Gaza Continues to Dominate Labour Group and the Plaistow North By-election.

We learn that the mayor and some 30 Newham councillors have signed a letter to the Leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer. The inclusion of some names suggests a desire of some parliamentary hopefuls to burnish their credentials in advance of the West Ham and Beckton selection.

There are times in politics, like diplomacy, when ambiguity is helpful; there are times when it isn’t. You, dear reader, will have to decide which is true in this case.

The language of the letter appears to confuse international humanitarian law with international human rights law, too late to do anything about that now. It accuses the Israelis of killing “vulnerable people” in hospitals and places of sanctuary. 

So, we feel obliged to ask, is a Hamas Operations Centre built below a hospital a legitimate target? Or is the entrance to a Hamas tunnel, located beside a church? Or a network of tunnels that if disturbed, bring down the housing above? And who breached the laws of war? The constructor or the demolisher?

The answers in terms of international law are quite simple. Attitudes however, are complicated by the consequences, at least they are when it comes to Palestine, in a way that is not apparent elsewhere.

We are well used to those who would seek to generate political capital by reflecting only upon the consequences, not the cause.

To insinuate nefarious actions to the Israelis might cause some of the selectorate in West Ham and Beckton to be more sympathetic to some of the signatories. If the Labour Party decides that Newham Labour is still a basket case and takes over the whole selection procedure, then challenging the Leader at this stage might prove not to be such a good idea.

From the text, we learn that some residents, apparently, were “thrown into turmoil and chaos” as they “watched in horror”, the events in Gaza. The events were clearly of such a different scale to those in Idlib, where Turkish and Russian bombers have continued operations against the population surrounding what’s left of ISIS, though wholly unreported on UK news media. Or in Sudan, where two armies continue to tear each other, the population and the country apart, in another conflict that has disappeared from the news cycle.

Being local representatives, they of course express no view on the greater geo-political context of the war. It matters not that Iran (or its leadership) harbours a desire to eradicate the Jewish state and has financed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Hezbollah to that end. Nor that they have pursued, (and continue to pursue), a policy of the active subversion in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian Authority with a view to both destabilising and overthrowing existing regimes in the region.

But the fact that the signatories couldn’t give the proverbial tinker’s cuss about the wider political context does not mean that others shouldn’t.

For those who have simply to mollify their own supporters this is a no-brainer; stuff the Syrians, the Yemenis, the Sudanese and for that matter the Burmese and Ukrainians (remember them?); let the Uigurs and the Western Saharans whistle; ignore the coups in the Sahel and the Islamist mass murders across the region. We’ve got our priorities and they do not include you.

That is not to say that the suffering in Gaza should be minimised. It's dreadful and it shouldn’t, any more than the suffering of those who have been abducted. But we see selective outrage when the conflict involves Jews in a way that we don’t when the conflict is between Palestinians and Palestinians, between Arabs and Arabs, between Arabs and Kurds, or Africans, or Yezidis or Druze or Christians; or between the Chinese Communist Party and Muslims (or Falun Gong or Tibetans), or Russians and Muslim Chechens… you get the idea.

We understand that the letter is the product of Cllr Zulfiqar Ali. Ali, we are told put this together with the agreement of the mayor, which is interesting because at the Group meeting at the end of October, she and the Labour Group were in agreement that the Group would not be issuing a statement on the situation in Gaza. Now, we understand, Fiaz is seeking to get as many members of the Newham Labour Group to sign as she can.

One of the notable names that is absent is that of Cllr James Asser. Asser, readers will recall is now Chair of Labour’s NEC. To have added his name might have caused some embarrassment when he and Keir Starmer next met. On the plus side, by refusing to sign, he may have created the impression that he is a safe pair of hands for the leadership, and this might work to his benefit in due course.