Ed McNally

The road to Jerusalem, it has so often been said, runs through Cairo. Writing from a regime prison cell in the months after Palestine’s ‘unity intifada’ of 2021, the Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abd El-Fattah modified this historic injunction: ‘The road to Jerusalem looked like it ran through Cairo–but what is certain is that it must pass through Gaza. Jerusalem is not too proud to ask for Gaza’s help. Maybe Cairo should now show a little humility and do the same.’

Here we have a lyrical articulation of a simple political truth: that the freedom struggle of the Palestinian people and the wider fight for democracy in the Arab world are one and the same. Only through the violent suppression of popular sovereignty across the region have the military dictatorships, the petro-monarchs, and the settler-colonial project in Palestine survived.

As Alaa’s mediation suggests, this interconnected struggle is not one-way traffic, a matter of the Palestinians waiting for the Arab peoples to triumph over their autocratic rulers (American clients, more often than not). On the contrary, the Palestinian people often lead the way, generating space for struggle beyond the borders of their historic homeland, in places where the conditions of possibility for mass politics seem to have been crushed. Two weeks ago, it was a march in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza that saw Egyptian democrats surge back into Tahrir Square for the first time since the revolution.

Palestine is never very far from ‘domestic’ politics in the West, either. But in the past eight years, its presence in British political life has overwhelmingly been as an object of controversy. A tremendous amount of ideological work has gone into presenting the popular cause of the Palestinian people as an extreme, fringe obsession. There was, Britain’s elites insisted ever-more hysterically, something odd, alien (and, of course, racist) about the obsession of the hard left and its leader with this faraway land.

So effective was this campaign that some comrades came to see Palestine as a liability. Better to place a cordon sanitaire around the toxic foreign policy and focus on our plans to transform the railways. As it turns out, this was a disastrous misunderstanding which only emboldened our enemies and paved the path to defeat.

Along the way, though, the construction of the Palestinian people’s cause as its opposite–a minority rather than a mass concern, a sectional rather than a popular issue–started to stick. In the eyes of the Labour right and their stenographers, delegates proudly waving Palestinian flags at party conference in 2018 was the ultimate emblem of Corbyn’s minoritarian obsessions. It helps, of course, that this is also precisely how Palestine has been construed by the British security state and its ‘counter-terror’ programmes in the past fifteen years: as an exemplar of extremism.

No wonder, then, that the British establishment is increasingly panicked that this latest chapter of the Palestinian people’s struggle, in all its horror in Gaza, has provided unexpected openings for popular politics in the belly of the beast. Across three successive weekends, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in London and across Britain, in the largest protests since the Iraq War. Opinion polls are consistent in showing that the political class, holding slavishly to the hawkish, genocide-abetting line of the masters in Washington, are on an island–speaking for only about 3 percent of the population in strongly opposing a ceasefire.

In other words, the elite mystification which sought to upend reality and marginalise the Palestine solidarity movement has been shattered–by both the clarity of public opinion and the numbers on the streets. As in Egypt, the universality of Palestine asserts itself inexorably, where masses stand with the Palestinian people as part of a movement aimed at ending Western complicity in their violent dispossession. But really this is to get things backwards: it is them opening the way for us.

Since the defeat of Corbynism, the speed of the Left’s banishment to the margins of British politics has been bewildering–our leaders are cowed, and the institutional legacies of our historic advance depressingly thin on the ground. In that bleak context, the sheer size, social breadth, and ideological strength of the movement that has sprung up for Palestine in recent weeks should offer some perspective. It might serve as a reminder that the closest the Left came to mass appeal during the New Labour ‘wilderness years’ was through leading a mass anti-war movement. There were two slogans for the largest protest in British history: ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’ and ‘Freedom for Palestine’.

More importantly, the seas of black, red, white, and green make plain–for us and our enemies–the reality that the left-populist surge in Britain wasn’t an aberration or a matter of pure contingency: rather, our politics is rooted in actually-existing social constituencies. Together with the left of the labour movement, that makes for a real base upon which mass political projects can be built. Only twice during his leadership of the Labour Party has Keir Starmer been forcibly reminded of this: fleetingly during the Enough is Enough campaign last year, and in recent weeks. That the adept authoritarian blockage of the Left does not sweep away its underlying social source of strength is a bitter reality for the small-minded functionaries of the Labour right to confront.

