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Gaza war: Keir Starmer could win back voters by standing up to Israel [1]
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Date: 2025-05
As Gaza’s traumatised and grieving Palestinians continue to suffer Israel’s daily bombing and the collapse of food and medical supplies, the aim of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is clear.
His government wants to clear the area of its population, whom it plans to replace with Jewish settlers. Gazans will first be herded into a grossly overcrowded area in the south-west of the Gaza Strip, close to the Egyptian border, and held in appalling conditions. From there, they will somehow be forced to move to a third country, although how that will be done in the face of Egypt’s opposition is glossed over.
Life across Palestine’s occupied West Bank will simultaneously become more difficult, with further Jewish settlements and aggressive policing intending to push Palestinians to move to Jordan and beyond.
Elsewhere, Israel will pursue regular use of force whenever and wherever it decides it is needed. It will bomb targets in Yemen, keep troops and use airstrikes in southern Lebanon and south-west Syria, and likely seek to destroy Iran’s developing nuclear programme – presumably intending to achieve the latter with direct US military support.
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All of this, the Israeli far right believes, will ensure the country has long-term security backed by military power, with its own nuclear arsenal in the background for extreme circumstances.
But there are also problems for Netanyahu. Israel’s international standing has plummeted, polls suggest the majority of Israelis would prefer the withdrawal of troops from Gaza, and there is reportedly increasing unease among the Israeli Defence Force reservists who are being called up in their thousands. Added to this, surprising progress is also being made in talks between the US and Iran on Tehran’s nuclear programme.
The Israeli government must now view time as of the essence to achieve as many of its aims as it can. To this end, it is highly dependent on military and political support from Western states, including the US, the UK and Germany.
The UK is of particular concern, having become a major supplier of weapons and other military equipment under Keir Starmer’s Labour government. But for Starmer and his ministers, any increased focus on Israel’s war on Palestinians comes at a difficult time. England’s local elections this month confirmed the collapse in Labour’s support seen in recent opinion polls – a worrying position for the party to be in less than a year after entering government.
Nigel Farage’s populist right-wing Reform Party, meanwhile, is going from strength to strength. In addition to polling well, it has five MPs, two mayors and ten local authorities under its control after the local elections. It’s also pulling in plenty of big money, in part through tactics that have worked for the Trump campaign in the United States.
Having once been the home of the left, the current Labour Party is now best described as a centrist party with right-wing leanings. The Starmer government’s taxation policies are one indicator of a shift in political position, with little chance of any kind of wealth tax being brought in at a time of grotesque wealth accumulation for just thousands of people, rather than shared across millions.
The UK’s poorest similarly have little hope of increased support, with government welfare policies instead involving a reduction in support for parents and Disabled people and cuts in winter fuel allowances for older people. That these policies would previously have been considered the antithesis of traditional Labour values further highlights the party’s significant rightwards shift.
All of this comes together to give a view of a party that has lost sight of its principles and become subject to ‘corporate capture’, with much of its financial security coming from just a handful of wealthy individuals.
While some dissatisfied Labour voters have embraced Reform, this is by no means true for the majority. There is instead a glaring gap in the representation of the left in Westminster. The Green Party has not been able to fill that gap, and there is currently little prospect of a national progressive party of the left emerging.
There is, however, one issue that binds together progressives across the UK: opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza. This opposition is virtually unreported in the mainstream press but can be seen in demonstrations and meetings all over the country, which persistently point to deep dismay and even anger directed primarily at the current Labour leadership.
At a global level, the UK may seem little more than a bit player in the Israeli war on Gaza. In reality, though, the Labour government’s influence on Israel is second only to that of the US.
An appalling humanitarian disaster is unfolding in Gaza and is only likely to get even worse. One of the very few actions that might affect the Netanyahu government would be the UK stopping all arms sales to Israel and recognising the state of Palestine.
Under Starmer, that is highly unlikely – although it would do much to revitalise the party. Labour will pay a heavy price for this failure that will come to haunt it in the coming years.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gaza-israel-keir-starmer-ban-arms-sales-netanyahu-labour-party-uk/
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