According to the polls, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is now leading Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, making their victory in the next general election quite probable. Nevertheless, Starmer has faced pressure from members of his party to resign because he failed to support demands for a cessation of hostilities in the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The expression of indignation by certain individuals, notably the head of Burnley Borough Council, emphasises the challenging endeavour that Starmer confronts in maintaining a semblance of harmony within his electoral alliance about a topic about which his party has a convoluted past.
The Labour Party’s stance on Israel and Palestine has been shaped by its control over the West Bank and Gaza, the uncompromising right-wing policies of Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu’s administrations, and the conviction that Israel was established as a result of colonialism. Starmer has been criticised for displaying a deficiency of empathy towards the Palestinian cause in Gaza.
Starmer’s current stance is that implementing a truce in the ongoing conflict would only maintain the existing situation without any progress and that Hamas’s killing of 1,400 individuals on 7 October renders this position unsustainable. He has aligned with the White House’s stance by advocating for humanitarian ceasefires to facilitate the delivery of aid to Gaza. While this argument may not meet the expectations of many individuals, it is nonetheless based on sound reasoning.
Some factions of the Labour Party think that Starmer’s decision to take this stance is an attempt to set himself apart from Corbyn, his predecessor. Corbyn contends that achieving peace will unavoidably necessitate the unification of all conflicting factions, asserting that a military resolution is unattainable.
The challenge for the Labour party lies in the fact that advocates of these two stances often perceive people with opposing views as not fulfilling the party’s objective of advancing social equity. The majority of the extreme left-wing faction inside the party, who are held responsible by the rest of the party for rendering Labour unviable in the 1980s and more recently, endorse a cessation of hostilities.