Kmflett's Blog

Aditya Chakrabortty has been to Luton and reported for the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/07/young-britons-massacre-gaza-luton-israel

What he found, as he notes, is little reported in the media and when it is sneeringly so, as if organised by old men with beards behind the scenes (hello there)

As E P Thompson wrote in the Making of the Class of Richard Carlile’s radical paper shop in Fleet St in the 1820s where those minding it were regularly arrested and jailed, it was in fact never left untended. As soon as someone was carted off someone else, unknown to them arrived to do it. They came out of a culture Thompson notes, and from all over England.

No doubt there was some organisation behind that but at root it was a reaction from below to events.

Chakrabortty found college students walking out to attend a mass rally on Gaza. They had no doubt heard the official words of Sunak and Starmer and then they had looked at their screens and talked to each other. Images of death and destruction to stretch the imagination, on the horror scale.

Official politics so far makes gestures about the murder of thousands of Palestinians and does little. The Luton students by contrast are taking action as are many others.

After days of deliberation the UN has agreed that more aid be sent to Gaza. There is no ceasefire and the murderous forces of the IDF press on, even as Israeli Government’s lies are exposed even now in mainstream media. Palestine is the historical source of the Christmas story but there will no peace and goodwill from the Tel Aviv regime in the coming days. A political rage continues to grow, not in the corridors of power but in communities and on the street.

If we return to Thompson he made the distinction between what he called Experience 1 and Experience 2. Theoretically it can be discussed and challenged as a framework. In practice though it draws a distinction between what people are told is happening and what they actually see is happening. In the gap, yawning in the case of Gaza, politics develops. Whose politics is of course up for debate and discussion but it wont be those of Keir Starmer who still can’t manage to call for an immediate ceasefire