There is no better example of modern pseudo-sophistication than the dismissal of the argument in the Labour party about a ceasefire in Gaza as self-indulgence. No debate in the UK will influence the Israeli government or Hamas, commentators say, and then sit back as if expecting to hear applause.
Of course, it won’t. But the professionally bored forget that global arguments are fought in local contexts. If you want global pressure to build on Israel, or wish to defend Israel, you fight your fights where you are and where you can.
A more revealing question than why left-wingers bother to argue about Gaza, is why has the western left’s campaign to persuade centre-left politicians to oppose Israel failed? For it has failed to date, not only in the UK but in Europe and the US. The left’s demand for a ceasefire, which is essentially a demand for Israel to stop fighting for good, is not being taken up by any senior left-wing politician I can find.
All Joe Biden is calling for is a ‘pause’ in Israeli assaults on Gaza to allow for the release of hostages and, presumably, the delivery of aid. Likewise, Keir Starmer argues that campaigning for humanitarian ‘pauses’ in the fighting is ‘the only credible approach’ . In Germany, where the centre-left social democrats and greens are in power, the government has not criticised the Israeli right to defend itself, but ordered a complete ban on Hamas and its front organisations after a rise in Muslim antisemitism. The crackdown was initiated by the Green leader Robert Habeck who gave one of the best speeches I have heard against anti-Jewish racism.
Thus, in the US, UK and Germany centre-left leaders are rejecting the left’s core demand that Israel just stop.
Ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s threat to kill Salman Rushdie, I have been deeply suspicious of western liberals and leftists who go along with reactionary religion and genocidal ideas, if and only if, their proponents hate the West. Fascism is not colour-coded. If Hamas massacres Jews, or Iran represses women, or the Taliban sets up a misogynist, homophobic and theocratic tyranny then it is the oppressors’ fault, not the fault of the West.
But let me be fair and write an analysis rather than a polemic. It is a matter of fact, not ranting argument, that Benjamin Netanyahu is not a man Biden or Starmer can begin to trust.
The massacre of 7 October happened because of Hamas’s genocidal bloodlust. But it was also the result of Netanyahu’s unforgivable negligence. He was following the Putin-Trump-Orban playbook and attacking the independence of the Israeli judiciary. His threat to the checks and balances of Israeli society provoked the most sustained protests in the country’s history, and divided the armed forces at a time of national danger. He allied with the Jewish extreme right, which, incidentally, also talks of an Israel ethnically cleansed from the ‘river to the Sea’ but ‘cleansed’ of Arabs this time, not Jews.
The army had to be diverted from the border with Gaza to protect violent settlers the far right planted in the West Bank.
After the disaster Netanyahu presided over, many Israelis want rid of him. Why should western centre-left parties indulge this third-rate Orban and tinpot Putin? The pertinence of the question only grows when you consider Israeli war aims.
A full-scale ground invasion of Gaza will cause, and is causing, immense human suffering. The Israeli Defence Forces may not deliberately target civilians as Hamas does. But if you are a Palestinian mother whose children have been killed that is a distinction without a difference. Israel aims to eliminate Hamas. But has no idea who should govern Gaza in the unlikely event that it succeeds in fulfilling that hugely optimistic task.
Finally, and let us not be prissy about this, there are 3.9 million Muslims in the UK, and Labour needs their votes. The left has a better case than its critics, myself among them, admit. Why, then, does it have so little traction?
We must go back to the failure to understand or even admit the existence of a fascistic Islamist movement.
Whatever their faults, and I am sure they are legion, Keir Starmer and Joe Biden are neither as cowardly nor as negligent as their critics. One reason Starmer gave for refusing to accept the demand for a ceasefire was that ‘a ceasefire always freezes any conflict in the state where it currently lies. And as we speak, that would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capability to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October the 7th.’
Starmer and Biden cannot envisage any kind of progress while Hamas remains a functioning force. They are right. There is no possibility of peace while a movement that wants to kill all the Jews remains in power.
As good politicians, Starmer and his colleagues must also be aware of the likelihood of terrorist outrages, and want to ensure that Labour is as far from radical Islam as it can be. As Gaza ought to have made clear to all but the most complacent, foreign affairs are domestic concerns today. You can almost feel the threat on the streets of London. Islamist and far-right terrorism are all-too imaginable as overseas wars pump internal passions.
In short Starmer does not intend to be a British version of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The leader of the French left and his LFI party could not even condemn the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. He repeatedly declined to call Hamas a terrorist group. LFI’s initial communique on 7 October used Hamas’s own language and called the attack ‘an armed offensive by Palestinian forces’ thatcame ‘in the context of the intensification by Israel of the policy of occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem’.
Mélenchon wants an immediate ceasefire, by which he means the unconditional and permanent withdrawal of Israeli forces, and has been engaged in delivering nasty little digs. At a pro-Palestine rally in Paris, for example, Mélenchon accused the president of the national assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, of ‘camping’ out in Tel Aviv to ‘encourage a massacre’ in Gaza. Braun-Pivet is Jewish, of course, and has been the victim of antisemitism in the past. She accused Mélenchon of putting another ‘target on my back’.
As a commentator for the French news magazine L’Express said, Mélenchon ‘conflictualises’ everything. He wants to push French society to the extreme so he can present himself as the alternative to Marine Le Pen. The far left will have the Muslim vote when he faces her in 2027 (Mélenchon won 70 per cent of French Muslim voters in the 2022 presidential elections) but the racist right will be able to present the left as the enemy of the Jewish people. Indeed, it is already doing so.
How can any decent person respect a ‘left’ like that?
The whole point of the Starmer years has been to avoid a future where Labour becomes a party of the graduate class and Muslim and black voters, while white working-class, Indian and Jewish voters look elsewhere. A modern progressive movement is anti-sectarian or it is nothing.
And yet Jean-Luc Mélenchon and all those like him may not be wholly wrong. It is hugely risky for US Democrats and European social democrats to trust a right-wing and often far right-wing Israeli government without demanding that, say, US support is dependent on the delivery of humanitarian aid.
It is perfectly reasonable to ask how many innocent lives will be lost as Israel’s forces take Gaza, and how the hell they intend to run Gaza once they have taken it. Far leftists should not be the only people raising these questions, not least because they are the people least likely to get answers.
Because there has been a generation-long failure by the worst elements of the left to confront fascism with an Islamic face, no one listens to them even when there is a faint chance that they may be right. Rather than give Netanyahu the benefit of the doubt, it would be better surely for our leaders to take charge and ask the hard questions themselves.
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