By Dave Stockton
Labour’s commitment to the colonisation project in Palestine dates from the same year as the Balfour Declaration, 1917, which Labour leaders have frequently celebrated and even painted in socialist colours. The Declaration was endorsed by the Labour Party and the TUC in their December 1917 War Aims Memorandum, drafted by Arthur Henderson and Sidney Webb.
The Memorandum stated:
‘Palestine should be set free from the harsh and oppressive government of the Turk, in order that this country may form a Free State, under international guarantee, to which such of the Jewish people as desire to do so may return and may work out their salvation free from interference by those of alien race or religion’.
The representatives of the Palestinian people who came to Versailles and to subsequent peace conferences overwhelmingly opposed it. But their objections were brushed aside, as were those of the various Arab leaders to whom Britain had promised independence.
The left wing of the Zionist movement, Poale Zion (Workers of Zion, or Labour Zion), which affiliated to the Labour Party in 1920, sponsored a series of annual conference resolutions supporting the Palestine colonisation project.
The Zionists’ colonising community, the Yishuv, through its labour front the Histadrut, pursued a policy of employing Jewish labour only in factories, commercial enterprises and collective farms (kibbutzim) many of which it actually owned. When the Palestinian communists joined the Third International, they were immediately expelled from the Histadrut.
The second Labour Government of 1929–31, under Ramsey MacDonald, had already taken office, when, in August 1929 rioting broke out in Jerusalem in which 133 settlers were killed. A government commission of enquiry was sent out under Colonial Secretary Sidney Webb. It produced a White Paper which identified the root of the hostility between Palestinians and Zionist settlers as the expulsion of peasants from land bought from their absentee landlords, and recommended limiting levels of future Jewish immigration.
The Zionists in Britain under Chaim Weizmann, head of the World Zionist Organisation and a key figure in the achievement the Balfour Declaration, protested vigorously to MacDonald, who promptly took the Palestine issue out of Webb’s control and binned the White Paper that the Commission had drafted. A grateful Weizmann later commented that:
This enabled us to make the magnificent gains of the ensuing years. It was under MacDonald’s letter that Jewish immigration into Palestine was permitted to reach figures… undreamed of in 1930.
In 1935, Labour’s new leader Clement Attlee issued a statement fully endorsing the Zionist colonisation project:
The British Labour Party recalls with pride that in the dark days of the Great War they associated themselves with the ideal of a National Home in Palestine for the Jewish People, and that ever since, the annual Conferences of the Party have repeatedly reaffirmed their enthusiastic support of the effort towards its realisation.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, the harassment of Germany’s Jews stepped up as did their emigration to Palestine and the purchases of land and expulsion of the fellahin (small tenant farmers and labourers). This, and the displacement of Arab labour in the towns, created a combustible mass of unemployed workers in the towns and cities of the British Mandate, which the League of Nations had recognised in 1922.
In 1936 when the Palestinian workers’ general strike broke out and turned into a great popular uprising, Labour condemned it, repeating the Zionist claims that it was antisemitic and organised by feudal reactionaries. Labour MP Herbert Morrison, the head of London County Council, asked in the Commons why ‘the ringleaders of the strike and the murders’ had not been rounded up. He was outraged that they were threatening ‘one of the finest moral efforts in the history of mankind’ and claimed that the whole thing was organised by ‘agents of Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini’.
After Empire troops finally suppressed the uprising in 1939 with the aid of Zionist militias, in part armed and trained by Britain, the impending Second World War dictated a major change of British policy. Britain needed to hang on to Egypt’s Suez Canal and the adjacent oil fields of the Arab kingdoms and this required conciliation with the conservative Arab monarchs of Transjordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. The new policy was spelt out in the Tories’ 1939 White Paper. This sharply restricted Jewish immigration, as well as land sales to the Yishuv, while openly rejecting a sovereign Jewish state and holding out promises of Palestinian self-government in the future.
