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Fifth Gaza Aid Convoy to Leave London 18th September

Plans are also being made separately by the International Committee to Break the Siege of Gaza to organise a flotilla to ail to Gaza with aid. We are hoping to the flotilla and the Viva Palestina convoy will arrive at more or less the same time.

The Viva Palestina aid convoy comes at a vital time. The aid we will be bringing is being specially prepared to meet to the urgent needs of the Palestinian population in Gaza and especially the women and children.

More than that, the Israeli siege has been shaken by the reaction to the massacre on the Mavi Marmara. There has been a very modest easing of the siege as a result. But now there is the real possibility of building up a campaign that will be so strong the siege will finally be lifted. That is what is at stake with this aid convoy.

All aboard for Viva Palestina 5

None but the dwindling hard core of Israel apologists is taken in by a propaganda campaign which fast unravelled even as it began, revealing doctored footage, fake audio recordings, baseless claims of coming under fire from the passengers of a humanitarian aid vessel and a perverted disregard for human life summed up in the Israeli information ministry advertising a barbarous video featuring prominent Israelis lampooning the deaths aboard the Mavi Marmara.

What I and others saw during the assault cannot be airbrushed out. One Turkish brother a metre in front of me shot through the leg; one half a metre to the back right of me, through the abdomen; the shooting coming from above while all three of us were on a deck where there were no Israeli commandos in proximity and therefore none who could feasibly claim to have been threatened by those they shot.

A friend of mine, Nicci Enchmarch, from Viva Palestina was next to a photographer holding a stills camera. He was shot through the forehead, the bullet blowing away the back third of his skull. She cradled him as the last few seconds of his life slipped away.

The testimony could go on - from the immediate opening up with percussion grenades, rubberized bullets and then live fire as the commandos attacked through to the systematic abuse of the wounded and prisoners, part of a wider pattern, as Franz Fanon reminded us during the Algerian struggle against French colonialism, "of police domination, of systematic racism, of dehumanisation rationally pursued".

In the face of such brutality from elite assassination forces the victims, under all the great legal, moral and religious codes, have a right to defend themselves with their bare hands and with whatever is to hand.

Indeed that's what passengers aboard a ship bound for Palestine in 1947 did. It was carrying displaced persons from war-torn Europe and was boarded by British soldiers. The passengers resisted. Three were killed - one, his head stoved in by a British rifle butt. The British government claimed that the reason for the deaths lay with some extremists on board. World opinion did not buy it: nor did the leaders of the Zionist movement. For the ship was called the Exodus; it was carrying Jewish refugees and the episode became a cornerstone in the foundational mythology of the state of Israel.

All the evidence of the Mavi Marmara atrocity, perpetrated by that state 63 years on, is now being gathered and recorded. It will inform an international and independent tribunal as well as legal actions in many jurisdictions against the Israeli authorities.

The whitewash inquiry announced by Israel, and acquiesced to by the US, Britain and the UN Security Council, will serve only to intensify the outrage and determination of many millions of people who have been moved as never before by this massacre.

As the British establishment has just found out after the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday overturned Lord Widgery's fiction written to order 38 years ago, whitewash applied too quickly and thickly begins to flake and peel as soon as it is slapped on.

The presence of Lord Trimble, a founder of the Friends of Israel Initiative, on the Israeli whitewash panel is all the dispassionate observer needs to know about how it will report.

It is not only those who were aboard the flotilla or those who were already supporters of the Palestinian cause who do not need an inquiry to tell them what happened. Very large numbers of people have rightly made their minds up: nine shot dead, some at close range in the back of the head, on the one side, and a couple of roughed up Israeli commandos on the other. As they say on the other side of the Atlantic,'Go figure.'

This is a turning point in the movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people and it has the potential to become decisive. The meaning of the Mavi Marmara massacre is that the miasma of defeat that has settled on the Middle East and sedimented in the minds of many activists for far too long is finally lifting - and we can begin to see through the thinning fog a way forward.

It is perhaps an indictment that the daily humiliations and oppression of the Palestinians in besieged Gaza, the occupied West Bank and in the refugee camps have not generated the breadth of response that this atrocity against their supporters has.

But analogous events in other struggles have played a similar role in focussing on the primary victims of colonial/racial oppression. When two Jewish civil rights volunteers from New York were murdered alongside a black activist in Mississippi in June 1964 the result was to deepen and radicalise the movement for black equality and liberation in the US.

