Tim Lawrence

The UK national solidarity movement: three years old and still applying pressure on complicit Labour

Labour’s sanctions on the West Bank will affect 0.6% of UK trade. It’s not enough!

6 October 2026

The UK solidarity movement marches in London this Saturday, 10 October, assembling at the Victoria Embankment at 12:00 noon. Behind the veneer of Labour’s sanctions policy on the West Bank, which will affect 0.6% of UK trade with Israel, the government remains deeply complicit. The protest continues!

I remember the first national solidarity demonstration of Saturday 13 October 2023 like it was yesterday. The onrush of what we almost immediately understood to be Israel's genocide of the Palestinians felt like a cataclysmic emergency back then and it continues to feel like a cataclysmic emergency now.

I remember attending the first national protest on Saturday 13 October 2023. By the Friday Israel had already killed 614 children and 370 women as part of a total death toll of 1,900 in five days. The figure far exceeded the 1,139 Israeli Jews (and tourists) who died on 7/10—which included 300 IDF soldiers and in all likelihood hundreds of civilians the IDF killed following Netanyahu’s activation of the Hannibal Directive, which mandated it was better for the Israeli army to kill Israeli Jewish civilians rather than allow Hamas to take them hostage. For Israel the higher cause of Zionism has always trumped Jewish life and it did so on 7/10 like every other day.

We only found out about the Hannibal Directive much later, thanks to the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz, which did a better job of reporting on events than the entirety of the western media establishment, including the godforsaken BBC, Guardian and New York Times. We’re still finding out about ways that Netanyahu apparently engineered 7/10 in order to create a pretext for the genocide. All the same, on the eve of the protest it was already clear that Israel’s response was genocidal.

On 7 October Likud MK Ariel Kallner called for a Nakba that would “overshadow the Nakba of 48”. On 9 October defence minister Yoav Gallant announced Israel was launching a “complete siege” on Gaza. He added: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” On 12 October president Isaac Herzog said “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians who were not aware and not involved.” By 13 October Israel had already dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza—not far off the maximum number of bombs the US dropped on Afghanistan in a whole year. By 13 October the US-based Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal had seen enough to publish an article in Jewish Currents that described Israel’s actions as “A Textbook Case of Genocide”.

When we heard about the 13 October protest Niki Orfanou and I quickly decided that we wanted to attend to show solidarity. Even if the massacre of 7/10 had been shocking, it was clearly important to stand against Israel’s horrific response, especially given that 7/10 was itself a response to 75-plus years of ethnic cleansing and apartheid rule. But the day before the protest I started to wobble and said to Niki, “What if I experience antisemitism?” Niki replied, “So what?” That was all it took for me to understand that at this particular moment in history, my feelings and sensitivities were irrelevant in the context of Israel’s onslaught. The ethical thing to do was to stand against the onslaught.

If I came across an expression of antisemitism, what difference would it really make given that I, like so many British Jews, have lived a privileged life that has seen many Jews flourish financially, professionally and socially, unlike so many other minority groups? Might a level of antisemitic expression even be understandable, given that Israel was carrying out its hateful annihilation in the name of the Jewish people? Was the protest the right time to police the response of people who wanted to take a stand against injustice, including in defence of family members and friends who were facing indiscriminate murder? Given that I’d grown up in a Jewish-Zionist youth movement/immersion programme, wasn’t it more important focus on the horrors being perpetrated by Israel and its supporters than to preposterously imagine myself to be the victim in the room—before I’d even shown my face?

Showing up that day turned out to be an epiphany. Rather than finding myself needing to process any antisemitism, I joined a mass demonstration that was defined by a surging humanity. It was one of the most diverse gatherings I’d ever had the privilege to be part of, one that cut across every vector of identity. Judging by the placards, banners, yarmulkes (Jewish skull caps) and levush Chassidish (chassidic Jewish attire), thousands of Jews were in attendance that day. I neither heard nor saw anything that resembled antisemitic rhetoric on display.

I’d long found a way to move beyond what to me felt like the often insular, frequently defensive and paranoid, obligatorily Zionist environment of the Jewish youth movement while remaining close with a good number of Jewish friends. I’d developed a particular attachment to dance floor culture, where people from all different walks of life could coexist in a joyous environment. But although the gathering of 13 October was rooted in great sadness and also anger, it was ultimately defined by its collectivity and unity, and, because of this, transcendent feelings of empowerment and hope.

There’s no question the UK solidarity movement has exerted massive pressure on Sunak/Braverman/Cleverly/Cameron and also Starmer/Lammy/Cooper plus Hermer, Starmer’s Attorney General, who clearly played a pivotal role in Starmer’s support for the genocide. The movement restricted support for Starmer in the 2024 election to a woeful 33%. It shone a constant light on Starmer’s support for the genocide, which led the robotic, corruptible, genocide-complicit non-leader to repress the movement in every way he knew how. This included him pathetically portraying it as antisemitic and, in a major neocolonial assault on free speech, disgracefully proscribing Palestine Action. The movement played a pivotal role in making it clear to the Labour Party that Starmer had become a poison for which there was no cure.

