Sawant Stands in Solidarity With Kneecap, Bob Vylan, Palestine Action, and All Antiwar Protestors

By Kshama Sawant, independent socialist antiwar pro-worker candidate for Washington state’s ninth Congressional district

Both the Starmer government in Britain and the Trump administration the U.S. represent the interests of the billionaire class that is profiting from the genocide in Gaza and the brutal occupation. Both of these governments, along with the Democratic Party, have blood on their hands and are fully complicit. We need mass strike action and civil disobedience by the international working class to bring this genocide and the war machine to a grinding halt. 

Workers Strike Back and I stand in solidarity with music groups Kneecap and Bob Vylan, organizations like Palestine Action, and all activists internationally facing draconian retaliation for speaking out against the genocide in Gaza.

Both Kneecap and Bob Vylan used their Glastonbury stage — which had the attention of a record-breaking 23 million people internationally — to condemn the genocide and make a historic call for international solidarity with the Palestinian people. Both consciously undertook major risks to their careers, which is more than most labor movement leaders or self-described “progressive” Democratic politicians have done in the United States. Palestine Action is a nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action organization whose activists have similarly carried out courageous actions.

It is utterly scandalous, and a betrayal of the fighting, working-class history of the British Labour Party, that Prime Minister Kier Starmer and his party have launched a criminal investigation on both Bob Vylan and Kneecap and charged Kneecap’s Mo Chara with supporting terrorism. Britain needs a new party for working people, as do wewe do here in the United States.

Yesterday, 385 Members of Parliament in the British House of Commons voted to designate Palestine Action as a terrorist group. Only 26 MPs voted against this motion, of whom only nine are Labor Party MPs. If this becomes law, membership in or expressing support for Palestine Action will become a criminal offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

In the U.S., the Trump regime has aggressively revoked Bob Vylan’s American travel visa. 

Both the Starmer government in Britain and the Trump administration the U.S. represent the interests of the billionaire class that is profiting from the genocide in Gaza and the brutal occupation. Both of these governments, along with the Democratic Party, have blood on their hands and are fully complicit. We need mass strike action and civil disobedience by the international working class to bring this genocide and the war machine to a grinding halt. 

Since 2008, the U.K. has sent weapons to the Israeli state worth at least $740 million. The funding has escalated specifically since the genocide began. Under Starmer, the British state approved $170 million in military equipment to Israel from October to December 2024 alone. 

The U.S. capitalist state, represented by Trump, the Republicans, and Democrats like my opponent, genocidal Congressman Adam Smith, have together sent hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel in the last decades, ramped up even more for this genocide, which began under Democratic President Biden.

In just the past month, more than 500 people have been killed and 4,000 injured in Gaza when they went to get food for their starving families and children. 

As some Israeli soldiers have themselves revealed, "it's a killing field.” Some have said that the Israeli state is ordering them “to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid.” 

This comes after over 400,000 people have been butchered since October 2023, according to estimates from the Medical Journal The Lancet.

The genocide in Gaza is the holocaust of the 21st century, and we urgently need mass protests, mass strikes, and mass civil disobedience to end it. No politician or political party who has supported it deserves one more working-class vote. We need to bring them down.