At its May 1939 conference, the Labour Party condemned these immigration restrictions. But at the same time it stopped well short of supporting large scale entry of the refugees from Hitler’s Germany to Britain. Nor did it deter Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, as ministers in Churchill’s war cabinet, from helping implement this policy over the protests of the Zionist movement. This initiated a temporary divorce between Labour and Zionism, during which it was the left of the party that continued the former support.
Then, as the war was drawing to a close in December 1944, the Labour Party Conference, meeting in London passed its strongest pro-Zionist motion to date:
There is surely neither hope nor meaning in a ‘Jewish National Home’ unless we are prepared to let Jews, if they wish, enter this tiny land [Palestine, not Britain -– Ed] in such numbers as to become a majority… Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out as the Jews move in… The Arabs have many wide territories of their own; they must not claim to exclude the Jews from this small area of Palestine, less than the size of Wales.
This motion was passed soon after the appalling conditions of the concentration camps and the existence of gas chambers in them was becoming known via reports from the advancing Red Army, but before the true scale of the Holocaust was revealed. This undoubtedly aroused an entirely progressive wave of solidarity among rank and file workers, but this is not what motivated the leaders of the Labour Party, who saw the opportunity to create a Jewish nation in the Palestinians’ homeland and protect Britain’s borders from an influx of Jewish immigrants.
However, the landslide victory on 5 July 1945 meant Labour was now responsible for the British Empire, then at its maximum territorial extent, but near bankrupted by the costs of war. Though at Yalta and Potsdam, the conferences that divided up the world, Britain still posed as one of the ‘Big Three’, it had run up huge debts to US imperialism. Despite pocketing the Sterling balances of its Dominions and colonies, held in the Bank of England, Britain soon had to go cap in hand to the US for loans.
In these conditions, control of oil supplies from the Middle East and the ownership and military control of the Suez Canal were of vital importance to British imperialism, quite apart from serving its energy needs. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, expressed Labour’s problem very clearly:
His Majesty’s Government must maintain a continuing interest in the area, if only because our economic and financial interests in the Middle East are of great importance to us and to other countries as well. I would like this fact faced squarely. If these interests were lost to us, the effect on the life of this country would be a considerable reduction in the standard of living… The British interests in the Middle East contribute substantially not only to the prosperity of the people there, but also to the wage packets of the workers of this country.
Here in the words of the former leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, is the worldview of the labour aristocracy of an imperialist power, that is, of a reformist socialist who needed a prosperous capitalism to be able to afford social reforms.
Preserving the Empire, rebaptised as the Commonwealth, was essential to the material basis for socialism in Britain— unless a Labour government committed to heavily taxing or, God forbid, expropriating the private wealth of British capital, which it never would. To defend ‘its’ empire, the Labour government also needed the support of the conservative monarchs of the Arab states.
Therefore in the immediate postwar years, the establishment of a Zionist settler state by wholesale dispossession of the Palestinians was—for the time being— a threat to British imperialist interests. This, rather than Bevin’s supposed antisemitism, was the root of the clash with Zionism. It could be reversed the moment Israel became an asset to British imperialism—and its new master, US imperialism.
But as soon as Labour Britain made clear its change of front, the Zionists began a war of terror against the British forces in Palestine. The Irgun, the militia of rightwing Revisionist Zionism, bombed the British administrative headquarters for Palestine in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, on 22 July 1946, killing 91 people.
Nevertheless, within the Labour Party, support for Zionism remained strong, even within the Cabinet and particularly from leftwingers, including regular writers in Tribune such as Richard Crossman and John Strachey. Crossman, a member of the Cabinet Defence Committee, was even privy to the terrorist plans of the mainstream Zionist military force, the Haganah.
These tensions can be gauged from a pamphlet co-authored by Crossman and Michael Foot, entitled A Palestine Munich. As the name suggested it drew the parallel between the appeasement of Hitler before the war and the Labour government’s refusal to completely endorse the Zionist demands. It asserted:
The government of the Judean State would be eager to negotiate a treaty of alliance with Great Britain … such a treaty would leave in British hands the port of Haifa and such airfields and installations as we require… Britain would be in a far stronger position than she is at present.
