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Questions raised as ‘senior Palestine Solidarity Campaign officials’ attend Israel lobbyists’ panel

Reports that “senior officials with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign” (PSC) were at an Israel lobby event on 28 September have shocked anti-genocide campaigners.

PSC: WTF!?

The “opaquely funded” lobby group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) held an event at the Labour conference on Sunday. This is the group that claims to back a “two-state solution” to Israel’s colonial occupation in Palestine, but which recently opposed Britain’s recognition of a Palestinian state. This exposed what most people already know – LFI has no real commitment to peace in the region. The truth is that decades of Western support for Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians has made a two-state solution near-impossible. Liberal Zionists like LFI, and their useful political allies in the West, only keep talking about two states to pretend they support peace while actually doing nothing meaningful to achieve it.

The apparent PSC presence at the panel simply adds to previous scrutiny over its apparent links with Zionists, discouragement of support for Palestine Action, and overly timid or controversial positions aiming to preserve relative acceptability in establishment circles.

Open University Friends of Palestine was one group that expressed its disappointment about the PSC’s attendance. While accepting that “details are still thin”, it said:

We demand answers.

It added that PSC’s presence “legitimises” LFI, a racist propaganda organisation that has been championing the denial of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. And it suggested that the PSC had “undermined” the pro-peace movement by ‘capitulating’ to lobbyists.

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Lobbying matters

LFI, which has very close ties to the Israeli state, has invested a lot of money in getting British MPs on side for genocide. Its supporters now dominate the top team of the current Labour government under genocide apologist Keir Starmer. The prime minister and key cabinet members have fully embraced the pro-Israel lobby. And that’s hardly surprising when you know how important such lobbyists were in their hostile takeover of the Labour Party. As journalist Alan MacLeod has written, for example, LFI “was crucial in smearing and defeating the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn”.

There are some voices in Labour trying to pull the party to a humane position on Gaza. But the party elites seem unlikely to listen. Because half of Starmer’s cabinet has received money from the pro-Israel lobby, the party got £4m from a dodgy hedge fund which “stood to profit” from Israel’s war crimes, and Starmer has spent the last year continuing Britain’s shameful participation in the Gaza genocide.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.