The Fifth Satrapy?

Everyone has to flee Southern Gaza to nowhere, because it turns out that the Hamas leaders are in Khan Yunis, and not in Al-Shifa Hospital after all. Just as they were not in the Jabalia refugee camp after all. Anyway, were they not supposed to be living the high life in Qatar?

ISIS, which Israel supported in Syria as enthusiastically as Britain and the United States did but with far more practical assistance, is like al-Qaeda in despising Hamas, which fulsomely returns the compliment. Hamas is allied to Iran, it participates in elections, and it has not implemented Sharia in Gaza in anything like a form acceptable to those factions, if at all. There, it has stamped them out without mercy.

To ISIS or al-Qaeda, it is absolutely forbidden to fight alongside Hamas on those grounds, and it would be even if none of them applied, since Hamas, while it vaguely aspires to a global caliphate as in some sense any Sunni Muslim does, is fundamentally and ultimately a nationalist movement, really only actively seeking an Islamic State in Palestine, and then only its own understanding of one, the character of which may already be seen in Gaza. ISIS cannot, however, hold it against Hamas that it has been funded by Israel, although it is now permissible to point out that it has been.

Hypocrisy, of course, gets around. The official reply to those who point out that the people who made a fuss about Ukraine were not generally making any about Gaza, is that far worse has been happening, and continues to happen, in, say, Yemen, or Sudan, or Somalia. Just cast your minds back, brothers and sisters. Just cast your minds back.

What may be called Aaronovitchism is taking hold among the three per cent that strongly opposes a ceasefire, according to which the 76 per cent that supports one, 58 per cent strongly, is thick and ill-informed on account of being young, or common, or Glaswegian, or Scouse, or what have you. Add in the false claim that MPs and marchers of that mind are overwhelmingly Muslim, and join the dots.

We are supposedly disconnected from Western civilisation. But is in fact we who have read Herodotus, and Saint Jerome, and Saint John Chrysostom, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, and Shakespeare (twice, and Holinshed before him), and the Douay-Rheims Bible, and the King James Bible, and Sir Isaac Newton, and Voltaire, and Diderot, and every map for at least 1878 years until 1948, and the history of the Second World War.

No one is more entitled to oppose a war than those who are of an age to fight it, or who very soon will be. All parliamentary questions about RAF Akrotiri have been blocked, while a D-Notice confirms the presence of the SAS in Gaza, where Tony Blair is being lined up to be the Viceroy of the gas field. This is a British war, so a Commons Division on it was not, nor would it be, gesture politics.

Nor are we engaged in identity politics. It is the other side that has the present Labour frontbench, and the Government under which "woke", if you must, has emerged. The case for Israel is largely framed in those terms, often by people who affect to define themselves against them in their own countries. Whereas at every level, our stalwarts include people who are steeped in the original critique of Foucault by those against whom he had defined himself by having turned.

The Morning Star, Counterfire, the Socialist Labour Party, and the Communist Party of Britain, are all absolutely sound on gender self-identification, with both Alba and the Workers Party of Britain having been founded in so small part because of that issue. Perhaps more than any other, it differentiates those who now organise in and through Counterfire from those who have remained in the Socialist Workers Party. It has also been key to the withdrawal of certain prominent individuals from activism in, or membership of, the anarcho-syndicalist organisations, amusing though those organisations are in principle. Those individuals are highly active for Palestine.

Of those listed, only Alba is iffy on Brexit; it wants an independent Scotland to be in EFTA. All of the others have been opposed to the EU forever, since Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit were calling that position "Loony Left". Again, both Socialist Labour and the Workers Party have in no small measure been founded on this question. If there is a Left party in favour of gender self-identification, then it is the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, which is the fiercely pro-EU British branch of the Shachtmanism that produced the neoconservative movement. It does not play well with others on the Left. Not insignificantly, it is supporting Israel's war.

Whatever one may think of a PFLP flag, those Celtic fans were more than averagely engaged, whereas I doubt that certain hereditary ornaments of media London had any idea what it was. In any case, we are all one-state solutionists now. Israel is never going to evict half a million people from the West Bank, so it looks like the constitutional position of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, as has been forcefully articulated by Tzipi Hotovely: one sovereignty "From the River to the Sea". One state, with human and civil rights guaranteed by universal suffrage and an independent judiciary, is the only thing that those decrying it there would tolerate on any other patch of the planet, and it is now the only alternative to apartheid, ethnic cleansing, or genocide.

Moreover, David Cameron has been made Foreign Secretary thanks to William Hague, who himself arranged to pass on his own parliamentary seat to Rishi Sunak, and Cameron's Minister of State, who attends Cabinet with him so as to answer for him in the elected House, is Andrew Mitchell, who has in recent days displayed the spirit of his old Department for International Development in endorsing the position of Robert Mardini, the director-general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, against the targeting of Gaza's hospitals under any circumstances.

Cameron was days into being Prime Minister when he called the Gaza flotilla raid "unacceptable". As Shadow Foreign Secretary under Cameron, Hague described the the 2006 bombardment of Lebanon as "disproportionate". As Prime Minister in 2010, Cameron called Gaza "a prison camp"; still in office in 2016, he described the West Bank settlements as "illegal" Sunak's speech to last Monday's Lord Mayor's Banquet was quite something. Anyone who said anything like that would be expelled from the Labour Party.

Now, don't get me wrong, Cameron's war in Libya set off a catastrophic chain reaction that is still being felt across Africa and beyond. But almost all Labour MPs supported that war, and you can probably name at least some of the very few who did not. No Liberal Democrat did so, but the Lib Dems voted for a ceasefire in Gaza last week. Cameron has a proven record of beating them among the voters whom the boundary changes have made decisive again, even though he had been in coalition with them for the previous five years and remained so on the day of the 2015 General Election.

And when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.