This explains their tendency, of recent weeks, to double down with more repression, heightened censorship, and increasingly absurd claims about the marginality of hundreds of thousands of people. Insisting that supporters of a mass, popular cause–on the streets calling for a ceasefire in line with the majority of the population–are in fact a minority of hateful extremists is a form of anxious projection. So too is the suspension of Andy McDonald: this is the paranoid style of the British establishment, who know that their politics of reflexive servility to the Americans is built on quicksand.

From the West, action against the complicity of our governments has an indispensable role to play in the struggle to liberate Palestine. That is the most important thing, and the first purpose of an emerging mass movement. In Cairo two weeks ago, the chants quickly turned from Palestine to calls for ‘bread, freedom, and social justice.’ There are no such revolutionary horizons in Britain, but the significance of it being Palestine that offers us a glimpse of mass politics again cannot be overstated.

Not only the Egyptians: we, too, should be grateful to the Palestinian people. We stand with them, but it is the steadfastness of their popular struggle for universal freedom and dignity that shows the way.

(Ed McNally is a a PhD student and a trade union political officer. He served on the Palestine Solidarity Campaign national executive for two years. Courtesy: Tribune. Tribune was established in 1937 as a socialist magazine that would give voice to the popular front campaigns against the rising tide of fascism in Europe. For eighty years it has been at the heart of left-wing politics in Britain.)

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Mainstream Media Ignores Massive Protest in New York for Palestine

James North

The huge protest last night at New York’s Grand Central Station, sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace, is exactly the sort of event that the mainstream U.S. media normally likes to cover. A thousand protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza actually closed down the terminal for a time, and then 300 of them got peacefully arrested, in what was arguably the biggest act of nonviolent civil disobedience in New York in many years. Most of the protesters wore photogenic black t-shirts with white lettering: “Jews Say Ceasefire Now,” and “Not in Our Name.”

There were striking photographs and video footage: hundreds of demonstrators blocking the railroad terminal’s main concourse; banners unfurled above, from a balcony; long lines of people waiting to be arrested and taken away. The protesters emphasized that many, probably most, of them were Jewish, and that they were challenging a mainstream narrative that protesting the killing in Gaza is somehow antisemitic.

You would expect huge media coverage. But you would be wrong, as the mainstream continued its policy of downplaying or ignoring what is easily the biggest wave of nationwide antiwar protest in the U.S. since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Let’s start with America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times; the protest actually took place on its home turf. In this morning’s print edition: not a word. Online, a short, 14-paragraph report, which is already hard to find on the Times home page. (Update: by 10:20 a.m., the Times had removed from the home page its direct link to the report.) Instead, the print edition had a bizarre front-page article about how the comedian Dave Chappelle is allegedly flirting with antisemitism as he includes Gaza in his live performances. The Times report on Grand Central did include tantalizing quotes from only three demonstrators, including 81-year-old Rosalind Petchesky, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace who was later arrested. “I don’t believe in this war,” was all the Times allowed her to say. You can bet that Ms. Petchesky had more opinions than that.

At least the Times did run a report. Over at the Washington Post, there was only a one-paragraph summary and a single photo. So far, absolutely nothing at National Public Radio. Quick searches at both cable news networks CNN and MSNBC turned up no coverage yet either.

The failure to report the Grand Central Station protest is only the latest example of the mainstream news blackout.

This site’s Michael Arria has just documented a string of examples over the past three weeks:

“Thousands have hit the streets in NYC, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and dozens of other cities. A D.C. protest organized by Jewish activist groups drew thousands, and hundreds were later arrested, including two dozen Rabbis. An estimated 25,000 people showed up to a rally in Chicago.”

Canceling coverage of last night’s Grand Central protest is actually extraordinary. Both CNN and MSNBC have sent quite a few reporters to Israel (although not Gaza), to cover the war. Why couldn’t they find correspondents to report from the heart of New York City?