For the Palestine solidarity movement this massacre is the Sharpeville and Soweto, two of the great milestones in the struggle against apartheid. It is the Sharpeville and Soweto of the solidarity movement, but not, of course, of the Palestinians themselves. They have endured more, and more massive, massacres for 62 years - from Deir Yassin, through Black September, and Sabra and Chatilla, to the Gaza invasion of 18 months ago.

It is the accumulation of those crimes and the increasingly egregious refusal of Israel to abide by the norms the "international community" says it upholds that has laid the basis for turning the reaction to the Mavi Marmara into a decisive advance in the struggle.

We could sense that, those of us in block five, wing four, of the Be'er Shiva prison in the Negev desert. We were held incommunicado. We felt mournful and angry - yet also surprisingly confident and determined. For we knew that Israel's capital has been wasting away for several years. Long gone is the image of a social democratic state - a Sweden on the Eastern Mediterranean, which is what even many on the left imagined in the 1960s and 1970s. That square circle of "socialist Zionism" has given way to a militarised overt racism that has become more rabid with each year and each election in Israel.

More recently, Israel lost politically and militarily in its war on Lebanon in 2006. The attack on Gaza brought unprecedented condemnation and numbers onto the streets in cities around the world. The forging of passports for use in the assassination of Mohammad Al-Mabhouh in Dubai earlier this year left many people in Britain, Australia, Ireland and Germany who had not been sympathetic to the Palestinians wondering what was in it for them from our governments sponsoring this piratical state.

In the US wider numbers of people are asking the question at a time of economic austerity why the White House and Congress every year vote through billions of dollars of subvention to Israel, paying for the very bullets Israel's commandos fired five times into Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old US citizen aboard the Mavi Marmara.

US General David Petraeus recently told a Congressional Committee that he thought Israel had become a strategic liability for the US. Of course; there remain powerful overlapping interests between US imperialist strategy in the Middle East and Israel's. But the interests are not identical. And the geopolitical map is changing. Tel Aviv would do well to remember the dictum of Britain's arch-imperialist Prime Minister Lord Palmerston: Britain, or any great power, "has no eternal friends and no eternal enemies, just eternal interests".

Turkey's renewed role in the near and Middle East is one of the clearest indications of the dilemmas facing Israel and the US, with Britain in tow. Historically a key US ally - it was the stationing of US missiles there that provoked the Cuban Missile Crisis at the height of the Cold War - its government is now reflecting pressures for realignment. Seven years ago the Turkish parliament refused to allow the country's military bases to be used in the invasion of Iraq, a decision that had a profound impact on the course of the war by preventing a US invasion from the north and thus creating a wider space for the insurgency to develop.

Turkish prime minister Recap Tayyip Erdogan clashed with Israel's Ehud Olmert over the Gaza massacre at the glitzy Davos shindig last year. Sections of Turkish capital want the state to provide a more independent role bridging economic relations between the Middle East and Europe, while others and the military-security apparatus remain locked in an old alliance with Israel and the US.

These conflicting pressures on the Turkish government refute the idea that it planned to stage the massacre on the flotilla as a provocation to Israel. Instead, it was a civil society initiative in solidarity with the people of Gaza, coming mainly from the Islamically-inspired welfare and humanitarian organisation the IHH, which created mass, popular calls on the government to act, which it did.

So there is now a concerted attempt by Israel and the US to unwind this process by propagandising against the IHH and seeking to isolate the elements of Turkish society and politics which stand most strongly with the Palestinian cause.

Resisting that must be part of the thought-out response of the solidarity movement if we are to catch this changing tide. As the anti-war movement in Britain has done over the defence of Muslim communities under attack following 9/11, we need to stand in solidarity with the Turkish movement and reject all attempts to claim that Islamic civil and political organisations such as the IHH and the parliamentary Islamist parties in Turkey are in any sense cyphers for Al Qaeda.

That also means that many of the historic Palestine solidarity organisations in the West must become permeable to new forces, especially becoming infused by the angry, young Muslims who took to the streets over Gaza and again over the Mavi Marmara massacre. The success of the three Viva Palestina humanitarian convoys to Gaza in the last 18 months testifies to success of that approach.

