Last month, at an event commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Nakba in the UK Parliament, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, formally announced the formation of the Conservative Friends of Palestine (CFP).
Warsi stated that the creation of the new parliamentary group was “long overdue” and that it would be the start of “something very interesting”. She said CFP will serve as a counterweight to the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), which was founded in 1974.
CFI has been a formidable pro-Israel voice in the upper echelons of the British political establishment for half a century. A recent survey found that it has paid more MPs to go on overseas trips than any other lobby group. In 2014, CFI boasted that 80 percent of Conservative Party MPs were members of the group.
In light of CFI’s historic success and continued popularity among Conservative MPs, the establishment of CFP is undoubtedly a surprising development.
Indeed, Warsi, who became Britain’s first Muslim minister in 2010, has long been a rare – if not the only – prominent pro-Palestinian voice in the Conservative Party.
In 2014, she resigned from David Cameron’s cabinet in protest of her response to the Israeli regime’s bombing of Gaza, which killed more than 2,000 Palestinians. The “government’s approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is morally indefensible,” Warsi wrote in the resignation letter she shared on Twitter.
However, Warsi’s attempts to counter the CFI’s influence on Conservative MPs in no way indicate that British Conservatives are increasingly supportive of Palestinian liberation.
After all, the Tory’s core values and policies remain at odds with the goals and motivations behind the Palestinian struggle. Warsi herself is only in a position to try and promote the Palestinian cause among Conservative representatives because in 2007 she agreed to join the House of Lords — a body seen by many as opposed to democracy and the epitome of elitist rule.
In addition, only six per cent of Conservative MPs and members of the House of Lords, or some 35 people out of 615, have joined the CFP since its formation – a very poor performance compared to the CFI, which has over two-thirds of the Conservative MPs. .
In fact, those who support the Palestinian liberation struggle are generally on the left side of the political spectrum. In the UK, trade unions, socialists and many other left-wing groups and grassroots organizations have long stood in solidarity with the Palestinians against Zionist colonialism.
As a Jacobin editorial stated a decade ago, support for Palestine is not an “idiosyncratic fetish divorced from the wider politics of the left. On the contrary… (it is) a focal point of anti-imperialist struggle, where farmers and slum dwellers are now waging a desperate battle against tanks and F-16s…”
It is the leftist values of anti-colonialism and racial and social justice, among others, that are the driving force behind this kind of solidarity with Palestine.
In this context, it is difficult to view Warsi’s CFP as anything other than a gimmick and a personal project that is unlikely to change the party’s position on Palestine in any meaningful way.
Yet, despite the values that fuel the Palestinian struggle, which are perfectly aligned with the core values of left-wing political thought, the UK’s “left” establishment and its leading representatives in the Labor Party have been staunch supporters of the Israeli regime from the start.
Former Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson, for example, was known for his “commitment to the cause of Israel” and somehow viewed the Israeli regime as a “wonderful experiment in socialist politics.” Labour’s support for the Zionist project was based on its support for liberal Zionism, which fused socialism and settler-colonialism. For the left-wing British establishment, which to this day has not reckoned with its own colonial past, there was no contradiction in this merger.
Since then, the British Labor Party has maintained strong ties with the Israeli regime and, in particular, with its sister, the Israeli Labor Party – the same party that spearheaded the illegal settlements in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Gaza Strip in 1967. occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Today, the Labor Friends of Israel (LFI) is a popular parliamentary group with support from the upper echelons of the Labor Party.
When Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labor Party, he broke with tradition and disrupted the party’s unwavering support for the Israeli regime.
In addition to the fact that socialist policies formed the basis of the party, he was also outspoken in his criticism of the Israeli regime’s oppression of the Palestinians. His decades of support for and involvement in the Palestinian solidarity movement was one of the main reasons why he was eventually expelled from the Labor leadership and eventually the party.
Today, as it continues to embrace neoliberalism and move away from truly leftist values under the leadership of Keir Starmer, the Labor Party is once again increasingly hostile to the Palestinian struggle. And it’s not alone — most of the left-wing mainstream political parties in the West are also hostile to Palestinian liberation. So much so that the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States has coined a term to describe it: Progressive Except for Palestine (PEP).
But despite this betrayal by established politics, most left-leaning leftists around the world are pushing for the inclusion of Palestine as an essential part of left-wing politics. To them, the Palestinians’ struggle against racial domination and aggressive colonial expansion by settlers is clearly legitimate and embodies the true meaning of internationalism.
With the right wing on the rise across Europe, some may be tempted to seek allies in these spaces and support tactical alliances with rare pro-Palestinian rightists like Warsi. However, such collaborative efforts would be not only morally questionable, but also politically incoherent.
So instead of looking for friendly outliers on the right, those interested in expanding Palestinian solidarity should focus their efforts on restoring power and support to the left.
Supporting the Palestinian struggle is not supporting a single issue in itself. It is in support of a radical and international political package that demands justice for all.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera