It was hard to know what the London Israeli counter protest thought it was doing. Laughing behind a heartrending banner saying ‘Bring them Home Now’ was one thing: people behave oddly in the face of horror. But enthusiastically waving the flags of a government starving, bombing, imprisoning, torturing, maiming, and burning people alive, while shouting playground taunts through a megaphone, to a soundtrack of Bob Marley?
Unlike the Maccabi Tel Aviv football supporters who recently rampaged through Amsterdam, they looked perfectly normal, even respectable, these 150 odd people. And yet the dimension they added to the huge London march for Palestine on Saturday November 2nd was surreal. It’s possible to understand those who still cling to the beautiful myths of the state of Israel; the sanctuary to which Holocaust survivors fled, even though around a third of those still surviving are living there in conditions of shocking poverty and isolation. Children have been born there, forced into the military there, lived there, killed for it, died there. A homeland founded on death and dispossession is a homeland nonetheless.
But who can now say they don’t know what the government of this US satrapy is doing, and who can say they support it, without being obviously psychopathic? Without going to Tel Aviv, here, in a small, barricaded corner next to Vauxhall Bridge, was the opportunity to find out, and unfortunately, it was, obviously, people driven beyond human empathy by something – fear, nihilism, racism, guilt, sadism, revenge lust, desperation, tragedy: who can tell? “They’re probably paid” said a friend of mine.
Prominent commentators and politicians have long demonised these vast, peaceful marches as antisemitic ‘hate marches’, and indeed, the hate was here: while sneering and jeering at all the 100,000 or so passing marchers, the counter protest’s shrieks and howls rose to an incoherent crescendo as the Jewish Bloc marchers, who included descendants of Holocaust survivors, appeared. This is not, as Torah Jews in the West, or the ultra-Orthodox Jews beaten and humiliated by the state police in Tel Aviv, or Israeli peace institutions such as B’Tselem, or Breaking the Silence, or Israeli conscientious objectors, can attest, about religion or nationality, or Judaism, at all, of course.
Such a sad, disturbing spectacle aside, the 21st London march against genocide was somewhere no-one wanted to be: even the third march had felt like a stretch too far; as though something else in the communal contract had been shattered. Poll after poll over the last year has shown only tiny minorities of the UK population are against an immediate ceasefire, or against suspending arms sales to Israel. The revelation that a change of UK government has done precisely nothing to alleviate the horror, instead adding more fiddling with words, while, against all international laws and humanity, cities and people burn, did not, however, seem to diminish the spirit of resistance.
I was helping to steward the London march: a line of us holding hands in front of the barricades and the counter protest; standing between it and the marchers they were trying to provoke; protecting the marchers from anything more than lame insults, and the triumphant Israeli tunes which replaced Bob Marley. ‘Tel Aviv! Tel Aviv!’ yodelled the sound system, as the waving Israeli flags conjured images of thousands of small, dead bodies, of hospitals, schools, homes, lands razed to rubble, of prisoners stripped and marched and disappeared; of traumatised, suicidal IDF soldiers; of the Israeli hostages whose families have been fighting their government for a ceasefire since October 7th.
Sure, the marchers responded: their expressions of solidarity, determination and rejection changing to almost universal revulsion when the counter protest came into view. Otherwise, out of 100,000 people, the Jewish Chronicle had discovered one marcher ‘ranting’ about ‘Synagogues of Satan’. Two marchers were arrested, the JC also reported the Metropolitan police claiming, ‘after being observed carrying a placard suspected of expressing support for a proscribed organisation’. Certainly, one young Muslim woman, terrified and crying, had been arrested, dragged out of the crowd by police at the end of the march, held on her own behind shutters in a car park, and then driven off in a police van, for a placard saying ‘If you’re not enraged, you’re not informed’ on one side, and ‘Resistance is not terrorism’ on the other. She was later released without charge.
Since then, of course, the counter protest’s less middle class, uninhibited side has been on public view, at least on social media, attacking Dutch citizens, tearing down Palestinian flags, disrupting a minute’s silence for the victims of the Valencia floods with whistles, jeers and flares, and chanting ‘Fuck the Arabs’, among witticisms about schools not being open in Gaza because ‘all the children are dead’. Children aged 5 – 9 years old are the age group most represented among the dead in Gaza, a recent UN study has found. Almost 70 percent of victims are women and children.
A young Dutch reporter filmed the Maccabi gang grabbing metal poles and planks of wood, before they roamed the streets. ‘They began attacking houses of people in Amsterdam with Palestinian flags, so that’s actually where the violence started’ Amsterdam council member Jazie Veldhuyzen told Al Jazeera. ‘As a reaction, Amsterdammers mobilised themselves and countered the attacks that started on Wednesday by the Maccabi hooligans’.
The prime minister of the UK retweeted its foreign secretary’s response to this: he was standing ‘with Israeli citizens and Jewish people across the world’. Other world leaders, including Biden, joined the UK to condemn these ‘anti-semitic attacks’. The Israeli government, mainstream news sources, Western politicians and the UK Daily Telegraph described this as, or compared it to, a ‘pogrom’; for those unaware of the origins of the word, it was used to describe a wave of attacks which ‘raped and murdered their Jewish victims and looted their property’ in pre and post Tsarist Russia.
‘Chilling scenes in Amsterdam remind us of an ancient evil’, the Telegraph explained. If you’d only watched the BBC you would have been horrified on behalf of the Maccabi supporters and, by extension, on behalf of anyone Jewish. Some Maccabi supporters were attacked, at least one reportedly thrown into a canal. Four people are being held in custody. Overall, five people, of unknown nationality, were taken to hospital, and later released. Meanwhile Sky News deleted a report which showed and analysed the timeline of Maccabi violence, re-edited it to include the words ‘anti-semitic violence’, and then deleted it again.
The Israeli government continues its genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Attacks in the West Bank are following a similar path. Lebanon is being destroyed, block by block, village by village. Another UK national march is planned in London for the 30th November. The UK Trades Union Congress, which passed a unanimous motion in September demanding an end to all arms trade with Israel, and reiterating support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is encouraging a Workplace Day of Action on November 28th in support of an immediate ceasefire.
Meanwhile, on the 8th November, a week after the London counter protest was waving its flags, and just around the time when Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were chanting ‘Let the IDF win to fuck the Arabs!’; Philippa Greer, human rights lawyer and Head of Legal for UNWRA in Gaza reported as follows:
‘Today entering Gaza City. The ruins of life. A donkey laying dead attached to a cart with someone’s possessions. Clusters of people crossing to the South, with too much to walk with under the sun and given the length of the journey. A man carrying a white flag in front of his family. Women about to collapse, dragging bags over the ground, walking backwards, stopping and closing their eyes. A man on the ground in underwear, with soldiers near the checkpoint. A woman presumably crossing with him, stalled, distraught, in desperation. They passed by these ruins’.
My government is supporting this. Let us not pass by.
tabitha troughton 