There is a dangerous disconnect: on Gaza, politics no longer speaks for the people

The Guardian

5 days ago

It was meant to be a cosy conversation about cooking and new motherhood.
But BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour took an unexpectedly bleak turn on Thursday morning, when the chef Yasmin Khan turned suddenly tearful in the middle of promoting her new cookbook, saying she couldn't talk about her own struggles to breastfeed without mentioning the mothers in Gaza unable to provide for their literally starving babies.
It was a striking illustration of how far this medieval horror has broken through, bleeding across the everyday lives even of people who don't usually follow politics. You don't have to know anything about the Middle East to understand what those newspaper pictures of emaciated children, with their drawn little faces and heartbreakingly visible ribs, mean. This is what famine looks like, right down to the return of Bob Geldof, begging the world to act just as he did 40 years ago at Live Aid. Except this time it's no natural disaster, but what the World Health Organization calls a man-made mass starvation: the chillingly avoidable consequence of an aid system forcing people to choose between risking their lives for a bag of flour, or dying for lack of one.
More than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking food in Gaza since May, according to the UN. Médecins Sans Frontières says even its staff, lucky enough still to be earning salaries, are now going hungry: there's almost nothing left to buy in the markets. The newswire Agence France-Presse spoke of watching helplessly as its Palestinian freelancers, who have risked everything to get news out of Gaza when foreign journalists can't get in, become too weak to work. Meanwhile, back in Britain, people who want to see arrests for war crimes read instead about clampdowns on pro-Palestine activists. That ministers have been quick to empathise with the frustrations of a very different crowd protesting at the housing of asylum seekers in hotels merely adds salt to the wounds.
Labour MPs are openly desperate now for their government to do something more than issue dramatically worded threats of future action that never quite materialises. Even cabinet ministers are publicly lobbying for the formal recognition of Palestinian statehood while (in the words of Wes Streeting, who could easily lose his marginal Ilford North seat over this war) there's still a Palestine left.
Recognition would be a largely symbolic act of solidarity, which in itself would do little to fill hungry bellies in Gaza. But ministers' problem is that there seems increasingly little reason for not doing it now: the longstanding argument that this prize should be saved for the right moment, to help unlock progress towards a two-state solution, made more sense when the two-state dream wasn't being actively crushed in front of us. But perhaps the real plea here is for Keir Starmer to recognise the country he actually leads.
After the horrors of the 7 October 2023 massacre, there was broad acceptance that Israel could not be expected simply to sit back and do nothing. Even a year into what was by then a highly divisive war, YouGov found that more than half of Britons still felt Israel had been justified in going into Gaza. But critically, only 14% felt its use of force there was proportionate. Sympathy has drained away as Israel's war of self-defence began to resemble first one of vengeance, and then something darker. In language no former Israeli prime minister uses lightly, Ehud Olmert has described a proposal to corral Palestinians into a settlement on the ruins of Rafah and prevent them leaving as in effect a 'concentration camp'.
More than half of Britons now favour financial sanctions like those slapped on prominent Russians over Ukraine, or suspending arms sales. These arguments are now mainstream, cross-party – the veteran Tory MPs Kit Malthouse and Edward Leigh made passionate cases in parliament this week for recognising Palestine – and driven not by the kind of creeping antisemitism Starmer was quite right to confront in his own party, but by what people see every morning, scrolling through their phones.
David Lammy's rhetoric is already about as strong as a foreign secretary's can get – this week he condemned Israel's 'inhumane' and 'dangerous' new aid system, and what he called 'settler terrorism' in the West Bank – and many Labour MPs suspect he'd privately like to go further than the sanctions and restrictions on arms sales he listed. But Downing Street is said to be wary of getting ahead of Donald Trump at a crucial stage in ceasefire negotiations (with Israel's parliament going into summer recess, relieving some pressure on the minority government of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, it's hoped there is a window for a deal). Britain has always argued that our influence over Israel is best magnified by synchronising efforts with the US, and though the chaos of this White House makes that harder, Trump's is still the only voice Netanyahu really hears.
Yet while everyone prays for that ceasefire deal to be done, a dangerous gap is opening in Britain between parliament and people.
A year into power, Starmer is increasingly adept at foreign policy, but much less so at handling the emotive domestic blowback from it. Without seeing the intelligence reports crossing the desk of the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, I wouldn't second-guess her decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terror group. A breach of security at RAF Brize Norton was never going to be taken lightly. But, inevitably, the process of police officers trying to figure out in real time what elderly vicars can or can't now say in public about Palestine has caused its share of farce and fury. After a retired teacher was arrested for allegedly holding a sign featuring a Private Eye cartoon about the proscription, West Yorkshire police issued an unusual statement saying they were sorry if he was 'unhappy with the circumstances' of his arrest.
As with this summer's other prospective powder keg, the protests building up outside some asylum seeker accommodation, doubtless everyone is learning as they go. There is, however, only so much policing can do to resolve what are really political conflicts, born in both cases of frustration with what both sets of protesters (in their very different ways) see as political failure to act.
To hold together all these volatile, mutually hostile parts of a fractured society through a hot and angry summer will be head-spinningly complicated, a daunting ask even for an experienced government. Yet that's the nature of the job Starmer applied for last July. A year on, we must all hope he is equal to it.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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