Official Politics, Gaza & the view from below. New Year update. A political rage is growing
Before Christmas Aditya Chakrabortty went 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 English Working 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 continues to make gestures about the murder of thousands of Palestinians and does little. The Luton students by contrast are taking action as are many others.
After eons 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 was no peace and goodwill from the Tel Aviv regime. Indeed Netanyahu made a Christmas Day appearance in Gaza to underline that genocidal actions will continue.
A political rage continues to grow, not in the corridors of power but in communities and on the street. Protest continued over the holidays, at companies making arms for Israel, at Barclays Bank which is funding it and New Year’s Eve Vigils. People will be on the streets again as the New Year gets going.
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 won’t be those of Keir Starmer who still hasn’t managed to call for an immediate ceasefire
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