Do we think Starmer’s intervention raises the chances of a ceasefire ?
Self determination is the Palestinians by right, it isn't a consolation prize for being massacred.
It'll be viewed quite rightly as incredibly racist.
Why is it a racist stance?
Because of the first sentence you quoted; it's something owed to the Palestinians by right, it's not something to tied to the bad behaviour of some other party.
Starmer's logic is that as long as there are 'substantive steps' (say there's one week ceasefire) the occupation can continue in perpetuity (including the continued ethnic cleansing of the West Bank)
Do we think Starmer’s intervention raises the chances of a ceasefire ?
Self determination is the Palestinians by right, it isn't a consolation prize for being massacred.
It'll be viewed quite rightly as incredibly racist.
Why is it a racist stance?
Starmer's logic is that as long as there are 'substantive steps' (say there's one week ceasefire) the occupation can continue in perpetuity (including the continued ethnic cleansing of the West Bank)
The reverse of that is even blunter. What the Palestinians do or do not get is contingent on what Israel does or doesn’t do.
That’s the biggest problem with it. The second biggest, regardless of their behaviour, is it’s being held out to Israel as a lopsided threat. Ie, ‘if you don’t do xyz well explicitly take sides and they’ll get abc. There are no similar restrictions on them.’
The reverse of that is even blunter. What the Palestinians do or do not get is contingent on what Israel does or doesn’t do.
Which is only an issue if you think this is an even remotely a good faith initiative to grant Palestinians self determination and also believe that self-determination *should* be contingent on some other party.
That’s the biggest problem with it. The second biggest, regardless of their behaviour, is it’s being held out to Israel as a lopsided threat. Ie, ‘if you don’t do xyz well explicitly take sides and they’ll get abc. There are no similar restrictions on them.’
The UK is already explicitly taking sides, and I'd ask you at which point in the last few decades Israel wouldn’t have viewed the prospect of self determination for the Palestinians as a "lopsided threat".
They have come under criticism on social media from Palestinians for not listening to Palestinian voices who were saying the same thing since late 2023.
The guardian has a piece about the continuity of the current situation with the pre-October 7th blockade of Gaza:
If you've read Eyal Weizman, or Sara Roy this will be familiar territory.
Finally Isaac Chotiner has a couple of pieces in the New Yorker interviewing a senior Israeli journalist and a former Israeli official on the politics of the blockade within Gaza:
So yesterday they bombed a hospital to take out a camera, then bombed it again once all the medics and journalists had arrived at the scene.
Fucking murderous bastards. It's absolutely clear that Palestinian lives have no value in the eyes of the Israeli government and military.
Of note, the Nassar Hospital is the only location that has wi fi in Gaza City. Palestinian Journalists will go to the Hospital to get their stories out, and since Israel will not let international journalists to cover the war, the Palestinians are taking a great risk when they gather at the Hospital.
You are right. There is no way this was an accident. They purposely waited until the Palestinians gathered covering the first bombing to release the second bomb. This is very likely a war crime.
Meanwhile 'Free Palestine' stickers are placed outside our local synagogue, and red crosses hung outside our local mosque (with chants of 'whose country? Our country')
@heron that post is a fine topic, but belongs in a different thread. This one is about genocide and conflict in the middle east, not about a crappy but non-genocidal act of anti-semitism in Great Britain.
Haaretz is now behind a paywall, but registering gets 6 free articles a month.
Haaretz has carried a number of first person articles from IDF soldiers describing the impact on them of killing civilians and children.
If you register, this article from 16/9 is a harrowing read.
From the article:
'I fire 50-60 bullets every day, I've stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I've killed, a lot. Children.'
The officers do not care if children die, the also do not care what it does to my soul. To them, I am just another tool
(I hope it is OK to link to Haaretz as a source. In the circles I move in it is seen as left leaning and critical of the Israel - from within - but reliable)
Formal recognition of the Palestinian state by the UK, Australia and Canada - don’t know if this will in any way change the UK’s legal position on things like arms exports.
