Ed Miliband admits we were right

Pressure from the Palestinian movement secured this. Now we need to organise more

My new book is out this week! Order The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It here

We were right.

That was the message Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband, delivered today to the millions of people who marched, agitated and organised against Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide of the Palestinian people.

He didn’t call it a genocide, of course. We’ll come to that.

He said this at Labour Party conference, which I’ve just returned from – and oh boy, do we have video from there. If you saw our video last year, in which Labour Lord John Mann aggressively seized my microphone, and thought that was shocking, wait until you see this year’s footage.

I want to try and give a thoughtful, nuanced take on what Ed Miliband has said and what the government is doing. The balance I want to strike is this: we should recognise that campaigning, organising and building pressure can achieve results – and take encouragement from that to do even more – without sowing illusions in a government that is still doing nowhere near enough.

We should welcome this shift - while demanding so much more.

We are, after all, discussing the crime of crimes: genocide.

I watched with my own eyes as elderly people opposed to genocide were dragged away by police officers outside the conference centre, including a 94-year-old Jewish human rights lawyer I interviewed. That’s because Labour proscribed the direct-action group Palestine Action – placing it under the same statutory proscription regime as organisations such as ISIS/Daesh.

Here is a passage from Miliband’s speech:

“But this cannot justify the suffering the Netanyahu government has inflicted in Gaza and the West Bank. This suffering is a stain on the conscience of the world.

And I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you. You were right. And under Andy’s leadership, we have reset our approach.

We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank. We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. And we match words with actions.

We will ban the import of goods from illegal settlements. We will disrupt the supply lines of British finance, British construction and British services for illegal settlements.

And when it comes to the attempt to destroy the two-state solution, this party, this movement, this government, says we will not let you succeed.”

It’s worth dwelling on the rapturous applause he received in the hall. That comes after years in which the Labour left has been driven to the political margins under Keir Starmer – who notoriously told LBC in October 2023 that Israel “does have that right” when asked about cutting off power and water to Gaza.

But opposition to Israel’s conduct in Gaza is hardly marginal. According to a poll earlier this year, 50% of Britons think Israel is committing genocide, with just 17% disagreeing. Among those who voted Labour in 2024, the figure think Israel is committing genocide increases to more than two-thirds.

Those three words from Miliband therefore matter:

“I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you.

You were right.”

This is an important vindication.

They spent years demonising us

The assault on those who have opposed Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide amounts to the most extreme assault on political free expression across the post-war West – and yes, I include the McCarthy era in that comparison.

People have been threatened, deplatformed, blacklisted, sacked, arrested – sometimes brutally – imprisoned and deported for opposing the crime of crimes committed by a key Western ally.

And Starmer’s Labour repeatedly helped to demonise those protesting against what was happening in Gaza.

When, for example, the then-shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy was heckled by pro-Palestinian activists, he called them “shameful and antisemitic”.

Former Chancellor Rachel Reeves accused protesters of crossing the line into “intimidation”, while Labour politicians repeatedly presented protests targeting MPs as a threat to democratic politics.

And then there was Labour Party conference in 2024, when Starmer was heckled by an 18-year-old who shouted about the children of Gaza.

Starmer responded with a joyous smile: “This guy’s obviously got a pass from the 2019 conference.”

It was depraved, frankly. The implication of the joke was that concern about Palestinian children being slaughtered was associated with the politics Starmer boasted he had purged from the Labour Party. And the delegates cheered and whooped.

What Labour still won’t say

When Miliband says:

“We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank.”

This is clearly movement from Labour’s previous position. But settler violence does not exist in some parallel universe detached from the Israeli state. The settlement project depends on the legal, political, military and infrastructural power of that state, while the Israeli military itself demolishes Palestinian homes and has forcibly displaced Palestinian communities.

That points to a continuing weakness in the government’s position: its tendency to isolate the crimes of settlers from the state structures that enable, protect and sustain the settlement project.

That is consistent with an overall refusal to hold the Israeli state responsible for crimes - up to and including genocide.

