HAMAS has shocked the world with both the scale and success of its attack on Israeli territory over the weekend — and British politicians have been quick to offer Israel their full support.

Hundreds of Israelis have been killed or kidnapped and, while hundreds of Palestinians have already been killed in vengeful air raids on Gaza, the Israeli military was still struggling to reassert control within its borders last night.

Benjamin Netanyahu does not downplay the disaster, warning the country is on the brink of “a long war.” If that is the case, as demonstrators marching on the Labour conference in Liverpool today warned, it will entail many thousands of deaths.

But for millions of Palestinians that “long war” didn’t begin on Saturday. Keir Starmer portrays Hamas’s action as an unjustifiable act of terror, and talks of it undermining “any chance for future peace in the region.” 

His rhetoric is familiar: political leaders across western Europe and the United States respond in this way every time Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and blockade of Gaza flare into open conflict. But this default alignment with Israel is partly responsible for the scenes now unfolding.

Netanyahu heads the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. It is labelled fascist even by some opposition parties in Israel itself, including the Communist Party. Some of its own ministers agree: its Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich describes himself as a “fascist homophobe.”

It builds on a legacy of ever more extreme assaults on Palestinian rights over recent history. Its infamous Nation State Law of 2018 formalised the subordinate status of the one-fifth of its citizens who make up the “Israeli Arabs” (a term which is itself used because Israel declines to recognise Palestine as a nation or Palestinians as a people). 

This, together with the systemic oppression of Palestinians in their own illegally occupied or besieged lands, has prompted the most prominent liberal human rights organisations in the world, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to agree that Israel is an apartheid state. 

Amnesty assessed that the routine “massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians” amounted to a single overarching system of repression “which amounts to apartheid under international law.”

That term is banned from the Labour conference meeting in Liverpool. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign was barred from using it when advertising its fringe meeting, and the term was deleted from the meeting’s listing in the conference brochure. 

Yet not only has Israel operated such a system for years, it is getting worse. Hundreds of Palestinians had been killed in 2023 before Hamas launched its assault on Saturday; the United Nations already deemed it the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2006. 

Netanyahu’s bid to overhaul Israel’s judiciary and give an increasingly far-right Knesset the ability to overrule the Supreme Court will only accelerate the theft and colonisation of Palestinian land.

His racist thug of a Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has been promised a new “national guard” to command that will terrorise Palestinian communities: even Benny Gantz, a recent Israeli defence minister and deputy prime minister, warns that this will be a private army and a law unto itself.

It is this savage regime that Britain’s government wishes to defend by banning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. That Starmer wants to sanitise by censoring discussion of its crimes at Labour conference.

Talk of a “peace process” has long been a sick joke when Israel continues to colonise land, ethnically cleanse Jerusalem and jail and kill Palestinians on a daily basis. 

The complicity of Israel’s Western backers allows it to do so. It is this ongoing nightmare which Palestinians continue to resist: and until Israel’s allies force it to engage with the Palestinians’ right to an independent state, the violence will go on.