Right, so today is the anniversary of the Nakba, the Catastrophe as it translates to, the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians immediately after the state of Israel came into existence, beginning exactly as it has carried on ever since, but instead of being a moment of reflection and being one of history’s never again moments, an institution supposedly there to acknowledge history and bring it to life, instead became the venue for a party, for a celebration, because for some the Nakba is not what they remember, but instead they celebrate the birth of that nation that has now been enacting genocide for 19 months, has held Gaza under illegal blockade for the last 18 years, has illegally occupied the Palestinian territories for the last 58 years, and of course it is 77 years since the Nakba, but instead, its candle blowing out time, happy 77th birthday to Israel.
Despite trying to keep the event secret, protesters descended upon it, led by Energy Embargo For Palestine, the British Museum’s ties to Israel themselves coming to light, but so did the UK government’s actions in Israel, confirmed by a defence minister in attendance, proving beyond doubt what many of us have been saying for months, so she might not be thanked for what might well have been a rather large gaffe.
Right, so while for many this is a time of solemn remembrance as Israel continues its genocide of Gaza, others were celebrating behind closed doors last night, lauding the birth of the entity carrying out said genocide whilst they were partying.
The British Museum, like most British museum’s sadly filled with items, some at least, that can be regarded as ill-gotten artifacts steeped in colonial legacy—hosted a celebration marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. For Palestinians and millions globally, however, this date does not symbolise liberation or independence. It marks the Nakba—the catastrophe—when over 750,000 Palestinians were violently uprooted from their homes by Israeli forces in 1948. That the museum would not only host this event but attempt to do so in secret speaks volumes, that they might be celebrating, but they don’t want you to know about it
The guest list that gathered within the museum’s halls reads like a rogues’ gallery of Britain’s reactionary pro-Israel elite. Labour defence minister Maria Eagle delivered the keynote speech. Also in attendance was Tory leader, for now at least still clinging on Kemi Badenoch and both Nigel Farage and Richard Tice of Reform UK were there too, just to remind people that Reform UK are not any different. It was wall to wall right-wing authoritarianism on show. The entertainment—if you can call it that—was provided by Jimmy Carr, who I find one of the most irritating and unfunny so-called comedians going and overseeing the whole affair was Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s rancis Ambassador to the UK, whose hardline Zionist views and open disdain for Palestinian rights I have covered on many a video now. She shouldn’t be compering, she should have been put on a plane back to Tel Aviv years ago. But it’s part of the speech that Maria Eagle gave, that has raised eyebrows, so get a load of this:
Apart from the level of background noise showing how few people were evidently paying the blindest bit of attention to the droning voice of Eagle, there’s no mistaking her admission that the UK has indeed been carrying out intelligence flights for Israel. It was well known already, but the government has refused to admit it repeatedly, yet now it comes from the mouth of a literal defence minister and one who’s portfolio also happens to include arms sales.
According to Declassified UK, who exposed the surveillance flights the UK was carrying out, since October 2023, the UK’s Royal Air Force has conducted over 500 surveillance flights over Gaza on Israel’s behalf. That’s up to march of this year. These missions, which originated from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, were never publicised by the UK government—until Maria Eagle let slip confirmation during her remarks there, so that admission has now tied Britain more firmly than ever to Israel’s military campaign, erasing any sense of plausible deniability Starmer’s regime might have been clinging to.
Action on Armed Violence, the AOAV, in collaboration with Declassified UK, has been tracking these flights, which are publicly available, every single one of them. Their research shows a pattern of military collaboration that directly implicates the UK in Israel’s war crimes, making Maria Eagle’s comments not just a diplomatic gaffe, but a clear confession.
It is grotesque enough that such an event as this occurred. What makes it worse is the secretive nature of its organisation. The British Museum, which made no public announcement of the celebration, took steps to hide the event from the public and you can understand why they would do that. They knew the optics. Hosting a party for a state accused of genocide, amid ongoing slaughter, in a publicly funded cultural institution, would provoke righteous fury. And it did.
Despite their efforts to suppress the truth, hide the event, word leaked, and protestors arrived. Spearheading the demonstration was Energy Embargo For Palestine, the EEFP, a direct-action group demanding an end to fossil fuel exports to Israel. They have particular beef with BP for enabling the transfer of oil from Azerbaijan to Israel. EEFP’s mission is quite clear and that is to cut off the lifelines of industry and finance that enable Israeli apartheid. Their protest was supported by Palestinian Youth Movement, Workers For a Free Palestine, Sisters Uncut, Queers For Palestine, and Artists and Culture Workers London—a big turnout, a powerful coalition of grassroots organisations that brought the street outside the British Museum to life with chants, banners, and a large presence of anti-genocide protest.
But the protesters were met with an overbearing police presence too—because of course they were, it’s a protest, its a familiar scene in today’s Britain, where protest rights are increasingly curtailed in the name of “public order.” Officers corralled activists, blocked access, and ensured that the museum’s elite guests remained unbothered by public dissent, though they did have to enter around the back. Reports also suggest that the counter-protest organised by Stop The Hate and Our Fight UK, on the side of the Zionists, had been in collaboration with the Met Police and the Israeli Embassy to ensure there was a large police presence and so they may inadvertently have drawn even more attention to the event.
