As ye sow…

...so shall ye reap was what Paul told the followers of Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago. Sadly this lesson is still not understood by many of those who now live in the land that the Apostle knew so well.
The deadly Hamas raid into Israel last weekend that killed over a thousand Israelis and wounded thousands more reflected the pent-up fury of the Palestinian masses in the Gaza Strip who have endured a brutal and often bloody Israeli siege for years. Ignored by the West which has armed Israel to the teeth and betrayed by the feudal Arab oil princes who crawl to the imperialists whose guns prop up their thrones the Palestinians in Gaza have closed ranks behind the Hamas leadership and the other resistance movements that believe that confrontation is the only way forward.
While the Israelis pound the densely populated settlements in the Gaza Strip they are amassing their forces for a new onslaught. Many thousands of Palestinians will die in the carnage that will inevitably follow.
Assured of blanket Western support the Israelis are clearly out to crush all Palestinian resistance to their occupation. But they never learn.
This seemingly endless cycle of violence started when the first Arab-Israeli war began in 1948. The Palestinians were driven from their homes and robbed of their land. But wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.
The refugees have the right to return or receive compensation, if they so want it, for their stolen land. The Palestinians have the right to self-determination; to establish their own independent state as was envisaged by the same United Nations that created the State of Israel in the first place. 
The Palestinians remained determined to fight. They still are and they still will be no matter what the Israelis throw at them.
Russian and Chinese calls at the United Nations for a cease-fire and genuine peace talks to end the conflict were, of course, routinely ignored by the Americans and their lackeys. They still think that victory comes through air-superiority and hi-tech weapons. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan proved them wrong. And they’ve been taught no end of a lesson in Palestine...  

a sham democracy

Delegates overwhelmingly re-affirmed their commitment to the renationalisation of the railways and the energy industry at their annual conference in Liverpool last week. But any hopes for a restored public sector under a future Labour government were soon dashed when
the Starmer leadership made it clear that this simply wasn’t going to happen. Shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds told the BBC "we're not going to nationalise the energy system". Asked if they would follow the vote, he said "No".
One wonders why Labour bothers to have a conference in the first place when decisions the leadership doesn’t like are simply ignored.
The social-democrats closed ranks with the bourgeois parties to trumpet their so-called “democratic” values during the Cold War. They called imperialist hegemony the “free world and said  the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies were dictatorships no better than those the Allies defeated in the Second World War.
They say we have free speech and live in a democracy but its democracy and freedom only for them. In fact bourgeois democracy is democracy only for the exploiters. It’s dictatorship in all but the formal sense for the exploited. Bourgeois elections are used so that the smallest number of people can manipulate the maximum number of votes. It is, in fact, a sham – much like Labour conference last week.

Fun and Games in Brighton

 The spirit of Labour Party Conference returned to Brighton this week. The good old days of open debate and factional back-stabbing may not have totally returned but the sterile bureaucratic agenda that made Conference a meaningless charade in the days of Blair and Brown has gone, hopefully for good this time.  

            Labour Conference has never been the sovereign body of the Party and its decisions can be, and have been, regularly ignored or side-lined by Labour Governments and the Parliamentary Labour Party, which, until recently, was a rule unto itself. Nevertheless Conference endorsed calls for the repeal of the anti-union laws, the restoration of some but not all of the old public section, the raising of the national minimum wage and the introduction of a four-day week within ten years.

            Whether these pledges, along with support for climate change action and a ban on fracking, eventually get on to Labour’s election manifesto ultimately depends on the balance of forces within the labour movement as a whole.

            Most Labour MPs are Blairites or relics of the old Labour right-wing platform that has dominated Labour Party thinking since its foundation in 1900. These bogus “social-democrats” always sought to serve what they believed was the dominant trend within the ruling class. They were “Atlanticists” who backed NATO and parroted anti-communist bourgeois propaganda  to justify support for Anglo-American imperialism during the Cold War. They were the people who witch-hunted communists and other militant union activists and preached class-collaboration in one form or another to justify their treachery. And they could always rely on the solid support of the trade unions to back up their claims to represent working people. Thankfully these “moderates” have little or no support in the unions today.

Palestine

Gone are the mealy-mouthed words about an “ethical foreign policy” that were trotted out in the early days of the Blair era.

Now delegates have called on an incoming Labour government to “adhere to an ethical foreign policy” on trade with Israel, including ending any trade in arms used to violate Palestinians’ human rights, the motion passed on Monday states.

            In the past Labour was a staunch supporter of Zionism and the State of Israel. Now the Zionists are on the defensive. Zionist moves to drive Palestinian supporters out of the Labour Party have succeeded in hounding out some well-known activists including Ken Livingstone and Jackie Walker. But their attempt to derail growing support for the Boycott,  Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that works to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians has stalled. And support for the Palestinians is growing.

            In Brighton this year delegates voted overwhelmingly to recognise the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland and oppose any proposed “solution” for Palestinians not based on international law, including their right “to return to their homes”.

It also reaffirms the party’s relatively new commitment to end all arms sales to Israel.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign supported the motion that commits Labour to ending Britain’s financial and military complicity with Israel’s oppression.

“Labour Party members have said in one voice to the Palestinian people – we stand with you in your fight for justice,” PSC director Ben Jamal stated. “What is required now is for this crucial motion, passed overwhelmingly by members, to be translated into official party policy as we move towards the next general election”.