OVER the weekend over 150,000 marched in London, and many thousands elsewhere, to demand justice for Palestinians and, as Mick Lynch put it, an immediate end to collective punishment by the Israeli government. 

The same day heads of state from across the world met at a conference in Cairo to seek the minimum basis for a settlement. It failed. No agreed statement was reached. 

Representatives from virtually all Arab states, including Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, Russia, China, South Africa, Brazil and a range of non-aligned countries, called for an agreement to work towards a long-term peace settlement based on the UN resolutions for a return to pre-1967 boundaries. Abbas for the PLO indicated opposition to any immediate demand that Palestinians leave Gaza. 

Representatives of the EU, EU member states and Britain did attend but would only agree to an interim statement for the avoidance of civilian casualties and the resumption of civilian aid to Gaza. 

This Monday morning, therefore, we face a continuation of the Israeli bombardment which has already killed over 4,300 people and the denial of food, water and medicine to the two million people still seeking shelter there.  

Far worse, Israel remains committed to a land invasion and has US support — with consequences totally disproportionate to Hamas’s original murderous killings, an invasion posing still wider threats to world peace and taken in defiance of repeated UN resolutions. US President Joe Biden will this week be seeking $100 billion additional military funding. 

This is the challenge now thrown down to the British trade union and labour movement. It has, in the past, repeatedly endorsed calls for the fulfilment of UN resolutions on Palestine.

So also, in fact, has the British government and the EU. Yet today our government, and its EU allies, equivocate — in the face of a far more profound level of conflict.  

If the Cairo conference succeeded in anything, it has been to expose this critical failure. 

Our trade union movement now needs to defend its existing policy, condemn the British government’s failure at Cairo and call on it to reverse its position in line with the great majority of states represented there. Resolutions are also needed to ensure that our movement’s party, the Labour Party, does the same.

This has nothing to do with supporting Hamas. It is about supporting UN resolutions and doing so in terms that will prevent a further bloodbath with consequences that cannot but fail to spill over the rest of the Middle East, to Lebanon, Syria and Iran and possibly further still.

Last month the Brics summit saw its membership extended to six new nations, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Some have questioned this. 

The current situation would seem to indicate the reverse. Not that the new members are progressive. But they are caught within, and challenged by, the consequences of an imperialism that has for two generations inflicted profound suffering across the Middle East.

Yesterday the Communist Party of Israel confirmed the magnitude of the danger: “The escalating fascism in Israel is threatening not only a regional war but is brutally seeking to silence the voices against the war on Gaza with death threats, arrests, and persecution. We will not abandon the demand for an end to the occupation and siege and for a Palestinian independent state according to UN resolutions.”