The entire British establishment is drenched from head to toe in the blood of the Palestinian people, and everyone knows it.
Rishi Sunak has on countless occasions pledged his ‘unconditional’ support for Israel’s genocidal war, as has ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer.
Israel’s inviolable ‘right to defend itself’, which these war criminals swear by, has led to more Palestinians murdered, maimed, and displaced than during the Nakba: the historic crime against the Palestinian people, which has since doused the entire region in blood.
War machine
Beyond fawning public statements in Israel’s favour, British imperialism has aided and abetted the Israeli war machine for decades.
The British state has licensed more than £574 million in arms sales to Israel since 2008. This has taken the form of aircraft, tanks, and munitions.
Britain manufactures 15% of the components in the F-35 stealth bombers, from which UK companies such as BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce take home a sizable profit. These combat planes have been essential in turning Gaza into a hellscape, and have been pivotal in Israel’s bombing campaigns over Lebanon in recent years.
Similarly, since 7 October, the RAF airbase in Cyprus has been a key conduit for US armaments getting into Israel.
Britain has also repeatedly carried out ‘spy missions’ over Gaza, supposedly for the purpose of ‘regional security’.
And no doubt British surveillance drones will have supplied intelligence to the Israeli Air Force, assisting the IDF as it reduces hospitals, schools, and clinics in the besieged Strip to the rubble.
Reliable ally
Despite millions marching for Palestine over the past seven months, calls for an end to Britain’s ties with Israel have fallen on deaf ears.
The stubborn fact is that, for the British ruling class, like their counterparts in Washington, Israel is a key ally in the Middle East, given its vital geostrategic importance to western imperialism.
That is why, for decades, both the US and the UK have turned a blind eye to the Israeli regime’s bloodletting. Neither will budge in their support for Israel, regardless of the chaotic, bullish nature of Netanyahu’s political regime.
For decades, they have nurtured Israel into becoming the strongest military power in the region.
As far back as the 1950s, Britain has facilitated the development of Israeli nuclear capabilities, through hundreds of sales of plutonium and uranium.
The warmongers in the White House and Downing Street have created a formidable friend, in a region where US and British imperialism have burnt bridges and left destruction everywhere they have turned.
As Biden, without a trace of irony, recently remarked: “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.”
This is the real nature of western imperialism’s cynical, hypocritical ‘rules-based order’.
‘Special relationship’
For Britain, a languishing, third-rate imperialist power, the establishment’s ‘unconditional’ support of Israel is intimately tied up with the so-called ‘special relationship’ it shares with US imperialism.
In the wake of Brexit, the most deluded Tories have bellowed about ‘Britannia Unchained’ – freeing the nation to pursue a path separate from the rest of Europe. But such a vision could not be further removed from reality.
In truth, British imperialism is firmly chained and bound to the whims and wishes of the US ruling class: the foremost terrorist group globally, presiding over the most reactionary force on the planet.
For decades, British foreign policy has not been determined in the corridors of Whitehall, or even the chambers of Westminster, but in Washington DC.
This is the real content behind the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the two nations: not a marriage of equals, but a bond akin to that which ties a sycophantic servant to their master.
Whether it is firing missiles into Yemen to protect the sanctity of international free trade (i.e. the profits of the international monopolies); or scrambling the RAF to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles: the British imperialists have fallen over themselves to prove to the US warhawks what a reliable ‘partner in crime’ they will always be.
Bring Columbia here!
No wonder that anger against the establishment has reached so far and wide in Britain. The working class and youth can instinctively feel that they have to take matters into their own hands. They rightly have no trust in any of the mainstream political parties.
As the massacre threatens to metastasize across the entire region – with a ground invasion of Rafah still on the cards – militant action has begun across the Atlantic. Gaza solidarity encampments have spread like wildfire across campuses in the US.
Starting at Columbia University in New York, students and faculty staff have mobilised en masse, calling for not a cent, not a bullet to be provided to the Israeli war machine.
Students – in their hundreds, in their thousands – are facing down severe state repression in their unflinching support for Palestine. This is an extremely inspirational example, which students at UK universities are beginning to turn to.
The solidarity movement in the US has exploded beyond the safe channels of organised marches. Demands for a ‘ceasefire’ are being superseded by calls to ‘globalise the intifada’.
Indeed, a new lease of life is pulsing through the Palestine solidarity movement.