At the same time, of course, the forces that can be won to active engagement in the solidarity movement are now very wide indeed. A recent survey analysed in the New York Review of Books found an increasing disconnect between young, liberal Jewish people and Zionist organisations such as AIPAC, which seek to speak in the name of all Jews. Younger people were much more likely to be critical of Israel and to hold it to universal standards of behaviour rather than churning out apologies.

The initiatives by land and sea to break the blockade on Gaza and end the siege are critical, for two reasons. First, Gaza is at the cutting edge both of the solidarity movement and of the attempts by Israel and its backers to defeat the Palestinian resistance by destroying the wing that Palestinians invested most hope in in the free elections held four years ago - Hamas. The apartheid wall, the occupation of the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem are monstrous injustices, but the key to raising and resolving them is to end the Gaza blockade, thus also helping to create conditions in which the Palestinian movement can overcome disabling divisions and exert far greater political pressure.

Second, the convoys and flotillas provide high profile and direct challenges to both Israel and to those other states, including in the Middle East, which enforce the siege. Behind those who have travelled on them stand many thousands who have raised money and support from tens of thousands more. There are now international efforts underway to ensure that the land and sea missions are even more coordinated, bigger and representing more countries. Viva Palestina has initiated an international land convoy, to be in conjunction with a large sea mission, leaving in September of this year just after Ramadan. The aim is not to loosen the bars around Gaza - which Israel and Egypt under the pressure of the flotilla fallout are doing - but to end the siege entirely, allowing the commercial and economic relations between Gaza and the rest of the world, which it needs to develop freely.

Already the indications are that these missions will enjoy very wide support from civil society organisations, communities and trade unions internationally. This is especially so in the Middle East, where almost without exception the mass of people have both been moved by Palestine and also face their own form of siege - social and economic - imposed largely from within rather than without.

And this is the great strategic step our movement is in a position to take. All movements require activists. But this cannot be a movement only of activists. It must become a more general movement of people for whom Palestine has become the international symbol of the fight against injustice. It must become a movement of social forces, of mass democratic forces.

The struggle against apartheid provides valuable lessons. It combined direct action against racist South Africa and its interests with mass mobilisations - demonstrations, cultural events and so on - and a range of activities aimed at isolating the regime through sanctions, boycotts and divestment. Each one reinforced the other and was accompanied by clear refutations of apartheid propaganda.

Such initiatives are needed now, simultaneously at different levels. One element is a coordinated and targeted consumer boycott. Few of us who went to university in the mid-1980s knew the full connections between British capital and apartheid South Africa. Everyone, however, was told as they enrolled not to buy Outspan fruit or to bank at Barclays. Most of us did not and some of us went further in picketing supermarkets or occupying Barclays every Friday afternoon. A similar focused call which could be popularised as the cutting edge of a wider boycott would be helpful today.

Salma Yaqoob last year managed to get cross party support on Birmingham City Council - the largest local authority in Europe - to move towards a boycott of Israel. Following the recent local government elections there will be other councillors who can move, or be moved, in the same direction.

The cancellation of gigs in Israel by a number of bands following the flotilla attack led to cultural figures and commentators in Israel voicing fears that the radicalising policies of Binyamin Netanyahu were leading to the country becoming a pariah state. Breaking cultural links with Israel and holding large, diverse cultural events for Palestine can have an enormous impact.

Trade unions in Britain and in many other countries now have extensive policies aimed at boycotting at least some contacts with and products from Israel. The TUC Congress in September may well see successful moves to harden that position.

In 1985 a 21-year-old shop worker in Dunnes store in Dublin, Mary Manning, read just such a union policy circular and told a customer that she could not checkout her grapefruit because it was on the apartheid boycott list. She was sacked, but the strike by her and 10 workmates for a year that resulted became an international cause célèbre for wider solidarity. If the general consumer boycott, mass initiatives and trade union policies are popularised they are likely to intersect with more Mary Mannings today.

Already, dockers in Durban and Sweden have refused to unload Israeli ships. At the time of writing, dockers and their supporters in Oakland, California, are set to do the same.

All these strands make up a movement which should have as its strategic direction altering policy in the West and contributing to the processes in the Middle East which have enormous potential power to end the suffering of the Palestinians. This will require serious strategic and tactical coordination as well as drawing in fresh forces.

Ending the siege on Gaza is an obtainable victory, an important step forward in the wider and longer struggle for a free Palestine.

