Could Gaza be a defining issue of the 2026 election?

SINCE October of 2023, Israel has waged what Amnesty International described last month as a “live-streamed genocide” in Gaza, with the world as its audience. Never before in history has a crime of this scale unfolded with such immediate visibility; to deny the evidence of its daily realities or their cost in blood – over 51,000 dead, according to Palestinian health authorities – would seem to be pointless as well as perverse.

The denial continues, regardless: since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 that provided its pretext, Israel has maintained that it is merely acting in the interests of its own security, which apparently required the deaths of over 17,400 children. As a rule, the Israeli government cares little for international opinion, but nonetheless refuses to give ground on any language that would accurately articulate the horrors it continues to inflict. Israel, we are told, is not engaged in genocide, or colonialism, or ethnic cleansing. Ignore all evidence to the contrary.

The latest such evidence arrived last week, when the Israeli cabinet approved plans to capture the entire Gaza strip and impose a military presence there indefinitely, only hours after the Israeli military confirmed it would be calling up tens of thousands more reservists. The plan would expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the north of Gaza and confine them to encampments; five to six thousand families would be imprisoned in each camp, guarded by private security companies and reliant upon miles-long treks to pick up food parcels, issued only to those willing to submit to facial recognition. As Al Jazeera observed, “It is unclear how the rest of the population – possibly some 1.5 million people – will eat.”

Whilst Israeli officials clinically described this new operation as the “capturing of the strip and the holding of territories”, others within the Israeli government have been less circumspect. “We will stop being afraid of the word ‘occupation’,” gloated Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich. 

In response to the new plan, the UK Government last week released a cursory statement, noting that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, after discussing the matter during a meeting with French president Emmanuel Macron, expressed “deep concern at recent developments and agreed a renewed peace process was required.” The people of Gaza, no doubt, gave a collective sigh of relief.

“Deep concern” is something of a personal brand for Starmer, a man who could affect a pose of studious perturbation if asked whether he wants fries with that. As he has repeatedly demonstrated over the genocide in Gaza, Starmer’s “deep concerns” are an end in themselves – he expresses them in order to show that he has them, and nothing further comes of it.

First Minister John Swinney meanwhile stated on Twitter/X that “there must be no illegal occupation in Gaza”, while SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn called on Starmer to cease all UK arms sales to Israel and recognise the state of Palestine – both demands which should, by any sane reckoning, count as the bare minimum. Nonetheless, Starmer’s government has never encountered a low bar it could not valiantly limbo under, as reflected by the fact this week will see it face a High Court challenge from several human rights groups seeking to establish the UK Government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes through the sale of F-35 fighter jet parts used in airstrikes on Gaza.

Moreover, to significantly change tack on Gaza would be to fold in the face of pressure from the Left, which in the Starmerite worldview is unthinkable; Starmer’s authority (such as it is), the raison d’etre of his entire leadership, rests on him acting as a repudiation to Corbynism. His need to assert this as performatively as possible undergirds some of his government’s most unpopular actions and policies. As a result, ‘pushing Labour to the left’ is the kind of endeavour that would prompt Sisyphus to tell you to find a more productive hobby.

Gaza is the most recent manifestation of this tendency. As with the post-Biden Democratic leadership in the US, a perception exists amongst the Labour Right which Frankensteined Starmer into being that anger over Gaza allows the sensible grown-ups to emphatically distance themselves from the kind of unhinged radicals who think that the systematic extermination of a people should elicit more than a furrowed brow.

The SNP’s stance may appear principled in comparison with that of the UK Government, but then, so would the House of Borgia. Gaza is one of the few remaining areas where the SNP is in their comfort zone, which is to say it is an issue where their position costs them nothing. We have seen this before: for a while, it was the fashion for the SNP to spill much rhetoric on Catalonia; later, it would discover a passion for the plight of Ukraine. Just as in these cases, a cynic might take the impression that Gaza is a priority for the party only when it appears in the headlines.

The redoubtable, unflagging international movement against the genocide has, to its enormous credit, shown no such wandering enthusiasm; more than any governmental response in the world, it is this movement which has shown itself to be at the forefront of opposing the slaughter of the Palestinian people and identifying the crimes of the Israeli state. And yet, as is often the case with UK anti-war campaigns, this predominately extra-parliamentary movement has collided with the grim reality of Westminster, within which there is no alternative government in waiting, ready and willing to implement a fundamentally different approach to Gaza, Israel and Palestinian statehood.

In lieu of that possibility, it is worth asking to what if any extent the pro-Palestinian movement in Scotland should focus its efforts over the next year on making Gaza a defining issue of the 2026 Holyrood election. Could it be done, and if so, what might the consequences be?

On the face of it, the question seems obvious: an election which does not consider an ongoing genocide to be a major concern is not one reflective of a healthy democracy or body politic. Those who have campaigned to end the suffering of Palestine may find it difficult to believe how the world can think of anything else. As with the rest of that world, Scotland has watched Gaza starve, burn, freeze, bleed and die; we cannot pretend otherwise.

Should the issue be forced, we may anticipate some blowback from those in the Scottish media who take harrumphing offence at the very notion of any within our devolved legislature concerning themselves with international matters; with all powers pertaining to foreign policy reserved to Westminster, this current of mainstream unionism takes the view that Scottish politics should be as isolated from the wider world as Brigadoon. We are fortunate, at least, that this cohort is in no position to tell the Scottish people what they are permitted to care about.