(Courtesy: Mondoweiss, an independent website devoted to informing readers about developments in Israel/Palestine and related US foreign policy.)

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Half a Million March for Gaza in London

Peter Lazenby

Anger erupted on the streets of towns and cities across Britain this weekend as record numbers of protesters mobilised to demand a halt to Israel’s murderous attack on the population of Gaza.

Half a million marched in London in the capital’s biggest-ever protest for Palestine yesterday.

And activists occupied and shut down the capital’s Waterloo station demanding an immediate ceasefire, an end to Britain’s arms trade with Israel and Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

In Manchester, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Belfast, Leeds, Bradford, Bristol and other centres tens of thousands marched over the two days.

The protesters spoke with one voice—“Ceasefire now!”—directing their message at the Tory government which licenced the sale of weapons from Britain now being used by Israel in the accelerating massacre.

The message was also directed at a Labour leadership stubbornly refusing to support the ceasefire call.

In London, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn told the rally in Parliament Square:

The world’s nations voted at the United Nations last night in the General Assembly by an overwhelming majority to demand a ceasefire.

It’s not much to ask, a ceasefire, when children are being killed by weapons coming through the rooms of their homes.

It is in eternal stain that the British government abstained on that vote.

Naomi Greenberg of the Black Jewish Alliance said:

Israel is waging a genocide in Gaza using weapons our government sold them.

The slaughter of my family members in the Holocaust was enabled by the same racist dehumanisation which we now see directed against the Palestinians by our own political leaders.

I came here today to demand an immediate ceasefire and end to the blockade of Gaza–all of us must stand against the genocide being carried out in our name and with our tax money.

Palestinian-British national Basma Ghalayini and her husband and two children were among 15,000 who marched in Manchester.

Her father and three brothers are in Gaza and contacted her today.

She told the Morning Star:

We talked about day-to-day stuff, how they were getting their water, that sort of thing.

The thing about Manchester is that there is a strong sense of solidarity. The message was clear—a ceasefire now and an end to the occupation.

There were Jewish friends of Palestine there. They are always a strong presence at demonstrations.

One of my best friends is the head of one of their groups.

It’s good to be heard as a Palestinian. Palestinians are never heard. We are censored in the British media. It is frustrating.

Ms Ghalayini said that things they heard from friends and relatives are “very different” from the mainstream media, adding:

anyone who supports Palestine is marginalised.

I will be out every time there is a demonstration, with my children.

Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) director Ben Jamal said:

The wave of solidarity has in turn put pressure on our political leaders to shift their stances and start calling for the prevention of further violence and killing.

The only way to stop the further deterioration of the situation is through a ceasefire, enforced and guaranteed by the UN, and we are putting all the resources we can into working towards an immediate ceasefire being called.

Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf has said he has spoken to his in-laws trapped in Gaza following the telecoms shutdown.

He said he fears for their safety as they have run out of drinking water.

He said:

The UN resolution must be implemented. We need the violence to stop, and for significant amounts of aid to get through without delay.

The government is continuing to resist calls for a ceasefire.

Tory minister Michelle Donelan said today that it will be judged at a “later date” whether Israel has complied with international law.

She said Britain continues to “call for a pause” in the violence to allow aid into the region and permit people to leave.

Amid an attempt to criminalise pro-Palestine protest, Ms Donelan also argued that current laws for dealing with extremism are “robust enough” but said the definition is kept under “constant review.”

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said about 100 people had been arrested at demonstrations held since October 7, with “many more” arrests expected in the near future.

Protests also took place in dozens of towns and cities across the world.

In France, police surrounded hundreds of people in Paris who defied a ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Saturday and fired tear gas when they tried to march.

Other protests took place in the country’s eastern cities of Marseille and Strasbourg.

In New York, protesters marched across the Brooklyn Bridge a day after filling Grand Central Station, many wearing black T-shirts saying “Jews say ceasefire now” and “Not in our name.”

(Courtesy: Morning Star Online, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.)