The Palestine flag has become embroiled in Britain’s culture war. The ruling class has many different avenues for creating division within the working class but its objective is always the same: keep the working class divided and looking in every direction – except up!
One of its current tactics is to demonise Islam and embolden reactionary movements while simultaneously funding social-democratic organisations and capitalist parties. Sounds strange but it is a tried and tested tactic to keep workers trapped and fighting one another within both sides of ‘acceptable’ political boundaries.
Palestine has suffered under Israeli aggression and occupation for decades. Showing support for the Palestinian struggle is a humane and necessary thing to do. Since 7 October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has escalated into a full-blown genocide against the Palestinian people, carried out with the political, financial and military support of Britain and the wider imperialist world. The Palestine flag represents resistance and has become the flag of an oppressed people fighting a just battle against occupation, colonialism and imperialism. Yet within Britain its symbolism of strength and survival has been tainted by becoming the identifying symbol of one faction in a domestic culture war.
The Flag of Resistance
Since October 2023 there have been demonstrations across Britain opposing the genocide and the British state’s support for Israel. In major cities such as Liverpool, where I live, there are regular protests, often every Sunday.
At first there was a massive swell of people attending. Large numbers from Arabic and Muslim communities marched alongside the many different colours of socialist, communist and anti-imperialist organisations. Everyday people who had never attended a political demonstration marched too. They had been moved by the horrific atrocities they had witnessed on their screens and feeds, and quite rightly felt compelled to march against what was clearly wrong – a genocide! For most of these people, carrying the Palestine flag was not about joining a political faction; it was a basic expression of humanity and solidarity with a people being slaughtered in front of the world.
In Liverpool, the demonstrations generally start at St Luke’s, the bombed-out church, before travelling down Bold Street and through the city centre to Derby Square. Once there, speeches are made, leaflets are distributed, and newspapers are sold. The marches were enthusiastic and served a purpose. They brought people onto the streets; they demonstrated the scale of public opposition and yielded a newfound solidarity amongst workers across cultures and pay grades. They offered an opportunity to reach people who had not previously been politically conscious, let alone active.
But as the months dragged on, the same demonstrations began to take on a different character; they became a ‘nuisance’ to workers. The same route was continually walked, the same slogans were repeated, and the same speeches were delivered to the same people. Activists who had campaigned against Israeli aggression for years were increasingly passing leaflets to one another and making speeches to people who already agreed with them. The demonstrations continued in this vein but the wider public participation began to decline. What had started as a mass expression of anger dwindled with the realisation that no one was listening and nothing was changing. Marches retreated back to familiar activist circles.
The symbolism of the Palestine flag had not changed; it still represented resistance and national liberation. What had changed was its interpretation and function within British politics: it increasingly became the uniform of a passive activist left who wore it as a badge of differentiation from an increasingly vocal anti-Muslim reaction. Instead of carrying the struggle into workplaces, housing estates and working-class communities, building class consciousness across working communities and throughout workplaces, and harnessing the outrage by giving it its proper political context as the same imperialist system of oppression against Palestinians and British workers, the left remained steadfast and silent within its safe spaces. The flag was flown, the slogans were shouted, and the pointless process of perpetual protest occurred week after week. The resistance represented by the flag remained real. The politics practised beneath it became increasingly performative.
The Reactionaries
Meanwhile, on the other side, lie the reactionary elements with their adopted flags: the butcher’s apron of the Union Jack and the St George’s Cross. Not symbols of resistance but badges of British capitalism and colonialism, flown across the world where the British empire has conquered and occupied. They represent the state, the monarchy, the armed forces and the ruling class. The gory glory of empire that built boundless bounty for British capitalists and misery for the masses at home and abroad. The reactionaries claim to oppose the state (for different reasons than we do) whilst still asserting bourgeois politics.
These people present themselves as rebels fighting against the establishment while marching beneath the establishment’s own flags. Their movement is cultivated by the very state they claim to despise. It is built around a manufactured fear that people from the Middle East, particularly Muslims, are invading Britain with bad intentions. We hear constant cries about invasions of ‘fighting-age men’ in dinghies, rape gangs and migrants receiving favourable treatment from the state. It is nonsense, but it has been repeated so relentlessly by the media machine controlled by that very same state, that some people are prepared to make it the defining political issue of their lives. They are victims too: pawns and foot soldiers who can’t see how they are cultivated and conditioned to divert their anger about declining material conditions away from the very class who must be responsible; the ruling class.
Instead they are incited to fly flags from lampposts and house windows or paint them onto roundabouts and refer to themselves as patriots. Patriots! A patriot is someone who loves their community and its people. It is someone who works for the betterment of their community and for the lives of those living within it. A patriot recognises their tribe and fights for it. How can the tribe of the working class ever be the very class that enslaves us?
There is nothing patriotic about frightening migrant families or making people feel unwelcome in the communities where they live. There is nothing rebellious about attacking Muslims while carrying the flag of the barbaric and murderous British state. The same state they defend has destroyed our industry, privatised our public services, reduced our wages and abandoned the very working-class communities where these people live.
They direct their anger towards migrants suffering from the same crisis, rather than the parasitical ruling class that’s exploiting them. They blame refugees for the destruction of their material conditions. They violently rage against Muslims while remaining loyal to the British state responsible for bombing and destabilising the countries in the Middle East that these people flee from.
The reactionaries dress obedience in the language of rebellion. They march beneath the symbols of their own rulers while believing themselves to be fighting against the system. If only they realised they too are victims of a clever class who will do whatever it takes to maintain their rule.
The Culture War
What has been created is two rival factions regularly finding themselves on opposite sides of an invisible line, shouting insults and well-used slogans at one another.
I have attended some of these protests and they just seem ludicrous. More pantomime than serious political action. People play their expected roles. The activist left flies the Palestine flag while the reactionaries respond with the Union Jack and St George’s Cross. Influencers move through the crowd looking for confrontations to film, hoping to create the next viral video. What should be class struggle is reduced to online content used to serve ongoing diversionary tactics.
The flags become markers. One faction carries the flag of an oppressed people resisting imperialism; the other carries the flag of the imperialist state itself. Yet both ultimately serve the same paymaster, which can only laugh at the effectiveness of the division it has created.
This culture war deliberately weakens the class struggle by making it appear alien to ordinary workers. Palestine becomes just another identity associated with ‘the left’, while British nationalism becomes the corresponding identity of ‘the right’. The substance of the struggle disappears: the genocide in Gaza, British imperialism, the interests of finance capital and Britain’s material support for Israel. Class struggle! They are all pushed aside, buried beneath useless arguments about flags, religion and national identity.
The Palestine flag and the fight against imperialism must be carried beyond the useless demonstrations and the professional leftist activists. The struggle must be taken into workplaces, trade unions, housing estates and working-class communities. Palestinian liberation must be connected to British imperialism and to the same capitalist system attacking workers at home.
The task is not to put the Palestine flag away. It is to rescue it from Britain’s culture-war circus and ensure that the politics beneath it are worthy of the resistance it represents. We must educate those who believe that the Union Jack or the St George’s Cross represents the workers. The banners of the bourgeoisie must fall alongside imperialism. Workers of the world unite!
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