By Ben Chacko
LONDON: The over 200,000 people who demonstrated in London on Saturday, on the 37th national march for Palestine, show that the issue has not gone away, despite Ed Miliband’s admission that: “You were right.”
They were not alone. More than 200 organisations across 60-plus countries — including civil society groups, trade unions, student federations and human rights networks — mobilised in a synchronised Global Day of Action. Protesters took to the streets in Berlin, Dublin, New York City, Turin, Athens, Warsaw and some 300 other locations to demand Palestinian liberation and an immediate end to Israeli occupation and genocide in Gaza.
While Israel marked October 7 as the third anniversary of what Hamas called Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the vengeance wreaked on the Palestinians since then has totally eclipsed the loss of Israeli lives due to the Gaza breakout.
At the latest count from gazacasualties.org, 74,473 Palestinians have been killed, including 20,179 children, 1,701 medical personnel and 262 press workers, while 175,371 people have been injured.
As Lee Keath and Wafaa Shurafa wrote i last Thursday, satellite imagery of Gaza illustrates the story of Palestinian suffering. Rafah, once home to a quarter of a million people, has been erased. Other towns and districts have likewise been razed to the ground.
Since the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal reached a year ago, demolition has continued in the 60 per cent of the territory that Israel still controls, while elsewhere in Gaza more than 1,430 people, including at least 300 children, have been killed, and over 5,000 injured, in Israeli attacks. Israel has now demanded that Palestinians in Gaza evacuate from the last surviving medical centres — obviously with the intention of destroying those places.
In a new book, Twelve Days that Shook the Middle East: Origins of a Genocide — reviewed by Ron Jacobs here — Marwan Bishara shows that the goal of Israel’s military onslaught in the wake of October 7 2023 was a plan that was a long time in the making, just waiting for the right moment, and one in which the United States was complicit.
As Jacobs says: “The never-ending resupply of weapons and other materials, the veto of ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations, the repetition of Israeli lies regarding its massacres and starvation, and the punishment of those who opposed the genocide by Washington reminds the reader of Washington’s collaboration, encouragement and consequent culpability.”
Likewise, the British government is culpable — not just through continuing arms sales, sharing of surveillance data and protection of Israeli weapons factories in Britain, but through its failure to carry out its legal obligations to prevent, punish and ensure non-complicity in what are obviously genocidal acts.
The government’s official recognition now that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is unlawful, and its settlements there are illegal, would not have happened without the mass movement of support for Palestine over the past few years. But, while Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband characterised Israeli actions in the West Bank as “ethnic cleansing,” for which sanctions would be imposed on goods from those settlements, his comments on Gaza still fell well short of describing it as a genocide.
All he could say was “the most unimaginable trauma and suffering … death, destruction and dehumanisation on an appalling scale. A stain on the conscience of the world and this country too.”
The Nobel Peace Prize has generally not been awarded to those who richly deserve it — last year it went to Venezuelan oppositionist Maria Corina Machado, which arguably paved the way for Donald Trump to seize President Maduro and his wife Celia Flores on January 3. But this year the Nobel Committee has awarded the prize to South African Navanethem Pillay “for her efforts to promote peace and international law.” From 2021 to 2025, she chaired the UN Independent International Commission of Enquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which named what was happening in Gaza as genocide Andy Burnham and Edi Miliband take note. (IPA Service)
Courtesy: Morning Star
