British MP Jon Pearce is currently chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). And at the weekend, he produced a nauseating piece of propaganda, revealing just how toxic the government’s genocidal agenda is.
Labour Friends of Genocide
Amid Britain’s participation in Israel’s Gaza genocide, Pearce was unapologetic. Well, not entirely, because he did apologise for the UK: dropping its objection to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant; restricting some arms sales to them; and supporting humanitarian aid for millions of Palestinian refugees via UNRWA. If you think those steps are just humane common sense, you’re right. But that’s not what LFI is about.
Among the pro-Israel steps the government has taken that Pearce boasted about were:
- Britain’s “surveillance flights” over Gaza in support of Israel’s genocide.
- Blocking progress for Palestinians at the UN Human Rights Council, supposedly showing ‘balance’ in “the tragic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians” (i.e. Israel’s decades-long settler-colonial crimes in occupied Palestine).
- Dropping the commitment under Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership to immediately recognise a Palestinian state. While a two-state solution is still most politicians’ stated preference (however unrealistic), pro-Israel propagandists tend to just pay lip service to it while actually opposing it in practice. (We’ll come back to this in a minute.)
- Making the hostages in Gaza “our first priority”, presumably above the lives of the 17,492 children Israel has killed in Gaza, respecting international law, ending Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, or freeing the thousands of Palestinian hostages in Israel.
- Its “desire to prioritize a Free Trade Agreement with Israel”.
- The mobilisation of British police to limit the movement of anti-genocide protests.
Genocide? What? Look over there!
The only mention of war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu was to condemn the international arrest warrant against him as “morally suspect” and “legally dubious”. So despite Pearce’s assertion that “our governments won’t always see eye to eye”, he apparently didn’t feel it was necessary to state any differences Labour may have with Israel’s corrupt, far-right prime minister who has been genociding Palestinians for 19 months. In fact, there was only one mention of Gaza, and one mention of Palestine (in inverted commas). And Pearce tried incredibly hard to divert readers’ attention away from the decimation and massacres of Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Palestine and Gaza didn’t appear in the article’s tags, but Iran did. And that’s little surprise, because Pearce said “Iran” or “Iranian” a whopping 13 times. That clearly tells you what he and his fellow pro-Israel propagandists want us to focus on.
Pearce also managed to wiggle Ukraine and Russia in there too, mentioning the “death and destruction” as a result of “Russia’s indiscriminate bombardment of Ukrainian civilians”. So he does know how to say the words death, destruction, indiscriminate, bombardment, and civilians – just without Israel or Palestine in the same sentence.
Ending conflict? Easy. Just give Israel everything it wants. What could possibly go wrong?
To get “regional peace”, Pearce wrote:
As a first step, LFI has called for our government to establish a special envoy for the Abraham Accords, with the status of an ambassador, tasked with encouraging additional countries to normalize relations with Israel.
He also said:
the foreign secretary has rightly recognized that the path to a Palestinian state is linked to a wider framework involving normalized relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
The problem is that normalisation of relations with Israel has pushed justice for the Palestinians further away than perhaps ever before. Because the ‘peace process’ in the 1990s simply bought Israel time to advance its settler-colonial project further, as it clearly favoured Israeli domination and Palestinian subjugation. And the Abraham Accords under Donald Trump simply showed once and for all that Palestinians’ struggle for justice was not an obstacle to regional regimes engaging with Israel.
The 2020 Abraham Accords were essentially business transactions which legitimised Israeli crimes and entrenched injustice. They rewarded Israel’s faithful service as an imperialist outpost for US imperialism in the Middle East. And the result was increasing settler violence in the West Bank, the rise of Israel’s most boldly colonial regime for decades, and escalating violence in the West Bank – all with impunity. With the world ignoring and sidelining the Palestinian struggle, anger and despair grew in Palestine. And Joe Biden’s continuation of Donald Trump’s ‘normalisation’ efforts made renewed conflict more and more likely.
US actions bolstered Israel’s impunity. The worsening situation in turn sparked the violence and hostage-taking of 7 October. And Israel took advantage of the constant green light from Washington to unleash a genocidal assault on Gaza.
Normalising colonialism brought us to this point. Only de-normalising it will change that.
LFI is not on the fringes
The “opaquely funded” LFI lobby group has invested a lot of money in getting British MPs on side for genocide. And its supporters dominate the top team of the current Labour government under genocide apologist Keir Starmer, who has happily embraced the pro-Israel lobby. And why wouldn’t he? Because as journalist Alan MacLeod wrote previously, LFI – which has very close ties to the Israeli state – “was crucial in smearing and defeating the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn”.
In 2024, Declassified UK revealed that half of Starmer’s cabinet had received money from the pro-Israel lobby. Then, openDemocracy revealed that the “tax haven-based hedge fund with shares in oil and arms” that had donated £4m to Starmer’s Labour also “stood to profit” from Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Starmer’s ongoing participation in that genocide seems to be the result. And if Jon Pearce’s propaganda is anything to go by, the Israel lobby is very happy about that.
Featured image via the Canary
