By John Wake, Harlow Labour Party member
I write to you as an ordinary member of the Labour Party to ask you to throw your weight behind the demand for an immediate ceasefire in the current Israel-Palestine war.
In your speech at Chatham House on 31 October you argued against a ceasefire on the grounds that Hamas would retain “the infrastructure and the capability to carry out the sort of attack we saw on October 7” and that it would still hold its hostages.
You seem to be advocating a ceasefire once the armed forces of the state of Israel have rendered the military wing of Hamas incapable of repeating an attack on the scale of that of 7 October.
Do you actually believe that, after one month of massive bombardment, the military wing of Hamas still possesses the ability to launch another attack on the scale of 7 October?
If the bombardment that has led to 10,000 deaths has not significantly diminished the capability of the military wing of Hamas, then how many deaths will it take, do you suppose, for the State of Israel to achieve the objective that you advocate?
The violent destruction of Hamas would not bring long-term peace. It would sow the seeds for more violence in the future. As you put it in your speech “the consequences will last for decades and the trauma might never fade” and “so often the trauma of the present, leads directly to the tragedy of the future.”
The government of the State of Israel seems to believe that making a desert of the Gaza Strip will bring its country peace, but it would do well to heed the graveside oration by Patrick Pearse at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa on 1 August 1915:
“They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! – they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”
A year later followed the Easter Rising
The year following Pearse’s speech saw him participating in the Easter Rising in Dublin, which led to a violent chain of events – the War of Independence, the Civil War, and the “Troubles” – that, it could be argued, only began to come to an end with the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Tony Blair was the Prime Minister who oversaw the peace agreement in Ireland. Blair also made a number of decisions with respect to Hamas that he now recognises to have been mistakes.
After Hamas won the elections to the Palestinian Authority in 2006, the UK, the USA, and other states decided to halt aid to, and cut off relations with, the Palestinian Authority unless it agreed to recognise the State of Israel, renounce violence, and abide by agreements made between its Fatah predecessors and the State of Israel. In 2007 the State of Israel began a partial blockade of the Gaza Strip, in an attempt to punish Hamas, and this severely damaged the well-being of the people of that territory for the sixteen years preceding the total blockade imposed at the outset of the current round of hostilities.
In an interview for the book Gaza: Preparing for Dawn (published in 2017), Tony Blair said: “In retrospect I think we should have, right at the very beginning, tried to pull [Hamas] into a dialogue and shifted their positions.” (Tony Blair: ‘We were wrong to boycott Hamas after its election win’, The Guardian, 14 October 2017)
Gaza: Preparing for Dawn cites internal Whitehall documents from January 2006 which warned against ostracising the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. A minute from the Department for International Development pointed out that the State of Israel and Hamas were already co-operating at a municipal level, and suggested that it would be difficult in the short-term for Hamas to renounce “its commitment to the destruction of Israel and its support for terrorism”.
The Provisionals were committed to the abolition of Northern Ireland
Instead, it suggested that “ultimately Hamas’s participation in the realities of political responsibility might bring about Hamas’s transformation to a political rather than terrorist organisation”.
It is worth remembering that the Provisional Republican movement in Ireland was not only committed to violence, it also called for the abolition of Northern Ireland and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Republic of Ireland. Only by engaging with the “men of violence” was it possible to draw their representatives into the constitutional process. There was no military solution to the “Troubles” in Ireland and there can be no military solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine.
The present war is the latest in a series of military conflicts in the Gaza Strip in the past fifteen years, and each has been brought to an end by a negotiated ceasefire. No doubt a new ceasefire agreement would include a promise to release the hostages held by the military wing of Hamas. It is the duty of the UK and others states to facilitate such an agreement, rather than to promote a continuation of the war.
As a Leader of the Labour Party, perhaps you ought to be promoting the values espoused in Clause IV Part 3 of Labour Party Rule Book, which states that Labour is committed to co-operating in international bodies to secure peace.
The fundamental problem that lies at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict is the dispossession of the Palestinian Arab people.
It seems to me that, in opposing a ceasefire, you are repeating the mistakes of Tony Blair and others. You are supporting a course of action that will not contribute to a solution to the fundamental problem, but will instead ensure a continuation of the conflict that is generated by the fundamental problem.
If you do not call for a ceasefire, then history will judge you to be a warmonger rather than a peacemaker.
[Top picture: demonstration outside the Northern Regional Labour Party dinner, attended by Keir Starmer last week, in Newcastle]