Students and workers in Britain are looking to escalate the struggle. Copycat encampments are starting to pop up across the country.
We need to bring the spirit and militancy of Columbia here, relying on our own strength and methods to fight for a free Palestine, and to bring down the imperialists and their system.
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Campus control
Just like in the US, complicity in the Gazan genocide does not begin and end with capitalist politicians, but seeps into all public institutions. Over 100 British universities, collectively, invest a total of £455 million in Israeli companies that directly contravene international law.
‘Elite’ universities like Imperial College London plough millions into Cisco Systems, which supplies information and surveillance technology to the Israeli state. It is well-documented how this ‘cutting-edge’ technology is used at Israeli checkpoints in order to maintain the occupation in the West Bank.
More broadly, UK university investment in the arms trade totals over £1 billion, with Bristol and Birmingham both maintaining sordid financial ties with a value of over £50 million.
Seemingly without a hint of irony, UCL has a ‘Centre for Ethics and Law’ whose chief sponsor is BAE Systems, notorious for its ties to the Israeli military machine.
Students are rightly repulsed by these links to companies that are bombing Gaza into a state of barbarism. As a result, emulating the movement in the US, divestment campaigns are beginning to sweep through campuses across the country, with students demanding that their institutions break with complicit Israeli companies.
This call for divestment is a step in the right direction. But it raises broader demands: to kick all big business interests off our campuses for good. And this can only be achieved on the basis of a mass campaign by students and staff – those who are essential for the functioning of universities in the first place.
We can have no trust in the vice-chancellors and bureaucrats currently in charge of higher education. These are the very same people who have silenced pro-Palestine activists and suspended student societies for daring to organise solidarity protests and actions; and who have happily presided over the marketisation of UK universities, inviting corporate parasites to leech off tuition fees, student rents, and taxpayers’ money.
For our education system to be free from the influence of these criminal companies, and from bureaucrats running universities in the interests of profit, it must be organised workers and students that make the decisions.
This means opening up the books to staff and students; fighting for democratic control and management of campuses; ending the marketisation of universities; and kicking capitalism out of education – all linked to a wider programme to transform society along socialist lines.
Spread the movement
Our strength lies in our unity. We must aim to escalate the action far and wide.
Where encampments have already begun, staff and students must follow in the footsteps of their US counterparts, and appeal for the organised working class to come out in support of the struggle against imperialism.
Student activists should start by approaching campus unions, as well as local trades councils and labour organisations, in order to forge a united movement of workers and students. This is the best response to threats of intimidation or repression from university authorities or the state.
In higher education institutions and beyond, mass class-based action must be the order of the day, along the lines of the internationalist appeal made by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions back in October.
Workers in the arms factories must be encouraged to down their tools. Transport workers should be approached to stop the transit of weapons from factories to ports. And dockers must be called upon to refuse to load armaments, parts, and munitions destined for Israel.
Despite the disgraceful timidity of the trade union leaders in Britain, who have not lifted a finger to call for strike action or worker boycotts in support of Palestine, this is the route the movement must take.
Down with the warmongers!
For months, anger against the decrepit Tory government has erupted onto the streets of Britain. Workers and youth are searching for a way forward; for a way to stop the war and genocide in Gaza.
Those protesting in Britain want to see an end to the merciless massacre of desperate and defenceless peoples – all carried out with bombs and bullets that have been funded by money that could, and should, instead be spent on healthcare and education.
For the millions who want to see an end to Britain’s complicity in this slaughter: the struggle begins here, against the main enemy at home.
Workers and students possess the power not just to shut down arms companies and campuses. Organised and mobilised, we have the ability to fundamentally transform society – to build a world free of war and want; free from imperialist intrigues and meddling.
Unlike the bosses and billionaires, the working class has no vested interests in this death and destruction, or in any other imperialist war.
The Revolutionary Communist Party, launching this weekend, is recruiting for revolution: aiming to organise the most determined class fighters and anti-imperialist activists. We are fighting to bring down the warmongers in Westminster.
If you want to end imperialism – the system that spawns endless wars and bloodshed – then this is the party for you.
- Not a penny, not a bullet for the Israeli war machine! Kick the profiteers off campus!
- Open up the books! For staff-student control over education!
- Spread the movement! Workers and students – unite and fight!
- The main enemy is at home! Down with the warmongers!
- Fight imperialism! Join the communists!
