Labour’s troubling shift on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the wrong move for the party

It is paramount that Labour’s fight against antisemitism runs in tandem with the international struggle for Palestinian rights, writes Rachel Shabi

‘Starmer risks denying Palestinians a means to describe their own experience of oppression under Israeli military occupation’ (PA)

Last month, party leader Keir Starmer delivered a speech to the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) annual lunch. In it, Starmer quoted a previous leader, Harold Wilson, who during the 1960s had said that Israeli social democrats had “made the desert flower”. It was an arresting statement.

The phrase is a classic colonial myth depicting longtime Palestinian inhabitants of the region as backward and incapable of tilling their own land. (Jaffa oranges, anyone?)

Alongside other troubling elements of Starmer’s speech, this set off criticisms and alarm bells among Palestine solidarity and peace advocates, including Jewish campaigners, who now wonder where Labour’s policy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is heading.