John Rees looks at the achievements of, and challenges for, the new Palestine solidarity movement

The eruption of mass Palestine solidarity protests over the last few weeks has changed the political landscape in Britain. Here’s the how and the why of the new political situation.

1. The power of mass protest

The 150,000-strong protest in London on 14 October changed the face of national politics. There has never been a mass protest so exclusively dependent on grassroots organisation without any support from the political establishment, the leadership of the labour movement, or the mainstream press. No MP except Jeremy Corbyn spoke on that protest, though many were invited. The Labour MPs and most of the trade-union leadership had already given so much ground to the Labour right on the issue of Palestine and on anti-war politics generally that they dared not break ranks.

The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, the foundling document of the Labour right wing’s offensive against Corbyn, was not opposed by leaders of the Socialist Campaign Group when it was adopted by Labour’s NEC, driving a wedge between them and the Palestine solidarity movement. This was followed by the same MPs’ desertion of the Stop the War Coalition over the Ukraine War, when ordered by Keir Starmer to take their names off a letter of protest over the conflict.

The Tory government clearly hoped that they could repeat the propaganda victory of the Ukraine conflict in response to the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October. Buildings would be illuminated with the Israeli flag, as they had been with the Ukrainian flag, and critics would be marginalised.

The mass defiance of the march on 14 October shattered that plan. The squeals of political pain from the right-wing press and politicians were loud and sustained. Suddenly, it was clear that hundreds of thousands were actively defying the mainstream consensus, and were not about to be silenced by false accusations of anti-Semitism or of conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Years of propaganda gains by the right wing began to melt away. Soon a Yougov poll would show a remarkable 76% of the population agreed with the protestors in demanding an immediate ceasefire, that is, in practice, a halt to the Israelis’ ground invasion of Gaza.

Two weekends later, and a demonstration of 500,000, showed that the movement has regained an intensity and capacity to mobilise not seen since the opposition to the Iraq War. Only mass mobilisation can do this. Only reaching down into community after community, workplace after workplace, family after family, and mobilising people onto the streets can change the political atmosphere in this way. Loose talk about ‘boring A to B marches’ is just the chatter of the politically impatient when it becomes measured against the real capacity of ordinary people to organise and mobilise themselves and thereby to open up new political possibilities.

2. State and party

The Tory government, illiberal to the very marrow of its bones, has reacted with a renewed propaganda offensive. It toys with the extreme Zionist arguments that any pro-Palestinian protest must be inherently anti-Semitic and a danger to Jews. Thus it stirs fear among Jews where there is nothing to fear, as the many Jews on the Palestine demonstrations have testified. More than this, it has revived the Iraq-War-era stories about the demonstrations being a cover for terrorists or Iranian agents, stories that gullible and\or willing journalists take uncritically from the security services.

But beyond this, the authoritarian instincts of the government, channelled through Suella Braverman’s social-media trolling, is now directly beginning to experiment with a legal crackdown on protestors by issuing orders curtailing the right to protest, arresting activists, and threatening to ban both the Palestinian flag and the slogan ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. Fortunately, the scale of mobilisation is holding this tendency in check, but it remains the battle cry of the Tory right, the Zionists, and the right-wing press.

The Tory offensive also now has to deal with the fact that the mass mobilisation has split the Labour Party and forced Keir Starmer into a partial U-turn over the demand for a ceasefire. Left MPs, not-so-left Mayors of London and Manchester, the Labour leader in Scotland, councillors around the country, and Labour’s Muslim members are now in revolt. Of course, this underlines the fact that, even under Starmer’s craven pro-imperialist leadership, the Labour Party is a different animal to the Tory Party, despite some superficial analysis that insists they are identical. There are no splits in the Tory party, and there won’t be.

The task of the solidarity movement is to integrate these belated converts, but not to be hamstrung by their reservations and timidity. Left to them, the movement would never have begun, and without being resolute and outspoken, it would never have provided the scale of movement which changed the political environment so that these figures felt confident to join it.

3. Union blues

Like the Labour Party, the union movement, despite a year of significant strike activity, had become politically divided over foreign policy. Disoriented by the defeat of Corbynism, the union leaders are divided over the Ukraine war. There was opposition to the war from some unions, notably the FBU and the RMT, but many fell in behind the pro-war lobby led by Gary Smith of the GMB. With Unite’s Sharon Graham retreating from political engagement, including with the Palestinian struggle, the TUC has adopted increasingly pro-war positions.

But the Palestinian protests have forced union leaders to rethink the drift to the right. The PCS has sent speakers to the rallies from the first, as have the RMT and the FBU. UCU has followed suit, and now so has UNISON. Unite is in internal turmoil because of its failure to join the movement. The union movement will never regain members if it stands to the right of where 76% of the population stand. The Palestine movement must regain the lost ground, not only for the sake of the anti-war movement, but for the sake of the unions themselves.

4. Anti-imperialist politics

The reason why organisations like the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop the War have survived, and been able to re-emerge as the organisers of historic mass protests for the second time in a generation, is because they have a core of anti-imperialist activists. Of course, Marxists like those of us in Counterfire have always understood that the vast majority of those who want to end war, or who want a ceasefire in Gaza, are neither Marxists nor convinced anti-imperialists. They are maybe pacifists or may have religious objections to war. They may just see the situation as unjust, and want an end to the killing. But for them to have a viable political movement which they can join to express those views and to be politically effective, it takes a core of organised anti-imperialists who are not subject to passing chauvinistic moods, prey to establishment pressure, or pressure from Labour Party or union leaders, and who rest their political stance on the self-organisation of working people. When every other current was hesitant, these were the organisations that raised the banner of Palestinian solidarity and first went into the streets. Without organisations based on that principle, the Palestinians would be fighting alone.