Those, like the Alliance for Workers Liberty, who paint the Zionist campaign against the Mandate as some sort of anti-imperialist or national independence struggle, ignore what was actually going on: the denial of the then-majority of the country’s population to self-determination. Events soon revealed this.
Under pressure from US imperialism, the Labour government suddenly announced that it would withdraw British troops from Palestine by 15 May 1948. A similar ‘scuttle’ policy in India led to the chaotic partition and the death of over a million people. In Palestine it encouraged and magnified the Palestinian Nakba. British forces watched from their barracks as hundreds of villages and major cities like Haifa were ethnically cleansed, the latter of 75,000 of its inhabitants. On 9 April 1948 the Irgun, led by future Israeli premier Menachem Begin, conducted the massacre of Deir Yassin, in which between 90 and 140 defenceless men and women and 30 children were murdered.
The well-armed Haganah, its strike force the Palmach, plus the rightwing terror squads like the Irgun and Lehi (the so-called Stern Gang), were now turned on the Palestinian people. Three quarters of a million were expelled from their homes and lands, leaving the Zionists with 77% of the territory of the former Mandate.
The Labour-aligned Daily Herald, which around this time had a circulation of two million, reported on these events but offered no editorial comment. Neither did the Fabian New Statesman nor the Labour left’s Tribune. Their silence makes them colluders in genocide.
A Tribune editorial, dated 20 August 1948 and headed ‘Let’s stay in Africa,’ reflected the tendency’s brazen imperialism: ‘Africa offers huge material resources which can be exploited for the benefit of Britain and the world’. A subsequent issue declared the new British Commonwealth could be ‘a great partnership of planned enterprise. Only thus can the economic menace to the colonies be countered. Only thus can Britain remain a great power.’ (11 February 1949).
The establishment of the state of Israel, and the defeat of the pathetic forces of the Arab monarchies that attempted any sort of intervention, provoked a series of Arab nationalist movements and coups by radical officers across the Middle East. The new Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, after the Americans had rebuffed his appeals, oriented towards the Warsaw Pact. The US then withdrew finance from the Aswan Dam project. On 26 July 1956 Nasser announced the nationalisation of the Suez Canal.
True to form, Labour’s leader Hugh Gaitskell roundly condemned Nasser’s nationalisation and likened Nasser to Hitler, calling on the Tory government to supply Israel with arms. The British and French secretly agreed with Israel that its forces would invade Egypt and advance across Sinai to the Suez Canal, which they duly did at the end of October. Then Britain and France also invaded ‘to keep the two sides apart’.
However, it soon became clear that Britain and France did not have the support of US President Eisenhower, so Labour backed off and condemned the whole adventure, not for any anti-imperialist motives, but simply because America, now the predominant world imperialist power—and one that Britain was economically and militarily dependent on—said no.
Labour left turns against Israel
Thereafter, every one of Israel’s expansionary wars—always dressed up as self-defence of course—saw Labour rally to the Zionist cause, under Harold Wilson, James Callaghan and Michael Foot. Labour supported Israel during the Six Day War, which saw the remainder of Palestine occupied and the settlements there remorselessly extended.
Harold Wilson, prime minister from 1964 to 1970 and from 1974 to 1976, called Israel ‘a wonderful experiment in Socialist politics’. He wrote a book in 1981 called The Chariot of Israel, on America and Britain’s repeated support for Israel’s wars.
The Times of Israel accurately summed up the near total Labour endorsement of the Zionist project:
On both the left and the right of the party, there was strong support for the newly established Jewish state: Nye Bevan, the revered founder of the National Health Service; Michael Foot, a future Labour leader; Barbara Castle, one of the most senior female politicians of the time; and fellow stalwarts of the left such as Eric Heffer and Richard Crossman were all prominent backers of Israel.