There was a time when apartheid seemed invulnerable. The apartheid abomination could murder 69 people in Sharpeville. It could gun down Hector Peterson and hundreds of schools students in Soweto. It could torture and execute Steve Biko: assassinate Chris Hani. But Nelson Mandela did walk free. Apartheid did fall.

The siege on Gaza will be lifted. Israeli apartheid can fall.

This article was first published in Respect Party members magazine, Respect Quarterly, Summer 2010.

Kevin Ovenden is a member of the Respect Party National Council and a key organiser of the three successful Viva Palestina overland convoys to Gaza.

To find out more about Viva Palestina 5 visit http:/ / www.vivapalestina.org/

Lansley's Sick Lullaby

After 13 years of New Labour changes in the NHS, including creeping privatization, the very last thing needed was a new re-organization. Lansley has confirmed that General Practitioner (GP) practices will be expected to take on planning and commissioning of health care over the next four years, thus removing the role of Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in planning.

Dr Kay Phillips, a practicing GP and National Chair of the Respect Party, was not impressed by the changes. 'GPs are trained in clinical diagnosis not financial planning or management. Most GPs do not want to be finance managers; they just want to be left to treat patients. This re-organization will put GPs at the forefront of making cuts and bringing in private companies.

'We have suffered 13 years of Labour government meddling in the NHS that has led to partial privatization and cost huge amounts of money. Now, the ConDems want to drive this ideological attack on the NHS further. The basic fact is that they hate the idea of a state run, free health service at the point of use. Drug companies see big profits from breaking up the NHS and the ConDems do their bidding.'

The plans amount to an invitation to privatization by making GPs form companies and tender out NHS services. With the break-up of a national service, the pensions and national pay bargaining of NHS staff will be destroyed.

An illustration of the cost of bringing the private sector to healthcare is that Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) has saddled the British people with £200 billion of debt in the form of repayments to private contractors, according to the Office of National Statistics. Another is the recent revelation that £26 million was handed to a private company by Greater Manchester PCTs for operations that were not performed. This occurred because of a contract for 9,000 operations between 2005 and 2009.

Naturally, Andrew Lansley has huge experience of the lives of the poorest in our society for whom free health care is essential. He went to a private school, Brentwood, and worked as a senior civil servant for Norman Tebbit. His qualifications for dealing with health include his claims that obesity will be increased by seeing obese people and stating in 2008 the recession would be good as more people would spend time with their families. What a shame he has not taken his own advice.

The Respect Party believes this is a completely unnecessary attack motivated by free market fundamentalism in the government. We welcome the declared opposition of the major trade unions in the NHS, UNITE and UNISON. These unworkable and destructive plans can and must be stopped.

Are we all in the same boat together?

However, the bosses have moved towards annual bonuses to supplement their meagre income. These bonuses will reach up to 300% of annual salary and, even in smaller companies, will get to 100%. Of course, we all understand bonuses that relate to company performance or 'performance-related pay' which companies tried to introduce across British industry. This is not what executives mean by it.

Cliff Weight, director of MM&K (one of those leading the study), explained that 'many performance-related pay schemes appear designed to satisfy the Chief Executive Officer and in fact offer little incentive for anything above just 'adequate' performance'. In other words, the bonuses are almost inevitable for these executives but just do not appear as salary for tax purposes.

Most of us never experience such wealth in a lifetime yet alone a year. Why has there been no freeze for chief executives? Why are they not paying back the money lost in the recession or taken from the public finances?

The public schoolboy government of the ConDems is not about necessary cuts or hard choices. It is starting an austerity programme designed to break the modern notion of the welfare state. This attempt to shrink the public finances is about abandoning the safety net to the poorest caught in the recession. It is about refusing to accept responsibility for the lost jobs and refusing help to those without the right home or enough money to look after their families. It is about ending the very limited wealth redistribution in taxation and benefits.

This government intends to change the role of the state away from helping the poorest and relieving the tax burden on their rich friends, in whose name they govern. By the way, did you know that David Cameron is a direct royal descendant of King William IV? So, another aristocrat who hides it and another pretending to promote fairness in society from a position of privilege and without hard choices as we know them.

