LABOUR’S Gaza shame deepens by the day. While Keir Starmer calls Israel’s continuing assault on the Palestinian people “intolerable” he nevertheless continues to not just tolerate, but to actively enable the genocidal aggression.

Even one of the few half-steps Labour has taken since coming into office, the suspension of some arms licences for export to Israel, is now called into question. It appears that munitions for Israel’s war have been supplied regardless.

Week after week, hapless Foreign Office minister Hamish Falconer is sent to the Commons to cover for Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, himself a study in venal complicity.

Falconer never has anything worthwhile to say. No end to all arms sales. No economic or diplomatic sanctions against the aggressor. No recognition of a Palestinian state.

He dare not use plain English to describe what the whole world can see. Genocide. Ethnic Cleansing. Gross violations of international law, as Israel seeks to starve, kill or expel the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Yet Falconer now faces a Commons riven with anger at the government’s policy of going along with whatever Israel wants while wringing its hands demonstratively.

While shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel remains staunch in her support for Netanyahu, she is no longer speaking for even Tory backbenchers. 

For example, the longest-serving MP in the Commons, Edward Leigh, asked the government, “In the name of God, why can we not give the Palestinian people some hope? Why can we not give them the same right to self-determination and recognise a Palestinian state now?”

Fellow Tory Kit Malthouse told Falconer that “we are seeing the live-streamed starvation of an entire people… can he not see what the majority of the House can see, which is that he is facing a catastrophic failure of government policy.”

And Conservative diehard Mark Pritchard said: “I have supported Israel, pretty much at all costs, but today I say I got it wrong…I withdraw my support right now for the actions of Israel and what it is doing right now in Gaza.”

He called on the government to “stand up” to the US if needs be and “be on the right side of history.”

Starmer is a stranger to history’s right side. It is a bleak indictment of his government when a group of Tory politicians demand the immediate recognition of a Palestinian state, and a Labour government has no response.

If these fractures are now emerging among the Tories and other hitherto stalwart supporters of Israel, it is largely on account of the sheer horror and cynicism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, particularly since it unilaterally broke the ceasefire agreement.

But it is also down to the persistent strength of the mass solidarity movement which has brought millions out to demonstrate for peace and justice over the last 18 months and more.

The rifts in the ruling class are not the only testimony to that movement’s impact. It is also shown in the mounting police harassment of pro-Palestinian marches and other protests.

This attack on basic democratic rights is undoubtedly at the instigation of political leaders and influential pro-Israel lobby groups like the Board of Deputies.

The only fitting answer to such attacks, and the only response which measures up to the urgency of the situation in Palestine, is to intensify that movement still further.

Next week’s demonstration, called to mark the original Nakba, or catastrophe, of Palestinian ethnic cleansing in 1948, is therefore more than usually important.

Every effort must be made to build the largest possible turnout and drive the wedge of Palestinian justice still deeper into the widening crevices of the imperialist establishment.