As Israel’s atrocities mount, the pro-Palestine movement needs clarity about how to bring the largest possible numbers into its actions, argues Chris Nineham

In the last year, the Palestine movement has organised one of the greatest cycles of mass demonstrations in British history, thousands of local protests, all kinds of direct action, student encampments, an escalated boycott and disinvestment campaign and a series of national workplace days of action.

Several million people have been involved. It may not have produced a single demonstration as big as that over the Iraq War in 2003, but this is a movement on an enormous scale and with unprecedented staying power.

There is a widespread sense of frustration that despite all of this, Israel is continuing the genocide in Gaza and lashing out across the region, taking the world to the brink of wider war. In the midst of the relentless horror, our government continues its shameful support of Israel. In these circumstances, discussing the strategy of the movement is essential. This discussion needs to be based on a careful analysis of the situation.

Israel isolated

Three things seem to me to be particularly important. The first is to recognise that the movement is having an impact. In Britain, attempts to criminalise the movement have failed, in fact the movement’s defiance led last year to the humiliation of the prime minister and the Metropolitan Police and to the resignation of home secretary Suella Braverman as 800,000 people responded to threats to ban the demo by bringing London to a standstill on Armistice Day. 

Days later, the movement forced a vote on a ceasefire in which 125 MPs voted for an end to the fighting, including 56 Labour rebels. Earlier this year, it helped generate the strongest left-of-Labour vote in British history with five pro-Palestine Independents and four Greens returned to parliament.

The Labour government has been forced into the absurd position of accepting that some of its arms sales to Israel are illegal, that Netanyahu would have to be arrested if he came to this country and that there needs to be a ceasefire, while at the same time continuing to back Israel in practice and in public. This is the highest hypocrisy, but it is a nonsensical position that is going to be hard to sustain.

Meanwhile, on the global stage, both the international criminal courts and the UN General assembly have ruled that Israel’s actions are illegal, and the recent walkout by a majority of UN delegates illustrated the extent to which Israel has become isolated internationally.

So to the second point, which is that we are we are decisively winning the battle of ideas. The latest polling shows that three quarters of Britons think there should be an immediate ceasefire, with only 5% – just one in twenty of the population -disagreeing. Sixty per cent think Israel has gone too far in its attacks as against 18% who support what they are doing. Only 12% of the population think Kier Starmer is doing a good job over the war. This is a disastrous situation for the British establishment. You would have to go back a long way to find a war policy with so little popular support. The movement’s ability to pull together millions of people in serial protests has effectively isolated our belligerent ruling class.

The movement is affecting opinion globally too. A June poll by Ipsos and the Policy Institute at King’s College London of 23,800 people across 31 countries found that Israel was the country that the most people said ‘used its influence for bad’. As the Guardian’s Patrick Wintour recently had to admit, Israel is facing a ‘haemorrhaging of support’ around the world, and is seen as a ‘Pariah state in many countries’. And the number of mass demonstrations around the world on the anniversary of the start of the war shows that the global movement is growing.

The dynamics of the war

Yet the carnage goes on. To explain this, we have thirdly to grasp what is driving the war in the Middle East. Of course, Netanyahu, the Israeli ruling class and their military are the prime movers. But this isn’t just a local issue driven by settler colonialism. We must face up to the fact that none of this would be happening without the backing of the Western powers, primarily of course the US, but with Britain playing a politically important role. Quite simply, the West’s military and political support is such that without it, Israel would have to abandon its aggressions overnight.

The US and its allies are – to some extent reluctantly – backing Israel’s hyper aggression not because of the Israel lobby, but because they need Israel as a crucial component of the West’s strategy to dominate the oil-rich Middle East. Seeing things this way round is important because it tells us that the West’s backing of Israel is not some accident, not something imposed by outside agents, but a core part of Western foreign imperial policy like the Vietnam War or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The fact that the Western powers are also fighting another big proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and militarily encircling China in the Asia Pacific tells us something else. The Western-enabled war in the Middle East is part of a wider push to war across the world, spearheaded by the West, but threatening great power confrontation.

Sometimes the movement is criticised for focussing mainly on the centres of political power rather than the arms industry. All efforts to disrupt the arms industry are valuable, but it is important to recognise that British support for Israel is something that comes from the very heart of the British state and is being pursued by both the main political parties and pretty much the whole of the British ruling class, not just the arms manufacturers. In fact, Britain’s main contribution to supporting Israel is political rather than military. We need to campaign to stop British arms sales to Israel, but Israel could fight on without them. Britain is indispensable to the US and Israel for its political and diplomatic support at the UN and on the international stage, not its military support. Without this, the whole project would be in deep trouble.

We must understand, in other words, that our movement is a challenge to the central interests of the greatest power on earth to which our government is closely allied and which is pursuing a more and more aggressive global foreign policy. Once we see the situation in this light, it becomes clear that in order to win, we are going to need a sustained and very powerful movement with enormous social weight.