Though the bulk of Labour’s parliamentary party (PLP) has always continued this tradition, not least because Israel is a strategic ally for America and Britain enabling their oil companies to dominate and exploit the Middle East, in the 1980s the party’s grassroots switched heavily towards the Palestinians. This was embodied in the person of Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn himself harks back to a decade when Foot, a former editor of Tribune, became party leader from 1980 to 1983 and when the left, under Tony Benn, was very influential, though it never came near to controlling the Parliamentary Party. By then Foot’s left days were long over; his deputy was the rightwing bruiser Denis Healey after he narrowly defeated Tony Benn’s 1981 challenge for the role.
The Labour membership’s support for Palestine grew in the period around the 1982 Lebanon War, which confirmed beyond doubt the aggressive, expansionist nature of Israel, with atrocities like the Sabra and Shatila massacres. These were carried out by Lebanese Phalangist militias but under the protection of the IDF forces, overseen by Ariel Sharon, another war criminal who would later serve as Israel’s prime minster. These events were too much for the likes of Tony Benn and Eric Heffer to stomach and they left Labour Friends of Israel. This was the year in which the Palestine Solidarity Campaign was founded and the left under Ken Livingstone dominated the Greater London Council and Ted Knight the Lambeth Borough Council.
But the weakening and purge of the left by Neil Kinnock, the Keir Starmer of his day, in the years after Labour’s stunning defeat by Thatcher in the 1983 general election, was magnified by the defeat of the 1984–85 Miners’ strike. The late 1980s and 1990s saw a decline in support for Palestine in the Party’s ranks. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown after 1997, the pro-Israel position was time and again reaffirmed with the fig leaf of support for the Oslo Accords and the mirage of a two-state solution.
The Corbyn experience
A major change—potentially—occurred in the summer of 2015 with Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise election as party leader and the near trebling of the membership which accompanied it. Corbyn promised that a Labour government, led by him, would recognise Palestine’s right to exist as a sovereign state. He pledged, if he were prime minister, to cut off arms sales and military cooperation with the settler state.
Corbyn had long condemned the siege of Gaza. As leader of the opposition he denounced the slaughter of unarmed demonstrators there in the Great March of Return 2018, in which 223 unarmed demonstrators, 46 of them children, were killed and 9,204 wounded by IDF snipers.
Such promises of support for the Palestine cause were unprecedented for a British party leader, so it was no surprise, to revolutionaries at least, when within months of his becoming leader, the huge rightwing majority in the Parliamentary Labour Party joined ranks with the traditionally conservative Jewish Board of Deputies to unleash an unprecedented campaign of defamation and vilification against him and the entire left wing in his party. The Tory and the Liberal press, notably the Guardian, as well as the public broadcaster, the BBC, took up the charges of antisemitism with gusto.
Coming on top of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, (BDS), in which anti-Zionist Jews in Israel and abroad play a prominent role, this sent the rightwing governments of Israel into a frenzy of campaigning against the friends of the Palestinians.
Nevertheless, Labour’s Annual Conferences in 2018 and 2019 passed resolutions by big majorities demanding an end to the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. The 2019 Conference vote was hailed by delegates cheering and waving dozens of Palestinian flags. Typically, Zionists denounced it as a Nuremburg Rally. Even as late as 2021 under Keir Starmer, Conference voted adopted the following:
Conference resolves to support “effective measures” including sanctions, as called for by Palestinian civil society, against actions by the Israeli government that are illegal according to international law; in particular to ensure that Israel stops the building of settlements, reverses any annexation, ends the occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza, brings down the Wall and respects the right of Palestinian people, as enshrined in international law, to return to their homes.
These resolutions indicate two things: first, that the ordinary members of the Labour Party and its affiliated trade unions are and remain overwhelmingly sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinian people; and secondly that the representatives of those members and unions do not and never have controlled the party’s MPs, the headquarters bureaucracy or, with one brief exception, its leader.