Nothing 'progressive' about this government

Now, I expect this kind of vindictive attack on the welfare state from the Tories. It is what they do. I remember well the reality of Thatcher's Britain as a teenager growing up in Birmingham. But what of the Lib Dems? Has Charles Kennedy's warning that the Lib Con pact could "drive a strategic coach and horses through the long-nurtured 'realignment of the centre-left' to which leaders in the Liberal tradition, this one included, have all subscribed since the Jo Grimond era" been vindicated? The answer is conclusive. As Nick Pearce illustrates, the Lib Dems have simply sold their soul:

'Tellingly, the central Liberal Democrat election commitment to fairness in taxes and benefits has been abandoned. A few facts illustrate this simply enough. In their Manifesto, the Liberal Democrats promised to raise nearly £2 billion from Capital Gains Tax reform. The Budget secures less than half that (£925 million). In addition, they pledged to raise £5.45 billion by restricting tax relief on pension contributions to the basic rate. This highly progressive measure has now been completely dropped. Ditto the Mansion Tax on properties worth over £2 million, due to have raised £1.7 billion. And there was barely a mention of the green taxes they had pencilled in to raise over £3 billion in the Budget. On almost every score, their pre-election tax package has been stripped of its progressive content.'

More than ever there is a need for genuinely progressive politics which has a commitment to principles of equality and social justice at its core. The Tories never had these principles. The Lib Dems have abandoned them. Labour needs to be pushed by progressives, both inside and outside the party, to fight for them.

A sympathetic noose: Gideon shows his colours

The noose

The reality of this budget for working people is that we will be expected to pay for the bailout of the banks. VAT is to rise to 20% - this is regressive taxation as it will affect everyone regardless of income so hits the poor hardest. It is the taxation model of the poll tax. This rise alone will wipe out any gains in state pensions.

Public sector workers are to suffer a pay freeze for two years, when most are already underpaid. For those earning under £21,000, there will be a flat £250 pay rise (again this does not cover the rise in VAT alone). There will be 25% cuts in most government departments, which signal more job losses, so raising the welfare needs in society.

While we suffer a housing crisis, the ConDems will not help. Instead, Gideon the aristocrat will put a cap on housing benefit with no recognition that the lack of council houses is the factor pushing private sector rents up and raising the cost of housing benefit. Child benefit is to be frozen for three years in a country with the highest level of child poverty in Europe. The general linking of benefits to the Consumer Prices Index is designed to stop benefit rises so contributing the extending poverty in Britain.

Paying the hangman

While there are cuts for the poor, the rich are given even more tax breaks. Capital Gains Tax is an instrument for taxing wealth which is created when selling stocks, bonds or property. It taxes speculators. Yet the ConDems have decided to increase the loophole that allows the rich to only pay 10% on the first £5 million. Before 1998, it was normal to pay 40%, the same rate as income tax for the rich at the time.

Corporation Tax is a tax on profits, which have risen for the richest in the recession. The banks were recording multi billion pound profits even as they demanded bailouts. New Labour started cutting this tax for the rich and the ConDems have gone further reducing it to 24% over the next four years.

The Chancellor has proposed a banking levy from January 2011 but this will only be £2 billion and it is unclear whether it will be a 'one-off' levy. When set against the banking bailout, it is ridiculously small and ineffectual. The National Audit Office puts the actual cost at £850 billion, including £76billion given to Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds to buy their worthless shares, £200 billion to increase credit (a measure that failed), £250 billion to guarantee bank borrowing, £40 billion in loans to failing banks and £280 billion to insure banking debt (which could be as high as £2 trillion).

This is a budget that cuts the services, jobs and pay of the poorest while handing out tax breaks and handshakes to the rich.

Respect's alternative

The public debt is £903 billion. Most of this is a result of the banking bailout and the increased cost of unemployment to the state. There need to be more jobs not less. Respect would start a programme to convert Britain to environmentally friendly power with the aim of creating 1 million jobs. It rejects the idea of cutting public sector jobs.

Respect would launch a council house building and renovation programme which would create jobs, homes and relieve the rent burden on housing benefit.

The banks and energy companies are getting away with huge rip-offs. Respect would raise Corporation Tax back to 30%. This would bring in over £6 billion per year - enough to double spending on higher education. This money could scrap tuition fees and introduce universal student grants. And a 'Robin Hood tax' of 0.5% on financial dealings in the City would bring in an estimated £250 billion. Respect would also clamp down on tax evasion by the richest, which cost the UK more than £100 billion per year. And if there must be cuts we would start by cancelling Trident and ending our costly wars abroad.

There is no need to cut public services or benefits. There is no need to tax the poor.