So why is the British Museum prepared to hold such an appalling event then? Well, the British Museum has its own history of complicity. In December 2023, the museum inked a £50 million deal with BP as part of a decade-long “masterplan” of mutual co-operation and support. BP, in turn, is deeply entangled in Israeli colonialism as I alluded to a moment ago. BP has supplied oil to Israel through routes from Azerbaijan. Here’s an excerpt from Middle East Eye on it:
‘The BP-operated Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline has emerged as a major provider of oil supplies for Israel's military, with crude exports spiking since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023.
The pipeline stretches 1,770km and carries oil from Azerbaijan to Georgia and Turkey. From the Ceyhan Terminal in southern Turkey the oil is distributed to international markets, including Israel.
Since Israel launched its war on the enclave, Azerbaijan has seen crude oil exports to Israel increase to around 1.3 million tonnes per month, a sharp increase from the 1.2 million tonnes it exported throughout all of 2022.’
I’ve often mentioned Turkish hypocrisy when it comes to their criticism of Israel, because they could stop that oil at Ceyhan, if they really wanted to do something about it.
Turkey aside though, BP is enabling the Zionist regime’s energy security amid its brutal siege on Gaza and the British Museum have effectively supported them in this. In fact, in December 2024, Palestinian human rights groups launched legal action against BP for aiding genocide through the facilitation of oil transfers, a case that is still ongoing.
EEFP knows this history well. In February 2024, they occupied the British Museum in a landmark protest, demanding that BP be dropped as a sponsor and that all cultural ties with Israel be severed. Their action shone a spotlight on how museums, are now platforms for whitewashing neocolonial crimes, too many of the artifacts they may be displaying have been gained in much the same way.
In that sense, the event being held at the British Museum ought to be less surprising, it was more than a party. It was a ritual of imperial affirmation. A moment for Britain’s political and corporate elite to declare their allegiance to the Zionist project, to reaffirm their support for Israeli supremacy, and to suppress the truth of Palestinian suffering. The Nakba never ended—it has simply evolved. The original expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was not a historical aberration but the foundational act of a settler colonial state. Today, in the rubble of Gaza, that colonialism just continues, armed and abetted by allies still today, just as it was then, like the UK.
Nowhere was this complicity clearer than in the remarks made by Tzipi Hotovely, who praised the UK for “standing shoulder to shoulder” with Israel in the face of what she claimed were “Iran-linked terror plots.” A public expression of gratitude for the UK’s military assistance, a pat on the back by the Zionist entity, for its intelligence-sharing and political cover and it must be noted that her comment came just days before the UK is due to meet with Iranian officials to discuss nuclear diplomacy—making the UK’s role as an “honest broker” in such talks frankly even more farcical at this point than they already were.
Hotovely’s framing deliberately conflates Palestinian resistance with Iranian terrorism, casting Israel as a perpetual victim and the UK as its protector and of course it is all part of that broader strategy of dehumanising Palestinians, legitimising collective punishment, and ensuring that any act of resistance is framed as “terrorism,” regardless of the context or international law.
And what of the UK government? Maria Eagle’s presence and remarks are par for the course. They reflect Keir Starmer’s wholesale capitulation to Zionist lobbying and his party’s sharp ever rightward drift. Under Starmer, Labour has purged pro-Palestinian voices, has overseen anti-Zionism punished as antisemitism, and consistently voted to support arms exports to Israel, even amid overwhelming evidence of war crimes and now they’re in court over that too.
By legitimising Israel’s genocidal actions, by aiding its war effort through surveillance, and by celebrating its founding in an institution arguably built on stolen artifacts at least in part and doing dodgy deals with immoral oil companies, the UK is an enabler of it all.
That the establishment tried to play this event down, shows they know how damaging such an event is, yet they still take part in it. It reveals a UK government not merely indifferent to Palestinian suffering but actively complicit in it, a cultural institution corrupted by fossil fuel money and pro-Israel lobbying, and a political class determined to maintain colonial hierarchies under a different flag.
Not everyone is having it though. From Energy Embargo For Palestine to Workers for a Free Palestine and despite the threat of police intervention and persecution, protest keeps growing. They understand what is at stake—not just for Palestine, but for all of us, because the systems that enables genocide abroad—from corporate greed, state surveillance, militarised policing—are the same systems that impoverish, surveil, and suppress people at home too.
Politicians and other guests at this event deserve to be named and shamed and we, the public, must take a stand not only in solidarity with Palestine, but against the global structures of oppression that this celebration so shamelessly upheld.
The 77th anniversary of the Nakba is not a day to celebrate. It is a day to mourn and to remember, but also to resist.
Not everything has gone Israel’s way though. Right now Benjamin Netanyahu might be keen on invading Gaza, but with a new study having shown 1 in 8 IDF soldiers now suffering from PTSD to such a degree as to be unfit for duty, the recruitment problems Israel has faced are now becoming insurmountable. Get all the details of that story, to cheer you up a bit in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you haven’t done so already so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new daily content as well as spreading the word and helping to support the channel at the same time which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working class people and I will hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.