I once visited the British consulate-general building in East Jerusalem for a meeting. It's a pretty strange place and relatively small. To be fair, I haven't been inside an Embassy to compare, but from the outside every other British Embassy I've seen is much bigger.
I mention this because if the UK has really accepted the status of Palestine as a full state then the Palestinian representative in London, who I have also met, should in theory be upgraded to an Ambassador and the building upgraded to an Embassy. And the common practice would be to do the reverse.
But the building in Jerusalem stands on contested land. It was there before the state of Israel existed, when it was in Mandate Palestine. Today it is the only remaining "Consulate General" in the world. The status of the guy who represents the Palestinians in London is similarly strange. He is actually a representative of the PLO rather than the Palestinian Authority. As such semi-officially he speaks for all Palestinians, including the large number in Syria, Lebanon and so on.
I am not involved in diplomacy, I just can't see how this is going to work. Declaring a state that has no boundaries to its land, millions of people spread across a wide area with a range of statuses, no facilities, with a large percentage of the population at very least war traumatised... this isn't ever going to work. I don't understand what anyone thinks this will achieve.
I'm not sure if it is actually the only remaining British Consulate-General, I shouldn't have said that. It looks like that might also be the status of the British diplomat in Hong Kong.
Today she came. Pale. Trembling. A young woman no older than twenty-five, clutching in her arms her son, her last living fragment of hope. The boy was limp, his little arms hanging as though life itself had slipped from them. His eyes were two dead stars. Behind her walked the grandmother. A grandmother who had already buried too many. Her face so worn that it seemed older than the land itself, older than grief.
The mother spoke haltingly, every word torn from her throat like a piece of flesh.
"Diarrhea. Five days," she whispered, as if naming an unforgivable sin.
"But what frightens me..." Her voice cracked. "He no longer eats."
"Since when?" I asked, though I was afraid to know.
Ah, that silence. That silence was like a bell tolling for the dead. She looked at her mother, as though asking for permission to speak. Then, with a kind of resigned despair, she confessed: "For a long time."
I gave her medicine. A hollow gesture. A lie we tell ourselves so we do not collapse. She left without a word. But the grandmother stayed.
She came closer. Each step was heavy, as if she were carrying not her own body but the body of every mother who ever lived. She leaned toward me and spoke with the voice of someone who has seen hell.
"Do not ask her," she said. "She cannot say it. The child stopped eating on the day he saw his father fall. He saw the blood. He saw the body. He saw everything."
Then she too left, and I was alone with the weight of the world.
I am no psychologist. But I have seen the abyss in men's hearts, and I know what it means when a child refuses life itself. This is not a disease of the stomach. This is the soul crying out: No more.
Tell me, what happens to a child's mind when the first god he ever knew, his father, is struck down before him? What happens when the one who was meant to shield him from death becomes death?
The father's blood was not the only thing spilled that day. The child's faith was spilled with it. The world collapsed for him. There is no food sweet enough to make him want to taste life again.
And this is the deepest cruelty of genocide. It is not the heap of corpses that marks its victory. It is not the smoking ruins. It is not the screams at night. Its triumph is when a living child sits in the dust and refuses the breast, refuses the bread, refuses the world itself.
This child will grow, if he grows, with a hollow inside him no bread will ever fill. No embrace will ever close. He will learn to love with fear, to sleep with ghosts beside him. And one day, when he becomes a father, he will place into his child's hands not only his love but also his terror.
And this is how extermination stretches its fingers into the future. It kills not only the body but the capacity to live.
Gaza is not merely a place under bombs. It is a factory of grief, a workshop of despair. What is being forged here is not just ruin. It is a generation of children who will one day walk the earth carrying death in their memories, in their dreams, in the way they touch the world.
As I write this, my chest burns. My hands tremble. I feel as though my own heart is being gnawed from the inside by rats. If there is a God, and I dare still to believe, then He must be weeping over Gaza tonight.
