I was there (at the demonstration)

Yesterday I went to my first Palestine demo in London since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza following the 7th October Hamas raids. The past week, or more, there has been a debate between the Tory leadership, in particular the home secretary Suella Braverman, and supporters of the march which have included the Royal British Legion and the police, who say things such as that the right to free assembly and expression were part of what British soldiers fought for in previous wars and that there was no evidence of any likelihood or intention of trouble from the organisers. Braverman and her supporters call the pro-Palestinian demonstrators a ‘mob’ and their demonstrations “hate marches” or “pro-Hamas” on the basis of a handful of unlawful or offensive posters which had been seen at previous demos, brought to the public’s and police’s attention by people who went looking and posted pictures of them online rather than by them having seen them first-hand. I was there for part of the march and I can say it certainly was not a “hateful mob”.

I came up from south-west London, and travelled to Victoria by rail and joined the march there, because getting to Hyde Park would have been more difficult as the march came down the same road the buses would otherwise have taken. (The District Line was closed, meaning coming straight in from the west was not possible.) The signs mostly said “free Palestine” or “Gaza: stop the massacre”; there were some home-made banners including one I saw that said “Israel kills kids like me”. A few trade unions had their banners; others simply waved Palestinian flags. There are a few pictures in circulation of banners depicting Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as coconuts (i.e. brown outside, white inside), of people wearing so-called Hamas headbands (green with the profession of faith on it) and of swastikas inside stars of David, and videos of people making the “Khaybar chant”, but these were a tiny minority, maybe a couple of dozen amid hundreds of thousands of people marching for freedom and against the slaughter of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. We marched over Vauxhall Bridge, down the west side of the Vauxhall gyratory where we heard a speech by Jeremy Corbyn, then on down Nine Elms Lane to where the main stage was, near the American embassy. I heard a speech by an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, some of whose family were killed in the ongoing massacres, but I left the demo at this point as I had to go and eat and did not want to be back home too late.

Politicians, including Sunak and Braverman but depressingly also Sadiq Khan, have issued statements in the aftermath that listed the few offensive banners and the thuggery of the far-right “counter-protesters” who attacked the police and broke through their lines near the Cenotaph earlier in the day. Braverman posted a thread on ‘X’ (Twitter) that talked of “violence and aggression from protesters and counter protesters” that led to multiple police injuries; she accused protesters (meaning the people on our march) of “antisemitism and other forms of racism together with the valorising of terrorism”, and concluded:

This can’t go on. Week by week, the streets of London are being polluted by hate, violence, and antisemitism. Members of the public are being mobbed and intimidated. Jewish people in particular feel threatened. Further action is necessary.

She does not state what the “further action” might be; however, it is reasonable to assume she means further restrictions on the right to hold demonstrations, other than those the government agrees with, which may or may not make it through the Commons if enough of the dwindling group of older Tories who like the idea of a free country rebel and vote against. Still, the people who think themselves to be liberals (connected to Harry’s Place, originally representative of the pro-war left in the 2000s but now nothing more than a Zionist blog that moans about Muslims constantly) who went round snapping pictures of offensive banners and then tagged the police are the people who also brought them to the attention of politicians, so I wonder if it bothers them that they contributed to making this less of a free country. Perhaps they think they will never have to demonstrate about anything.

Politicians are afraid to admit they got it wrong; the threats from the far right to ‘defend’ the Cenotaph were being made on social media throughout last week, while the record of several demonstrations against the Israeli genocide that did not turn violent spoke for itself, which is why the police did not ban the march given that it went nowhere near the Cenotaph and started after the Remembrance events had finished. Matthew Goodwin posted on Twitter a remark from an anonymous serving police officer that Braverman was right, moaning about “years of wokery and political correctness” and claiming that senior officers were afraid of being accused of racism if “they fully enforce the law against pro-Palestinian protestors”. The fact is that senior officers knew who the thugs were and who were more likely to attack them or start fights with members of the public (indeed, there is a lot of footage of these racists attacking Muslims and others carrying Palestine demo paraphernalia at railway stations yesterday evening). As for this anonymous source, he sounds like the sort who keeps getting exposed for misconduct, everything from taking pictures of murdered women and mocking them on police WhatsApp groups, to abusing their partners or shielding abusive fellow officers from justice, to rape and murder; exactly the type of rogue officer that everyone agrees the police has to free itself from, everyone that is except for the rogue officers themselves.

Some people are asking if it bothers me to be sharing a demonstration with “those sorts of people”. Besides the fact that I did not see any of this at the demo, only online, the simpler answer is that ordinarily I would not, but that extreme situations like this one change things, much as we would not normally hold an anti-austerity demonstration on Remembrance weekend, unless (for example) legislation was due to pass in the next week. In this case, another thousand or more innocent people might have been killed by next Saturday. We’re dealing with a savage bombing campaign that has killed (by Israel’s own estimate) at least 11,500 people, not counting those trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings, which has destroyed hospitals, where journalists, doctors and their families have been targeted, where the leaders of the nation responsible have openly used the language of genocide, where leaders of the “free world” freely give them arms, mouth platitudes about “humanitarian pauses” while insisting that the month-long civilian-targeted bombing campaign is “self-defence” and smearing and threatening to criminalise those who protest against it. It’s not the time to be too picky about who your friends are; let’s remember who we allied with to defeat Hitler.

If there’s one criticism I have to make of the demonstration, it was the lack of any emphasis on the arming of Israel. The posters were the usual “free Palestine” stuff and the slogans were that and “from the river to the sea”, “we are all Palestinians” and (new this year) “we charge you with genocide” but despite the end point being the US embassy, nothing was said about where Israel gets its weapons from. We have seen activists target the actual weapons manufacturers and workers refuse to load ships containing weapons for Israel, so there is awareness about the issue, but it didn’t filter down to the streets where people are shouting the same old slogans. It’s time to think up some new ones, folks.