Protests against the Vietnam War involved millions in the US and round the world. Combined with the resistance of the Vietnamese, it managed to create enough of a political and social storm to end the war. Nevertheless, it was eight years between the first big anti-war demonstration in the US and the US withdrawal.

We are actually much further forward than the early organisers of the anti-Vietnam War movement. That first demonstration in the US numbered just 50,000. In London, the biggest demonstration in 1968 was 100,000. Opinion polls were never even close to being as favourable to the anti-war movement as they are now. Even so, the lesson remains that we still have a lot of work to do to create a movement of the type that made the Vietnam War not just unwinnable but ultimately impossible for the US to continue.

Next steps

How to make this happen? As a general principle, the more protests and actions that can be organised the better. It is impossible to predict where breakthroughs may come. During the Iraq war, no one foresaw that school students would organise strike action, or that military families would start organising against the war. However, their actions were amongst the most powerful elements of the resistance.

What we do know is that although we already have a very big movement, there is still a huge gap between the size of the demos and protests and the number of people who support our demands. We must continue broaden the movement, drawing in wider and wider forces onto the streets and into action.

This is one of the reasons why the mass demonstrations remain so important. There is a temptation to respond to the frustrations of the situation by looking to smaller minorities taking more and militant action. We shouldn’t forget, though, that these huge demonstrations cause major disruption, bringing the whole of central London and sometimes other cities to a halt for hours on end, week after week. They shouldn’t really be counterposed with direct action because they are a form of it, only on a monumental, popular scale.

This is why pro-Israeli organisations, the police, the media and the government have mounted such a massive operation to try to ban, demonise and criminalise them. The police have threatened the organisers, mobilised thousands of officers on every one of them, harassed and arrested marchers. However, because of their sheer size, while the movement has stayed united and defiant, it has been impossible for the police to move against them in the way they have against some other kinds of action.

It is not true either that the demonstrations are passive or routine. The incredible diversity and almost carnival atmosphere on the demonstrations is widely noted and suggests something very different. They are bringing together an alliance of the oppressed and exploited in a participatory, inclusive and radical mass movement which the authorities must either allow, showing their weakness, or suppress, showing their anti-democratic tendencies. The authorities have tried the latter but have been forced to do the former.

Time and time, again people report being emboldened or rejuvenated by their scale, and sense of unity and purpose, often going back to their areas, schools, universities or workplaces and stepping up the movement there.

Our own escalation

As well as broadening the support and pushing outward, the movement clearly needs to escalate. Rather than focussing on minority actions, we need to consider how to make the most of the fact that more and more people are becoming intensely angry and concerned at the spreading war.

The electoral political front is clearly important. It is a big step forward that we have five independent pro-Palestine MPs and others from the Greens. Many others came close and there is a widespread demand for more co-ordination amongst pro-Palestine political forces. Strengthening left and pro-Palestine representation however is a long-term project.

A more immediate priority is to deepen the movement in workplaces and the institutions of society generally. There is a climate of fear generated by managements in many institutions. Yet in most workplaces, the majority will agree with the basic positions of the movement. If we can start to give confidence to that majority to express their views and take even the most limited action, this would alarm the establishment.

It was a real breakthrough that the Trades Union Congress voted for an end to arms sales to Israel and backed workplace days of action over Palestine. It was very telling too that the Palestinian ambassador spoke on the floor of the TUC and many of the big union conferences to tremendous acclaim. It was as if the spirit of the movement erupted inside the conference halls across the Labour movement. This was a victory in itself, but it opens up the possibility for deepening and escalating the movement up and down the country.

The latest workplace day of action reflected this with some big student and lecturer lunchtime walkouts and more modest but significant rallies on town-hall steps and at school and hospital gates. If we could turn this into a bigger movement involving thousands of working people around the country, it would seriously raise the stakes. Council disinvestment campaigns have also helped to pull together networks of union activists across boroughs which can feed into this process.

The student encampments have helped to raise the issue in the universities. It is important now to find tactics that will expand the movement into the wider student body with regular rallies, marches, speak outs in lectures and, if possible, occupations. This again would help to take the movement to a new level.

These are aspirations which will involve serious organising to achieve. However, as the situation in the Middle East becomes more and more critical and the world moves closer to war, the general priority must be to deepen the movement into the working population to increase its reach and power. We need to make it simply impossible for our government to continue to participate in the horror.

Whether this can be achieved depends not just on widening the movement, but on political clarity. As we move into the second year of this struggle and an even more dangerous and destructive phase of war, the movement needs to be gathering everywhere to discuss, strategise and plan.

The arguments about the why the West is involved, about Britain’s role and about the vulnerability of our ruling class need to be popularised. We need to convince the widest number of activists possible both that the movement is already making a difference and that it can and must be deepened and strengthened. The stakes could hardly be higher.