Starmer’s departure and Andy Burnham’s entry into Downing Street changed the personnel and the mood but not the policy—at least not in a way that’s anywhere near sufficient. Burnham is a longstanding member of Friends of Israel who, before being elected, echoed Starmer’s pathetic, morally if not legally criminal refusal to recognise the genocide. Four in ten of his cabinet appointees were members of Labour Friends of Israel. We were all grateful Burnham speaks with a northern accent—apparently a sign that he might be a human being. As mayor of Manchester he regulated the city’s private bus system, which was enough to earn him the title King of the North. Along with foreign secretary Ed Miliband he’s said he’ll introduce sanctions on West Bank settlers. But is this enough to persuade us to stop marching?

The enthusiasm shown for the sanctions policy has been ridiculous—the sure sign of a party that desperately wants to be seen to be doing something, even if in reality it’s doing close to nothing. It’s by no means a foregone conclusion that Labour will effectively roll out the policy. Even if it does, it will affect £38 million of the UK’s £6 billion annual trade with Israel, or about 0.63%. A footstep in the right direction is better than no footstep at all only so long as it doesn’t become a smokescreen that prevents real progress. The ovation Ed received at Labour party conference could have given the impression he’s brought an end to the genocide. Instead he’s fiddling about with a microscopic amount of trade that hasn’t even got anything to do with Gaza.

Ed’s broader framework will provide Israel with the support it needs to maintain the genocide. He has also said he won’t sign off new UK arms contracts with Israel, which means he’ll keep all the existing ones in place. He won’t introduce any sanctions that affect Israeli companies that are based within Israel’s 1948 borders, so will continue to support 99.4% of UK trade, as if Israel has nothing to do with the annexation of the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza. He acknowledged that Labour got it wrong under Starmer, but repeated Starmer’s gutless decision to defer ruling on whether Israel has perpetrated a genocide or not to the ICJ, even though the ICJ probably won’t report until 2030. Similarly, he hasn’t committed Labour to revoking its treacherous proscription of Palestine Action.

What did Ed think when police arrested Margaret Owen, a 94-year-old human rights lawyer and one-time friend of Ed’s mother, outside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, where she held a placard that read: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.” Ed’s mother, Marion Kozak, passed away in May 2026, so we won’t get to know what she would have made of her son’s position. She’s understood to have opposed all nationalism, especially Zionism, and to have been a long-time supporter of Palestinian justice. Maybe she'd have felt that Labour is on the right track, maybe she'd have felt that it should be doing more--including with regard to its ongoing clampdown on people such as Margaret.

Ed made much of his desire to build an international coalition to stop Israel, but ignored that (1) he’s not going to persuade the US and Germany to join in any time soon, (2) there are already plenty of international leaders who are far ahead of the UK with whom he could ally, some of them European, most of them not, and (3) the UK can have a seismic impact by immediately introducing a full trade, arms, cultural and sporting boycott. It doesn’t need to wait for anyone’s permission. And if Ed wants to build an international alliance he can do this while it rolls out the boycott. We’re three years into a genocide. Would Ed be as hesitant and slow if his own children were being bombed by the IDF?

Ed and Andy adopted the sanctions policy in part because Andy’s election had only a very modest effect on Labour’s standing in the polls, lifting the party from Starmer’s farewell rating of 20% to something like 25%. It was barely nudging ahead of Reform and remained well short of Starmer’s 2024 showing of 33%, which was itself a historic low for a general election victory. Labour had to do something so grabbed the lowest hanging fruit and introduced its 0.6% sanctions policy and made the right noises.

The meagre offering was enough for Ed to receive a standing ovation at Labour conference. It was as if he’d reincarnated as Gandhi. Those who applauded understood perfectly well that it was about time that they improved their image on the genocide and recognised that Ed had just given the party a coat of varnish that will reduce the heat it has faced. So far it’s worked: the Labour Party’s polling is now magically up. Meanwhile a small group of”progressive” rabbis and liberal Zionists who’ve been almost entirely silent throughout the genocide suddenly found the courage to speak up in support of a policy that will make virtually no difference to Israel’s trade and even less to its genocidal conduct.

Ultimately the sanctions policy is nothing more than a delaying tactic and it can only fail to deliver anything meaningful. There is no “opposition” party in Israel that opposes Netanyahu’s core approach to Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran and beyond. At best the opposition simply wants to achieve Netanyahu’s goals more effectively. This is because Israeli society has been wholly supportive of Israel’s approach to ethnic cleansing and has mounted close to zero opposition to the genocide. There is no immediate prospect of the US, Germany and the German/France-controlled EU changing course, despite their approach to Israel amounting to a betrayal of their own citizens, never mind the Palestinians. The EU’s determined support for Israel hamstrings countries like Spain and Ireland.

Within this context it’s clear that we must continue to apply as much pressure as we can to our national governments. Many other developments within Palestine and beyond are signalling that Israel’s fascistic hegemony is weakening rapidly. So is the power of the US, upon which Israel is entirely dependent. Every action that seeks to isolate Israel and its supporters makes a difference. On Saturday every step will add to the pressure.