had around 350,000 on it.
That was five over a whole year, but now we’ve had demonstrations week after week, month after month. And they are accompanied by a lot of local activity—demos, boycott campaigns and various other things.
It’s an incredibly sustained movement and I don’t see much sign that that’s going to go away. As long as we have Israel’s genocide continuing, we’ll have the protests.
What’s made it so sustained?
The scale of the attack by Israel has been on a much bigger level and been more sustained, where previous attacks went on for weeks rather than months.
The second reason is that we’ve got a very broad movement that has got some history.
Stop The War has been involved with organising demonstrations with the other demo organisers for a long time.
You begin to build up a whole way of working together and bringing in different sections of society. You have Stop The War, but also the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and various Muslim organisations.
You don’t always agree on everything, but we’ve held that coalition together and that’s been very important in terms of building things.
What has the impact of the movement been on British society—and what next?
People around the world say the movement in Britain is the biggest and most effective in the world.
We’ve put an alternative vision of the Palestine conflict. When we first marched, they told us we couldn’t chant from the River to the Sea. But we chant that on every demo now.
They even said at various points you can’t have Palestine flags. There are lots of Palestine flags on every demo.
The government, the media and those who support them try to denigrate the movement. They say the demos are “hate marches” and violent. They say Jewish people are frightened of going into central London. They say that people are terrified of them.
The whole racist narrative is that they’re made up of large numbers of Muslims. The Palestine movement over the last year has become the victim of vile Islamophobic attacks from Braverman to Tommy Robinson.
But we did get rid of Suella Braverman, when she incited the far right against the Palestine movement and failed to stop us. It’s very important to connect the question of racism to the question of Palestine—and we’ve been successful in doing that.
Given the discontent with Labour, including over domestic issues, it’s important we make the links.
Labour has found £3 billion to arm Ukraine. But there’s not the £1.1 billion a year to pay pensioners fuel allowance. People can begin to see the links between support for wars and the way that they’re treating working class people in this country.
We have to bring it much more into the trade unions and much more broadly into the working class movement.
We will be publishing analysis and interviews with Palestinians and people in the solidarity movement every day in the run-up to the one-year anniversary of 7 October. Stay up to date with our latest articles by going to Palestine: one year on
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