100,000 march in London against UK and US complicity in genocide :PNN reporter Say

London /PNN / story by by PNN reporter Roddy Keenan

Over 100,000 people marched through London on Saturday (2nd November) to demand an end to UK and US complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine. Starting outside the UK Houses of Parliament, the demonstrators marched to the US embassy, where a series of speakers spoke against the ongoing brutality and slaughter in Gaza, the West Bank, and the Lebanon.

The march took place a day after the United Nations described the situation in northern Gaza as ‘apocalyptic’, and in the aftermath of yet another Zionist massacre of civilians in northern Gaza where air strikes killed 84 people, including 50 children. And it also came in the wake of the Israeli Knesset vote to ban the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, a move which contradicts the principles of the UN Charter and violates Israel’s obligations under international law.

Yet despite this, the UK, US and other western nations, who regularly lecture the rest of the world on the need for adherence to international law and commitment to the so-called ‘rules-based order’, continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with the genocidal apartheid Zionist regime. And no matter how much savagery the latter continues to mete out on Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, their accomplices in Western capitals continue to support their genocidal allies.

In the week prior to Saturday’s demonstration, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy  was widely condemned for remarks in the UK House of Commons, in which he suggested that Israel’s actions in Gaza do not amount to genocide, arguing that that not enough Palestinians have been murdered to justify such a characterisation. Apart from demonstrating a total misunderstanding of the Genocide Convention, which states that the intent to destroy a human group in whole or in part, constitutes genocide, Lammy’s comments reflect a callous and reprehensible dehumanisation of Palestinian lives that permeates the UK political class as it gives a green light to mass murder. Lammy’s views were echoed by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer later that week in parliament during Prime Ministers Questions.

But of course, these comments are not surprising, bearing in mind that uncompromising support has been the unwavering position of successive UK governments since October 7th, as they have gone out on a limb to defend and support the actions of the Israeli government.

From permitting the continued sale of weapons to Israel, to providing diplomatic cover for the apartheid regime at the United Nations, the UK has revealed the true contempt that it has for international humanitarian law, especially when its enforcement does not serve the UK or its allies’ interests.  Indeed, as Al Jazeera recently reported, both the UK and the US have played a vital role in providing an air bridge that has enabled the Israeli occupation forces to maintain the intensity of its military assault on Gaza throughout the past year. The investigation concluded that more than 6,000 military flights to Israel were recorded during this time, as the UK and US provided weapons deliveries and intelligence support.

Moreover, of the 1,600 intelligence-gathering flights over Gaza that were accounted for during this time, the UK conducted almost half. With the scale of this intelligence-gathering operation becoming clear, one must wonder how many Zionist war crimes the UK has recorded over this period, and yet has remained quiet, refusing to acknowledge any evidence of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Meanwhile, the UK’s military base at Akrotiri in Cyprus has been identified as playing a particularly crucial role in maintaining logistical support for Israel. In November 2023, the British government took the unusual step of blocking  all parliamentary questions on the nature of cargo and personnel going to Tel Aviv from Akrotiri, after concerns were raised in by Scottish MP Kenny McCaskill.

In addition, there is also reason to believe that UK forces are on the ground in the region. It was notable that in late October 2023, the British government served what are called D-Notices on the UK media, requesting they do not report on UK special forces operations in Gaza. Such a request begs the question as to what the government was seeking to hide. 

Furthermore, the fact that the UK media shamelessly went along with this request, underlines the significance of another pillar in the UK state’s support for the ongoing slaughter, that of British mainstream media complicity in genocide.

Yet, British responsibility for the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinian people, is not simply limited to the present. For on 2nd November 1917, exactly 107 years prior to the day of the latest London demonstration, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made his infamous declaration that the British government supported ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.

The Balfour Declaration would ultimately lay the groundwork for the Nakba in 1948, with the subsequent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and destruction of 500 towns and villages in order to create the apartheid ethno-state of Israel. And now, over 100 years later, we are bearing witness to the intensification of Zionist efforts to complete their long held aim of establishing a Greater Israel as they seek to implement their final solution by ethnically cleansing Palestinian men, women and children from the remainder of Occupied Palestine.

But in recalling the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, we are once again reminded that history did not begin on October 7th, 2023. The settler-colonial project to create a Zionist state in Palestine began over 100 years ago. 

And as tens of thousands of people on London’s streets bore testimony to on Saturday, the UK continues to play a perfidious, unprincipled and malevolent role to this day, 107 years later.