Patronising Palestine
The adults might be in the room, but the room is turning to rubble.
Interruptions to speeches at Labour Conference were inevitable. They were inevitable even before the party was accused of censoring mentions of genocide and apartheid in the fringe brochure, reminiscent of the DNC’s refusal to allow a Palestinian speaker onstage in Chicago a month before. So it was probably no surprise for Rachel Reeves when a protester stood up and unfurled a banner while another shouted, "We are still selling arms to Israel. I thought we were voting for change." And it would’ve been even less surprising for Keir Starmer the following day, when his declaration that the contributions of all children should be valued was met with: "What about the children of Gaza?"
The Starmer heckler, 18-year-old Daniel Riley, was removed from the conference floor with his hands behind his back. One of the men who interrupted Reeves was removed with a hand around his throat, before being arrested and kept in a police van for an hour. So much so familiar. In a near year of bombardment, individuals around the country — around the world — trying to force Gaza onto the political agenda have been subject to jeers at best and harassment, intimidation, and serious violence at worst. What’s more interesting is that both Starmer and Reeves chose the moments in which their hecklers were being manhandled away to make comments not about Palestine but about the nature of the party, Reeves declaring Labour "changed" and Starmer leaning against the podium to joke that "this guy’s obviously got a pass from the 2019 conference."
The message these statements are designed to send is simple enough: caring about Palestine represents a bygone era for Labour. But there’s something about the indulgent, teasing tone of Starmer’s words and the laughter that followed, in particular, that implied more: that caring about Palestine was an embarrassing phase, like a bad teenage haircut; that Labour has not only "changed" but matured, leaving behind the silly concerns of youth to reach the relief of serious, grown-up politics. This is the "adults in the room" rhetoric beloved by liberals everywhere. Levied against the left, as it usually is, the implication is that a world in which innocent people don’t have to be, say, starved by blockades, robbed of limbs by snipers, or crushed under rubble is akin to a world in which you can eat cake for every single meal and not get sick. It’s a nice idea, comforting, maybe, in times of distress, but not how things — how humans — actually work.
The notion of a maturity imbalance is fed by the fact that those who most visibly engage in protest about Palestine are often young themselves. The encampments earlier this year were one example, Daniel Riley himself another. Labour Conference was also targeted in a graffiti action by a group calling itself Youth Demand. Characterising the call for an end to the violence in Gaza as exclusively a young man’s game, however, only allows liberals to obscure the very real political threat empathy for Palestine poses to them among people of all ages.
That threat is given away by the aggression that almost always accompanies the patronising language, as it did in the case of the hecklers in Liverpool. There’s a nervousness in the establishment’s laughter that’s difficult to miss: these kids are naive fools with absurd ideas no-one takes seriously, and for that reason we cannot let their voices be heard. Even were the generational picture so clear-cut (it isn’t), the rules of our democracy also dictate that the opinions of an 18-year-old count no less than those of their parents or grandparents — a principle that should be obvious to a party which was touting the idea of giving 16- and 17-year-olds the vote just four months ago.
As Labour seeks to distance itself from its former principles, the death toll of liberal sophistication continues to climb. Coinciding with the rush of headlines about Conference this week was a rush of Israeli bombs towards Lebanon, which have left more than 500 people dead and thousands injured, a situation the Lebanese health minister, Dr Firass Abiad, described to the BBC as "carnage". 500,000 people have been displaced from their homes in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley by Israel’s escalation, according to Amnesty. 63,000 residents of northern Israel had already been evacuated due to ongoing Hezbollah attacks, which the group has vowed to continue until a ceasefire in Gaza is agreed. Those of us watching from our own homes thousands of miles away have to find a way to acknowledge this new disaster without taking our eyes off the continuing horrors in Gaza and the West Bank, and the continuing suffering of the families of Israeli hostages.
Whether those responsible for the bombings in Lebanon — Benjamin Netanyahu and his government's acolytes in Israeli society, including those hard-right groups eyeing up southern Lebanon for settlement — qualify as "adults" in the liberal imagination is questionable. Netanyahu’s stubbornness has seen him maligned by leaders like Joe Biden; Biden is among many who believe escalations are an attempt by Netanyahu to hold onto power. What's clear is that Biden, Starmer, and their co-ideologues have used their grown-up politics to provide cover for the Israeli government for a year now, if not far longer. The steps that Labour specifically has taken to reign them in — dropping Britain’s challenge to the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu, restricting some arms sales, and reinstating UNRWA funding — are not enough when British-made components continue to kill and maim, and when their representatives continue to be welcome at Labour events. Until more changes are made, Israel’s carnage remains Britain’s carnage — its mature, considered carnage — too.
There is one respect in which Gaza is specifically a young person’s concern. Gaza has a young population, which means that young people are suffering in particularly high numbers as Israel’s bombardment continues. Children are being forced to trade limbs and family members for record levels of trauma, robbed of their childhood and their future in one go. Look at the adults sticking their fingers in their ears and singing la-la-la, figuratively and literally, in the face of their suffering, and ask yourself if maturity in these mouths means anything at all. ▼
Francesca Newton is an editor at Vashti.
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