Notably, Miliband also said:

“We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza.”

Again, this is movement. It is an advance on the formulation the government has used since Andy Burnham became prime minister – which was itself an advance on what came before. The bar really is on the floor here.

In his apology over Gaza, for example, Burnham said: “There’s increasing evidence that war crimes appear to have been committed.”

That language is very obviously lawyered: stating directly that Israel has committed war crimes carries much greater political and legal implications.

Now we have: “We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza.”

On one level, this is an excruciating example of just how low the bar has become. The evidence concerning alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza is vast. Yet the government continues to choose language that stops short of directly saying that those crimes have been committed.

But the government clearly privately know that Israel has not simply committed war crimes - but perpetrated a genocide.

The second most powerful figure in the new government is Louise Haigh, the First Secretary of State. In June 2025, she said:

“It is impossible to conclude that what is happening in Gaza is anything short of genocide.

“On that basis, will the Minister reflect the clear will of the House and immediately impose sanctions on Netanyahu and members of his genocidal regime.”

So this isn’t simply a question of wondering what senior Labour politicians privately think. A woman who is now First Secretary of State has already publicly called what is happening in Gaza genocide and described Netanyahu’s government as a “genocidal regime”.

The government’s official language nonetheless remains far more cautious.

Why Labour has shifted

What has changed is the political context. There has been a mass protest movement, sustained organising and mounting electoral pressure from the Greens and other candidates and parties campaigning on Gaza – phenomena which are, of course, intertwined. The government has shifted significantly amid that pressure.

But it still fails to go further because of defying the pro-Israel lobby backed by Donald Trump. That’s why they need more countervailing pressure.

Miliband also called out what he described as “Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine”.

Again, that is a significant sharpening of the British government’s language.

And he set out sanctions which will not simply target goods produced in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, but British finance, construction and other services which facilitate those settlements.

Then he said, to cheers:

“And when it comes to the attempt to destroy the two-state solution, this party, this movement, this government, says:

We will not let you succeed.”

The two-state solution: but how, exactly?

My own view is that the final political settlement is not something people here should dictate. Britain, after all, played a pivotal role in creating this nightmare in the first place. Personally, I favour a single state with equal rights for everyone between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean sea.

But for those advocating a two-state solution, there are huge questions which Western politicians almost never answer.

There are around three-quarters of a million Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. What sort of pressure would Israel have to come under to evacuate them - which itself would plausibly trigger an Israeli civil war?

It’s not just the Israeli government which support the illegal occupation and colonisation of the West Bank - and the genocide in Gaza. The opposition do, too.

That is why, to me, the ritual invocation of the “two-state solution” by Western politicians so often functions as a can-kicking exercise – a means of avoiding the vastly more difficult conversation about what would actually have to happen to create one.

The danger of conflating Israel with Jewish people

Miliband also condemned antisemitism in his speech, and of course antisemitism is a great evil which must always be fought.

But one thing politicians desperately need to do is insist on the clearest possible demarcation between the Israeli state and its crimes on the one hand, and Jewish people as a whole on the other.

Israel’s cheerleaders and antisemites alike collapse that distinction, albeit for completely different reasons. That conflation is profoundly dangerous and fuels antisemitism.

Pressure works. So increase the pressure.

Because of pressure, the position of the British government has moved. Miliband’s speech is an acknowledgment of that reality, and the movement should take encouragement from it.

But no, of course it isn’t enough.

Britain should impose sweeping sanctions on Israel, introduce a full arms embargo, end intelligence sharing and military cooperation, and pursue prosecutions wherever there is evidence that British citizens serving in the IDF have committed war crimes, among other measures.

They should immediately end the proscription of Palestine Action, too.

The lesson is not that the job is done. It is that pressure works – and therefore that the pressure has to intensify.

After all, what’s at stake here is the very future existence of the Palestinian people.

As citizens of the West, we have a responsibility. These crimes were only possible because of Western political, diplomatic and military support. It has been done in our name.

My new book is out this week! Order The Fall of the West: How They Really Lost It here