“Now is the time for Labour voters and members in Tower Hamlets to abandon the party which has been an active accomplice in the Gaza genocide right from the start” said Bow West Green Party councillor Nathalie Bienfait. “I have no doubt of Councillor Sirajul Islam’s personal sincerity as expressed in his recent statement on the famine which is now happening there, and I know many Labour supporters feel the same way. However, by continuing to remain as members or by giving the party their vote, they share the moral responsibility for what the government they support is doing. Perhaps that is why Councillor Islam did not once mention his own party’s role in what has been happening.”
When Labour leader Keir Starmer told LBC Radio on October 11th 2023 that Israel was entitled to deny Palestinian civilians water and electricity, he gave permission to Netanyahu’s government of racists and far right extremists to begin their genocide against the people of Gaza.
Since then, Labour have continued to sell weapons to Israel, provide intelligence to the IDF, slander as terrorists and antisemites ordinary people who oppose the daily slaughter of unknown numbers of civilians and is said to be close to giving a £2 billion contract to a company which supplies the Israeli army.
Over seventy Labour MPs have remained members of Labour Friends of Israel even as the country’s senior government ministers have called for the eradication of Gaza. Earlier this year some even met the Israeli president, a man who said all Gazans were responsible for Hamas’s murderous attack on October 7th. By this Isaac Herzog clearly meant none were innocent and all could be slaughtered. How is it possible for people who see themselves as in some way progressive to be “friends” of a regime committing such horrors?
At the last general election tens of thousands of Tower Hamlets voters rejected Labour because they understood its complicity in genocide. Irrespective of the personal feelings of those who seek election on behalf of Starmer’s party, a vote for them is also a vote on what his government has done and failed to do since October 2023. Tower Hamlets Greens, along with the entire Green Party, have been opposed to the genocide as soon as it started. We say that it is not terrorism to act to prevent the mass murder of civilians and that arms sales and military cooperation with Israel must end immediately. We demand that the anti-democratic legislation labelling Palestinian activists as terrorists is repealed immediately. Those voters who are still thinking about voting Labour next May have a moral choice to make. So too do members of the Labour Party.