Yes, the father was killed. But the greater crime, the eternal crime, is this: the slow, unseen murder of the child's soul.
This is our apocalypse. Not fire from heaven. Not angels with trumpets. But a child sitting in the rubble, lips pressed shut, eyes empty, refusing to swallow the world's cruelty.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/03/gaza-doctors-under-attack-review-channel-4-crucial-film-stuff-of-nightmares
And Mohammed El-Kurd has an own voice piece in The Nation:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/mohammed-el-kurd-book-excerpt/
Marginally. Maybe. If anyone believes what Starmer says anymore.
Self determination is the Palestinians by right, it isn't a consolation prize for being massacred.
It'll be viewed quite rightly as incredibly racist.
It's good because it exposes the sub-colonial logic along which Starmer operates.
This is his idea of compromise because he cannot imagine a world in which Palestinians have rights.
No. But TBF, I'm not sure anyone's intervention is likely to raise the chances of a ceasefire. Not even Trump's.
Trump cutting off military supplies and imposing trade sanctions might do it, but that's about as likely as the Chief Rabbi dining on pork wings.
Why is it a racist stance?
Because of the first sentence you quoted; it's something owed to the Palestinians by right, it's not something to tied to the bad behaviour of some other party.
Starmer's logic is that as long as there are 'substantive steps' (say there's one week ceasefire) the occupation can continue in perpetuity (including the continued ethnic cleansing of the West Bank)
The reverse of that is even blunter. What the Palestinians do or do not get is contingent on what Israel does or doesn’t do.
That’s the biggest problem with it. The second biggest, regardless of their behaviour, is it’s being held out to Israel as a lopsided threat. Ie, ‘if you don’t do xyz well explicitly take sides and they’ll get abc. There are no similar restrictions on them.’
Which is only an issue if you think this is an even remotely a good faith initiative to grant Palestinians self determination and also believe that self-determination *should* be contingent on some other party.
The UK is already explicitly taking sides, and I'd ask you at which point in the last few decades Israel wouldn’t have viewed the prospect of self determination for the Palestinians as a "lopsided threat".
https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
They have come under criticism on social media from Palestinians for not listening to Palestinian voices who were saying the same thing since late 2023.
The guardian has a piece about the continuity of the current situation with the pre-October 7th blockade of Gaza:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/31/the-mathematics-of-starvation-how-israel-caused-a-famine-in-gaza
If you've read Eyal Weizman, or Sara Roy this will be familiar territory.
Finally Isaac Chotiner has a couple of pieces in the New Yorker interviewing a senior Israeli journalist and a former Israeli official on the politics of the blockade within Gaza:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-the-israeli-right-explains-the-aid-disaster-it-created
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-political-motives-behind-the-gaza-aid-catastrophe
Fucking murderous bastards. It's absolutely clear that Palestinian lives have no value in the eyes of the Israeli government and military.
Of note, the Nassar Hospital is the only location that has wi fi in Gaza City. Palestinian Journalists will go to the Hospital to get their stories out, and since Israel will not let international journalists to cover the war, the Palestinians are taking a great risk when they gather at the Hospital.
You are right. There is no way this was an accident. They purposely waited until the Palestinians gathered covering the first bombing to release the second bomb. This is very likely a war crime.
Meanwhile 'Free Palestine' stickers are placed outside our local synagogue, and red crosses hung outside our local mosque (with chants of 'whose country? Our country')
Gwai,
Epiphanies host
Haaretz has carried a number of first person articles from IDF soldiers describing the impact on them of killing civilians and children.
If you register, this article from 16/9 is a harrowing read.
From the article:
'I fire 50-60 bullets every day, I've stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I've killed, a lot. Children.'
