In the parliamentary constituencies of West London, politicians have responded to the renewed war in the Middle East. Most have failed to oppose Israel’s genocide; some have encouraged the killing, and others have tried to position themselves on the side of peace: a mix of cowardice, complicity and clarity.
Israel & Free Speech
Speaking truth about Israel-Palestine is now almost forbidden, such is the level of hysteria it triggers. The hysteria deters free-thinking, deters open recognition of Palestinian rights under international law and the impact on Western political discourse is chilling. The reasons for the chronic pro-Israel bias include:
- The constant threat of being smeared as an antisemite by supporters of Israel for dissenting against Western governments’ support for Israel’s dominance of Palestinian life.
- Israel is seen as representative of Western values, an oasis of white European democracy amid backward Arab states. This racist concept means Israel’s crimes are routinely ignored; Palestinians’ peaceful resistance is ignored, and Palestinians’ violent resistance is always denounced as terrorism. Mainstream discourse either omits context altogether or obfuscates it with misleading cliches like “religious conflict” “disputed land” and “another round of violence.” Western states accept Israeli crimes as a price worth paying for the division of the Arab world.
- Fanatical and powerful Christians who believe that Christ will return and that the existence of Israel is a prerequisite for this. This pathology is particularly prevalent among American leaders.
- The Israel lobby wields significant power across Western capitals. Those speaking out against Israel’s crimes, or even speaking up for Palestinian rights, are smeared and harassed.
Palestinians have sacrificed so much since Britain gifted their land to the Zionist movement. Palestinian steadfastness has remained constant while the essence of the conflict has not changed in 75 years: a colonial regime that seeks to remove the indigenous people from the land and replace them with an exclusively Jewish population. The occupation and its violence are illegal under international law. The right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return home is also uncontroversial under international law. The same goes for their right to resist oppression. Seven decades have added much detail to the story but it remains a case of illegitimate occupier versus legitimate resistance. Are our local politicians acting on this truth?
Westminster North
Labour MP Karen Buck, who is a veteran of the Palestine solidarity movement and visited Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s 2008-9 massacre, has shown little appetite for fighting for the people she knows to be the victims of a brutal siege. Buck toes the party line, focusing on humanitarian assistance rather than addressing the cause of the humanitarian crisis.
The Conservative party have not yet named their candidate to challenge Buck.
Hampstead and Kilburn
Tulip Siddiq is Labour’s Shadow City Minister and has issued boilerplate statements on the war that serve to support Israel’s ongoing genocide. Siddiq claims she “can’t bear watching it” and says Israel must act in line with international law but does not condemn Netanyahu’s government as it breaches international law daily.
In an email to constituents, the MP’s focus, like most Labour politicians, was humanitarian aid. Like almost every British politician, Siddiq ignores the Palestinians’ right to resist and blames the resistance movements in Gaza, rather than Israel, for the situation.
The Tories and Liberal Democrats are yet to announce candidates in Hampstead and Kilburn.
Hammersmith
Andy Slaughter is Labour’s Shadow Solicitor General and a long-time supporter of the Palestinians who visited Gaza with Buck in 2009. To maintain a just-about-plausible pro-Palestine stance, Slaughter has broken ranks somewhat from the zealous pro-Israel line of Keir Starmer and Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, retweeting Palestine’s Ambassador to the UK and Sadiq Khan’s call for a ceasefire.
Unfortunately, Slaughter also retweeted a very telling post by Labour Campaign for Human Rights: “We are horrified by recent atrocities in Israel and subsequent developments in Gaza” – note the profound racism of the language: Young Palestinians breaking out of their concentration camp for the first time and killing Israelis qualifies as “atrocities” while Israel’s systematic destruction of a whole people in the name of religious and ethnic supremacy is regarded as “developments”.
Slaughter also foolishly retweeted false claims about Hamas killing babies.
Once a marginal, but now a Labour stronghold, Hammersmith will be contested by Conservative Andrew Dinsmore in 2024. He does not seem to have commented on the war yet.
Chelsea and Fulham
Greg Hands MP is Conservative Party Chairman and Minister Without Portfolio in the Sunak government. Hands is prolific on social media and since the Palestinian resistance’s attack on October 7th, he has offered relentless support for Israel and no acknowledgement of the rights of Palestinians.
Hands’ month-long stream of propaganda has included smearing Labour MP Apsana Begum for her solidarity with the Palestinians; claiming without evidence that Israel is not an apartheid state; conflating resistance with antisemitism; celebrating the government’s awarding of £3 million to the fear-mongering Community Security Trust, and retweeting the false claim that the Palestinians bombed their own hospital. Hands supports genocide with total impunity and has shown no interest in calling for a ceasefire, let alone addressing the causes of the war.
Hands will face Labour’s Ben Coleman at the next election. Another prolific tweeter, Coleman appears to be an unthinking supporter of Israel and has retweeted a large number of pro-Israel statements from Starmer and Lammy as well as a photo of the Israel flag on 10th October when the genocide was well underway.
Brent Central
Labour MP and veteran of the Corbyn era, Dawn Butler has called for a ceasefire. She is supportive of peace, but like Andy Slaughter speaks only within the limits of debate set by the media and party leaders. Butler enjoys a huge majority with almost 75% of the vote last time out and is uncharacteristically quiet over Israel’s genocide. There has been no announcement of who her Tory opponent will be.
Kensington
Felicity Buchan, Tory MP in the marginal seat of Kensington, was an enthusiastic supporter of the “western values” of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion but takes the opposite approach when it comes to Palestine. The Under Secretary of State for Housing and Homelessness in the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is fully supportive of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian housing, their creation of millions of homeless people, and their levelling of the Gaza Strip.
Like her colleagues, Buchan’s focus is Israel. Palestinian suffering receives barely a mention from Kensington’s MP despite her large Muslim constituency, aside from a reference to “the tragic loss of civilian lives” as if an earthquake has struck Gaza, rather than a campaign of ethnic cleansing by a military regime that has illegally occupied the territory since 1967, maintaining it as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. Buchan dismisses acts of resistance by inhabitants of the camp simply as “terrorism”.
To compound her anti-Palestinian approach, Buchan has shown more concern about the conduct of peaceful anti-war protests than she has for the genocide of mainly children and women, reassuring her Twitter following that there will be “a robust approach to policing these demonstrations”.
Complicity Felicity’s main challenger at the election will be Labour’s Joe Powell who has limited his response to retweeting and liking pro-war, pro-Israel voices like Barack Obama (“we stand squarely alongside our ally, Israel”) and David Lammy, who claimed during a pro-Israel rant on Sky News that Hamas has “raped babies” and who’s diplomacy has extended only as far as supporting “humanitarian pauses” in the genocide.
The phrase “humanitarian pauses” has been created to enable liberal politicians to imply that it is fine to commit genocide while still pretending to care. This focus on humanitarian aid is lipstick on the pig of Labour’s full commitment to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The party’s vision for the Middle East is a region dominated by a militarised apartheid state; a colonial anachronism in the 21st century, with any challengers to that power imbalance brutalised and denigrated in an attempt to kill off any hopes they have for justice.
The other challenger to Buchan is independent candidate Emma Dent Coad, who resigned from the Labour Party earlier this year. Dent Coad has been far more outspoken than any other West London politician, without reticence about her affiliations to Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and her support for Palestine solidarity. Dent Coad has retweeted fiercely independent anti-war journalists like Matt Kennard, helping the spread of important information about the war, its origins and its true intention: the destruction of the Palestinian people.
by Tom Charles @tomhcharles
Urban Dandy London 