NO EVENTUAL US green light to allow aid into Gaza — where a quarter of the population are starving — can disguise its wrecking role throughout the UN process.

The urgency of getting food, water and fuel to more than a million displaced Palestinians has not deterred Washington from delaying a UN resolution repeatedly, insisting on the removal of calls for a ceasefire, watering down the demand that Israel open air, land and sea routes for humanitarian assistance and blocking a proposal for the UN rather than the Israeli military to approve deliveries.

As with the security council ceasefire vote a fortnight ago — which the US alone opposed, with Britain alone abstaining — the mask has slipped. 

Everyone in the world can see who facilitates Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza even while crying crocodile tears about civilian victims. 

We know that Joe Biden’s reproaches to Benjamin Netanyahu for bombing hospitals and unleashing a wave of settler terror in the West Bank are accompanied by a steady flow of munitions to ensure the Israeli Defence Forces can keep killing.

We know too that the copycat expressions of regret from British leaders are meaningless while we permit the US to resupply Israel from the RAF’s Akrotiri airfield on Cyprus, which we can assume it is doing since ministers won’t answer questions on the flurry of US flights to Israel from that base.

Britain and the US stand isolated and exposed. There will be geopolitical consequences.

The brazen hypocrisy of supporting Israeli war crimes while condemning Russian ones in Ukraine has not gone unnoticed, and will further undermine efforts to convince the global South to abide by US and EU sanctions against Moscow, as European diplomats admit. 

Normalisation of Israel’s relations with Arab states, a priority aim of US diplomacy in recent years, lies in tatters. Following the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement and the invitation to five Middle East and north African states to join the Brics bloc of developing countries in 2024, this war could be catastrophic for US power in the region, accelerating a shift to Beijing already under way.

We have little influence over such developments. Not so the domestic political fallout. The medics’ vigils for Gaza, the hundreds of local demonstrations and fundraisers, the gigantic national peace marches, have changed British politics.

The British and US governments are not just exposed in the eyes of the world, but before their own peoples. In Britain, the Palestine movement has thrown open doors our whole Establishment have spent the last four years nailing shut — it is again possible to question Britain’s role in the world, its uniquely close alliance with the United States and the sinister character of our military operations and armaments industry.

As we learned in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn pointed to the links between British foreign policy and terrorism and found a majority agreed with him, there is mass scepticism about our rulers’ claims about the world and an openness to building a different kind of Britain, one that promotes peace and co-operation instead of war and plunder.

The ruling-class response to Corbyn’s popularity was ferocious. The response on Palestine will be no less so. 

Human Rights Watch has already pointed to Facebook parent company Meta’s complicity in a global censorship operation targeting Palestine solidarity work. 

In Britain, we have seen off one home secretary trying to ban peace marches, but should the movement falter or the numbers dwindle the government will be tempted to revisit this. 

Our movement must go on the offensive, ensuring politicians who will not back a ceasefire fear for their seats, and demanding a reversal of all the attacks on Palestine activism of recent years, including the bids to ban the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

This Christmas the traditional call for peace on Earth must be turned from an abstract seasonal aspiration to a practical mobilising demand.