The officers do not care if children die, the also do not care what it does to my soul. To them, I am just another tool
(I hope it is OK to link to Haaretz as a source. In the circles I move in it is seen as left leaning and critical of the Israel - from within - but reliable)
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
I mention this because if the UK has really accepted the status of Palestine as a full state then the Palestinian representative in London, who I have also met, should in theory be upgraded to an Ambassador and the building upgraded to an Embassy. And the common practice would be to do the reverse.
But the building in Jerusalem stands on contested land. It was there before the state of Israel existed, when it was in Mandate Palestine. Today it is the only remaining "Consulate General" in the world. The status of the guy who represents the Palestinians in London is similarly strange. He is actually a representative of the PLO rather than the Palestinian Authority. As such semi-officially he speaks for all Palestinians, including the large number in Syria, Lebanon and so on.
I am not involved in diplomacy, I just can't see how this is going to work. Declaring a state that has no boundaries to its land, millions of people spread across a wide area with a range of statuses, no facilities, with a large percentage of the population at very least war traumatised... this isn't ever going to work. I don't understand what anyone thinks this will achieve.
Today she came. Pale. Trembling. A young woman no older than twenty-five, clutching in her arms her son, her last living fragment of hope. The boy was limp, his little arms hanging as though life itself had slipped from them. His eyes were two dead stars. Behind her walked the grandmother. A grandmother who had already buried too many. Her face so worn that it seemed older than the land itself, older than grief.
The mother spoke haltingly, every word torn from her throat like a piece of flesh.
"Diarrhea. Five days," she whispered, as if naming an unforgivable sin.
"But what frightens me..." Her voice cracked. "He no longer eats."
"Since when?" I asked, though I was afraid to know.
Ah, that silence. That silence was like a bell tolling for the dead. She looked at her mother, as though asking for permission to speak. Then, with a kind of resigned despair, she confessed: "For a long time."
I gave her medicine. A hollow gesture. A lie we tell ourselves so we do not collapse. She left without a word. But the grandmother stayed.
She came closer. Each step was heavy, as if she were carrying not her own body but the body of every mother who ever lived. She leaned toward me and spoke with the voice of someone who has seen hell.
"Do not ask her," she said. "She cannot say it. The child stopped eating on the day he saw his father fall. He saw the blood. He saw the body. He saw everything."
Then she too left, and I was alone with the weight of the world.
I am no psychologist. But I have seen the abyss in men's hearts, and I know what it means when a child refuses life itself. This is not a disease of the stomach. This is the soul crying out: No more.
Tell me, what happens to a child's mind when the first god he ever knew, his father, is struck down before him? What happens when the one who was meant to shield him from death becomes death?
The father's blood was not the only thing spilled that day. The child's faith was spilled with it. The world collapsed for him. There is no food sweet enough to make him want to taste life again.
And this is the deepest cruelty of genocide. It is not the heap of corpses that marks its victory. It is not the smoking ruins. It is not the screams at night. Its triumph is when a living child sits in the dust and refuses the breast, refuses the bread, refuses the world itself.
This child will grow, if he grows, with a hollow inside him no bread will ever fill. No embrace will ever close. He will learn to love with fear, to sleep with ghosts beside him. And one day, when he becomes a father, he will place into his child's hands not only his love but also his terror.
And this is how extermination stretches its fingers into the future. It kills not only the body but the capacity to live.
Gaza is not merely a place under bombs. It is a factory of grief, a workshop of despair. What is being forged here is not just ruin. It is a generation of children who will one day walk the earth carrying death in their memories, in their dreams, in the way they touch the world.
As I write this, my chest burns. My hands tremble. I feel as though my own heart is being gnawed from the inside by rats. If there is a God, and I dare still to believe, then He must be weeping over Gaza tonight.
Yes, the father was killed. But the greater crime, the eternal crime, is this: the slow, unseen murder of the child's soul.
This is our apocalypse. Not fire from heaven. Not angels with trumpets. But a child sitting in the rubble, lips pressed shut, eyes empty, refusing to swallow the world's cruelty.