While the proximate causes of Israeli apartheid, occupation, and genocide clearly lie squarely at the feet of Israel, the United Kingdom has a special responsibility to make right its historical sins in Palestine—and everywhere else. A minimal first step would be to work to stop the current genocide instead of waving an Israeli flag.

It has been decades since NDP governments anywhere in Canada have undertaken such a bold approach to governing, and this particular NDP government faces fiscal constraints. Nevertheless, this is the kind of reform program that the incoming Manitoba NDP government should commit to doing. Implementing such an agenda will take vision, determination and courage.

The Trudeau government’s unequivocal support for Israel’s right to “self-defence” is exposing the hypocrisy behind Canada’s magnanimous brand. There is simply no nuance to Ottawa’s statements: it fully stands behind the forces that are destroying hospitals, uprooting hundreds of thousands, and espousing genocidal rhetoric.

The Manitoba government can expect opposition to each move it makes to enhance worker rights. Nevertheless, it should embrace labour issues as critical to the future of our province and our country. In so doing, New Democrats will earn support from the workers who put them into office, as well as the wider population who understand that rising inequality is not the way forward.

Israel taught the Palestinians to communicate in the primitive howl of hatred, war, death and annihilation. But it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control.

Israel strictly controls Gaza’s land borders, airspace and coastal zones with a combination of conventional military hardware and high-tech surveillance devices. It has also enforced a harsh import and export blockade since 2008. As Morgan Duchesney argues, the human costs of Israel’s brutal occupation always meant that a terrible retaliation by Hamas was inevitable.

It feels like 1939. A far-right regime is in the early stages of killing potentially hundreds of thousands of people or more. But instead of debating whether or not to enter the war, the ‘Allies’ are sending weapons and aid to that same regime—Israel—that is mobilizing its military to carry out a genocide, and criminalizing those at home who would speak out.

In the end, Zionism has destroyed two peoples, the Palestinians and the Jews. But tonight we must all vow to do whatever is necessary to save the Palestinian people and restore their national rights. Forging a shared and inclusive and egalitarian state and society sounds absurd tonight, even a cruel, inappropriate joke. But that is where we must go.

Nothing excuses the murder of innocent civilians. But if that is true for Hamas, it is also true for the IDF. The numbers of dead prior to Hamas’s violent incursion speak volumes. Palestinians who live in Gaza and in the West Bank have been systematically murdered by a state that is determined to cleanse its lands of Palestinians and build a nation only for the Jews. Who will stop Israel?

Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the UN reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.