There is precedent: anger over the Iraq war came to dominate UK politics for years, and had the SNP not staked out its opposition to the war so definitively, it is debatable whether their election in 2007 would have transpired. The idea that public anger over a criminal conflict can be mobilised, and made itself felt within the chambers of Scotland’s parliament, is by no means hypothetical.

There is, however, the practical question: if Gaza were to become one of the defining issues of the 2026 election, if a candidate’s position on the matter became the deciding factor for enough of the electorate that no candidate could ignore them, what practical impact would that have?

Domestically, elevating Gaza could potentially expose a vulnerability in Reform, which has carefully avoided the subject thus far, perhaps because they have made their own calculations and concluded that disengagement is the only approach that works well for them. At the very least, placing Gaza front and centre renders it impossible for those who endorse or accept genocide to do so silently and without notice.

Many within the pro-Palestinian movement in Scotland may quite rightly have no interest in being utilised as a means of keeping the SNP in power, particularly if the party persists in only commenting on Gaza when it makes the front page. The challenge facing any effort to elevate the salience of Gaza’s plight in 2026 would be to make it a test which cannot be passed with worthy rhetoric alone.

Those who have followed the brutality unleashed upon the American pro-Palestinian movement by both the Biden and Trump administrations will be painfully aware of what a political environment looks like that is hostile to those who oppose genocide. Yet Kamala Harris learned to her cost that silent acquiescence to that genocide does not mix well with electioneering. It is not unthinkable to suggest that any politician, in Scotland or beyond, should be forced to reckon with Gaza’s suffering, and what must be done to end it.

It should not need pointed out, but the people of Gaza will only benefit if Israel is actually impeded from killing and subjugating them – all else is window dressing. At present, anything approaching that can only delivered by a dramatic change in the UK’s position, which in turn could only be achieved if the UK Government were convinced it was under existential threat should it maintain the current course. 

Successive UK governments have, with some reason, proven stubbornly resistant to the idea that what takes place in the Scottish political arena is relevant to their own future. An outcome in 2026 shaped by Gaza would, in one form another, need to be considerable  – even unprecedented – to break that trend.

It would be naïve, however, not to recognise that both the Scottish Government and Holyrood have a poor track record of compelling their opposite numbers in London to do much of anything – indeed, it fundamental to much unionist thinking that it should be impossible for Scotland to do, and that no democratic outcome on any issue should threaten the British state’s balance of power. 

The great Neal Ascherson once proposed that Scotland should act as though it were already independent, and that “if some project is outwith the terms of the Scotland Act, we should go quietly but determinedly ahead as if Scotland were a sovereign country until Westminster physically stops it.” 

In the years since Ascherson offered this instruction, we have unfortunately seen multiple examples of the UK Government doing exactly that, from Brexit to Gender Reform, each of which have seen the Scottish Government grow warier of future confrontation. 

Gaza is not the only reason Holyrood should find its nerve, but it is hardly to think of one more pressing. In August of 2023, MSPs voted down a Tory attempt to ban public bodies from boycotting foreign nations – a flagrant bid to strangle any possible application of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in Scotland. It a post-2026 chamber was to rediscover its appetite for a fight, codifying BDS on a national scale wouldn’t be the worst way to start.

The barriers to developing the kind of anti-colonial and distinctly Scottish foreign policy would nevertheless endure as long as the Union remains duct-taped together. If the options that left for any Scottish parliament animated by Gaza are largely symbolic – such as recognising a Palestinian state, as former First Minister Humza Yousaf has repeatedly urged – that should prompt some reflection about the limits and the power of symbolic action.   

In 2013, a majority of MSPs rightly voted to commemorate the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and to recognise it as such – an act of honesty still seemingly beyond the UK Government. Having demonstrated its capacity to identify and name genocide as such, the Scottish Parliament may wish to do so in the case of Gaza a little sooner than a century after the fact. Stating the truth is never without some power of its own.

Also true, sadly, is that neither the UK nor the United States, the support of which Israel’s colonialist project depends upon, will contemplate seriously threatening that project, because colonialism, drenched in the blood of Gaza, is the means by which Israel’s apartheid system is maintained; without that system, the ethnostate could not persist, and Israel as we know it would cease to be.

As with Apartheid South Africa, there is every likelihood that the UK and US will cling to their material support for Israel in defiance of worldwide condemnation, right up until the point that support becomes untenable. And, as with Apartheid, it is our responsibility to hasten the moment of that untenability, whether on the streets or in the polling booth, by every means available and by any means necessary.

At the risk of stating the obvious, a Scottish parliamentary election will not bring that about and deliver Palestinian liberation (though feel free to prove me wrong). Yet the exercise of democracy demands that we assert what matters to us. Failing to demonstrate that the agony of Gaza and its people matter, however and wherever we can, would make us complicit in the live-streamed genocide we have all borne witness to.

See also:

Palestinian Hospitals Call for Urgent Help – Abed Qusini

A statement on writing poetry during a genocide – Mohammed Moussa

Cancer Nursing Under Occupation: A Conversation with Gerry O’Hare – Uma Nada-Rajah

The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth – Jim Aitken

Israeli Embassy’s Interferes in UK Palestine Action Case – Mike Small