It is 400 days since the Hamas attack on Israel, killing hundreds with hundreds more taken as hostage. “A day when the world united in grief for those innocent Israelis who lost their life.”

As we well know the Israel/Palestine conflict has claimed many souls over previous decades. Since 2005 and prior to October 2023, 4,006 people, of whom 168 were Israeli and 3,838 Palestinian, lost their lives. Every life lost is a life too many. But the scale and disproportion of the suffering since is beyond comprehension.

In the past 400 days, at least 40,000 Palestinians, half of them women and children, have been killed at the hands of the Israeli military. The record number killed in Gaza does not include nearly 20,000 people who are either unidentified, missing, or buried in the rubble. It is estimated that the true death toll could be over 186,000, taking indirect deaths into account.

Let’s call it for what it is: mass murder. War crimes genocide. The idea that the IDF actions of the past400 days can be described as legitimate self-defence is as ridiculous as it is horrifying. Most of the world sees that and this includes most of the citizens of the UK. It does not yet appear to include our government.

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The UK has called for a ceasefire but done nothing material to deliver it. The same or even worse can be said of the current US administration. And there is potentially even worse to come.

While there is some prospect that the new Trump administration’s “America First” policy might limit direct US intervention in the region, Israel may well end up with an even freer hand than it was given by Biden.

Since the invasion of Lebanon and the exchange of hostilities between Iran and Israel, the prospect of a wholesale Middle East conflict has increased but there is very little effect on changing the approach of those Western governments who are so palpably out of step with the rest of the world.

Last week, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer voiced further concern at the bills that Israel’s parliament has passed banning the operation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNWRA) from acting in the Gaza Strip or the occupied West Bank.

This follows the withdrawal of aid to UNWRA by the USA and the withdrawal, before it was later reinstated, of aid from the UK too. Most of the attention to the fate of UNWRA has focused on the immense increase in death and human suffering that will ensue. However, there is a still deeper and more existential issue at play here.

UNRWA was created in 1948 as a direct response to the creation of the state of Israel. The Nakba – or catastrophe – that ensued caused around 750,000 people to be expelled from their homes or made to flee through Zionist paramilitaries and then the Israeli military. Palestinians were massacred, with over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighbourhoods depopulated.

UNWRA’s role was to support the hundreds of thousands and now millions of Palestinian refugees created by partition. Thus, UNRWA is indelibly written into the history of the creation of the state of Israel. It is also crucial to the so-called two states solution to which our and other governments cling.

To this effect, it is completely unsurprising that the Israeli government, hell-bent on the destruction of any hint of a viable Palestinian state, should seek to destroy the relief agency built on the need to support its people. But where does this leave those, including the UK, who purport to support a different future?

Given the destruction of Gaza and the unfettered expansion of illegal settlements replete with settler violence and oppression, how much further proof is required that Israel, our so-called ally, is set on a course which diverges from the peace and mutual security that our government at least purports to support.

The truth is that sorrowful words about the scale of killing in Gaza, and empty utterances about support for a two states solution, are meaningless while we continue to arm Israel and categorise their carnage as legitimate self-defence.

We refuse to sell arms to some 30 different countries around the world including most of the countries – with the shameful exception of Turkey and Saudi Arabia – who are major players in the Middle East.

The recent suspension of 30 out of over 300 arms licenses to Israel barely scratches the surface of what it required.

Given that the UK only provides 1% of Israeli military equipment, a full embargo would be a symbolic rather than a practical brake on the Israeli government’s action, yet the symbolism and diplomatic impact would matter.

We think our Labour government needs to go much further than this though.

Until it begins to comply with international law including dismantling illegal settlements in Palestinian territory, Israel should be subject to far wider sanction, beginning with any imports from Israel whose provenance is from illegally occupied Palestinian lands but going well beyond this too.

The last time UK and US foreign policy was as far out of step with those of the international community was in the 1970s and 1980s when much of the world united to isolate South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Our governments were on the wrong side of history, but most of our people were not. Civil society, trade unions and political campaigners allied to pressure for political change and practical support through boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. The people ultimately won the day. Companies who were complicit were named, shamed and boycotted. The rest is history.

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A poll earlier this year found that 55% of people support the UK ending the sale of arms to Israel for the duration of the conflict in Gaza, with only 13% wanting to see them continue.

Among Labour voters that figure rises to 74%. It is not difficult as trade unionists for us to judge where the views of the majority of our members lie on this issue.

Later this week, the STUC will gather to specifically discuss how Scottish trade unions can continue to exact pressure on our politicians and enact an economic and cultural boycott to shift the dial towards a ceasefire and progress towards peace and justice.

We will ratchet up the pressure on the new government to act to bring about peace. We cannot sit back and allow the people, let alone the idea of Palestine, to die.

Roz Foyer is the general secretary of the STUC