In 2017, because of the Tories’ civil war over Brexit and Corbyn’s successful taking up of the arguments against austerity as a deliberate policy to run down the NHS, education and social services, Labour came close to winning the election. It later emerged, through the leaking of a series of Labour HQ WhatsApp messages, that party functionaries were actively colluding to deny Corbyn a victory, by diverting resources away from marginal seats and towards some far ‘safer’ seats held by rightwing MPs. A long delayed report into the incidents by Martin Ford KC exposed a racist and sexist culture deeply embedded in the party bureaucracy.
After the election the ‘antisemitism’ witch hunt was stepped up. On 26 May 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), had adopted a so-called working definition of antisemitism. This was now utilised to create a new definition of antisemitism which included all but the mildest criticism of the racist basis of the state of Israel and its apartheid like treatment of the Palestinian.
Actually it was the appended eleven examples, rather than the 32-word definition, that explicitly brought criticism of the state of Israel within the scope of antisemitism. This included ‘comparing Israeli policies to those of the Nazis’, ‘claiming the creation of the Jewish state was a racist endeavour’ and ‘holding Israel to higher standards than other countries’.
When the Labour NEC excluded these ‘examples’ from its acceptance of the definition, this provoked a letter in three Jewish papers, signed by 68 rabbis, that talked of an ‘existential threat to Jewish life in this country’ that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government. Stephen Pollard, editor of the Jewish Chronicle, even wrote, ‘I have always felt safe in Britain, my country. If Corbyn takes power I will no longer.’ This prompted the drafter of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, to warn in 2019 that ‘right wing Jewish group took the “working definition”… and decided to weaponise it’.
Corbyn and Momentum responded in a weak and defensive manner rather than launching a counterattack on the Labour right and the pro-Israel forces in the British Establishment. Momentum’s founder, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy veteran Jon Lansman, was a committed Zionist. He resisted any attempt to allow the party’s grassroots a democratic internal life, thereby preventing the rank and file from rebuffing the right wing’s onslaught on the party’s pro-Palestinian supporters.
Worse, Lansman issued a statement, on Momentum’s behalf, admitting that there was indeed a problem of antisemitism in the Party. Thereafter it systematically failed to defend those falsely accused of antisemitism, including a high proportion of Jewish supporters of Corbyn.
Poale Zion had relaunched itself in 2004 as the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), which in 2016 committed itself to driving anti-Zionist forces out of the party on the false assertion that anti-Zionism was a modern form of antisemitism. In 2018 the JLM asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate antisemitism in the party.
Anti-Zionist Jewish party members fought back by founding Jewish Voice for Labour in 2017, first as a home for non-Zionist Jews and later as an explicitly anti-Zionist organisation. Over the next five years its members were systematically targeted for disciplinary action and expulsion of one sort or another, mainly by the JLM. Corbyn offered JVL activists little or no support.
Why did Corbyn put up such an ineffective defence of his supporters? Certainly, this did not placate the right who were determined to get rid of him from the party, not simply from the leadership. He was suspended from the PLP for saying on Facebook, that the scale of antisemitism in the Party, as revealed by the EHRC report in 2020, had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons.’
Corbyn, like Tony Benn and the entire Labour Left, saw the party as a ‘broad church’ and neither wanted nor dared to counter-attack its right wing, since a split would damage its electoral prospects, such as happened in 1983 when the right wing splinter SDP caused a catastrophic election loss for Labour. This is the fundamental flaw in the left’s parliamentary cretinism. The left needs the right to win elections, yet the right does not need the left and will always sabotage them if the latter look like getting anywhere near to power.
Return to Zion
Following the 2019 defeat, Corbyn resigned. New leader Keir Starmer promised to stick to Corbyn’s policies, an expedience he was soon to drop. But on no issue was he so immediate and brazen as in his support for Israel:
I do support Zionism… I absolutely support the right of Israel to exist as a homeland … I said it loud and clear—and meant it—that I support Zionism without qualification. (Interview with Jewish News, 14 February 2020)
He continued his clampdown on criticism of Israel, by MPs, local councillors and the ordinary members, as antisemitism. Corbyn was suspended from the PLP and barred from standing as a Labour candidate in Islington North; the constituency party itself was closed down.
Two years on from the resolution of 2021, Labour conference witnessed a very different spectacle from the delegates waving Palestinian flags. Starmer received two standing ovations at the 2023 conference, when he declared his support for Israel over Gaza and condemned Palestinian resistance as terrorism. He rejected calls for a ceasefire, saying ‘that would leave Hamas with the infrastructure and the capabilities to carry out the sort of attack we saw on 7 October’.
The Labour Party’s public position from the outset of the 2023–24 Israeli war on Gaza has been staunch support for its ‘right’ to do so. This continued over weeks and months after the 7 October Hamas attacks, when Israel’s collective punishment of Gazans far exceeded in scale these killings. Sir Keir Starmer even said in a radio interview that Israel had the ‘right’ to cut off access to water, food, and electricity to civilians in Gaza—brazen breaches of international law
A deeper motive, besides his ‘unconditional support for Zionism’, was to prove to the ruling class that in his hands the party could be safely entrusted with the worldwide interests of British imperialism. He underlined this by rarely appearing without a giant union flags behind him. Labour’s 2024 election material and membership card also carried prominently images of the same flag, while the word ‘genocide’ was expunged from 2024 conference literature, even in the advertisements for fringe meetings.
More recently Labour’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy, when asked in the Commons by Conservative MP Nick Timothy to clarify that ‘there is not a genocide occurring in the Middle East’, and that to use words like ‘genocide’ in connection with Gaza were ‘not appropriate’ and were ‘repeated by protesters and lawbreakers’, replied, ‘I do agree with the honourable gentleman.’ Lammy then added that terms like genocide should only be used ‘when millions of people lost their lives in crises like Rwanda, the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the way that they are used now undermines the seriousness of that term’.
Lammy’s rescinding of 30 out of 360 weapons export licenses to Israel and his decision to restart Britain’s funding of Unwra need to be seen in this light. They do not represent a more hostile attitude to Israel and support for the Palestinians; rather they are an attempt to placate popular outrage at Israel, while keeping their core support for the Zionist state intact.
And though many of the big general trade unions like Unite, Unison and GMB, are affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, they have remained muted on the Gaza genocide and most of their general secretaries absent from demonstrations, while hundreds of thousands, including many of their members, have thronged the streets of London and other major cities for over a year. Sharon Graham, left wing general secretary of Unite, even condemned those pro-Palestine who called on her members in the arms industry to boycott supplies to Israel.
In fact this indifference, even hostility, should come as no surprise. Labour in government, as we have shown, always assures the ruling class that Britain’s interests as an imperialist power and those of its US protector are paramount. And when push comes to shove the major trade unions look to Labour ministers for favours, leaving it to a few of the smaller or unaffiliated unions like the RMT railway and transport union or the NEU education union, to express more principled internationalist opinions and appear on Palestine Solidarity Campaign platforms.
This near absence of speakers and banners of the big battalions of the labour movement from the mass Gaza solidarity movement is not because the majority of its members support Israel’s atrocities or endorse its long history of driving Palestine’s indigenous population from their lands. No sympathy for Israel grips the British working class. Opinion polls clearly show that this is not the case. Ipsos’ October opinion poll shows 73% of Britons are for an immediate ceasefire and an even greater proportion among Labour voters.
Now with Labour in government and Israel banning Unwra from providing the minimal aid to Gaza and the West bank so it can complete its genocide, it becomes a burning task to exert maximum pressure on Starmer to break off all Britain’s military supplies and cooperation with Israel, to stop blocking condemnation of the genocide in the UN Security Council, to send massive medical, food and reconstruction aid to Gaza and the West Bank as partial reparation for Britain’s historic and ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.
Labour’s disgraceful record of support for Zionism shows that Britain’s imperialist Labour Party is no genuine party of the working class and that the need for a revolutionary party committed to the struggle against all the rival imperialist powers, especially our own, and to active support for all those oppressed by them, is now more urgent than ever.
