We’re now a year and a half into Israel’s war on Gaza. The growing recognition that this is a genocidal attack, that Trump and Netanyahu want to ethnically cleanse not just Gaza but the West Bank, continues to cause revulsion at Israel’s acts. These include the deliberate cutting off food and electricity in recent days, the report showing that Palestinian prisoners have suffered sexual assault at the hands of the Israelis, the attacks on refugee camps in the West Bank.
But the response of Israel’s friends in the US and here is to clamp down on protest and solidarity with Palestine. The case of Mahmoud Khalil, student at Columbia University in New York, who has been seized and held in detention pending deportation for organising protests for Palestine, is a particularly shocking case. But it is part of a wider clampdown on the highly effective protests on US campuses, deemed by Trump to be ‘antisemitic’. They of course nothing of the sort and include among them many Jewish activists who are also protesting at the treatment of Khalil.
We are seeing a tightening of the already limited right to protest here in Britain. Policing of demonstrations is getting more restrictive, with arrests, exclusion orders, and now the increasing line coming from the Metropolitan Police that it is not acceptable to protest over Palestine anywhere in the general vicinity of a synagogue at any time on a Saturday, because it presents a threat to the Jewish community.
This is despite the fact that there has never been an attack on a synagogue connected with any of our marches, that none of them are on the route of any marches, and that our marches are aimed at Israel not Jews, who regularly attend the demos in large numbers. The argument that our protests should not take place on a Saturday is a denial of our civil liberties and ignores the fact that is the traditional day for protests of all kinds, including by many Jews at various times.
Why should Palestine marches be forced to another day when Jewish people have, quite rightly, attended protests, party conferences, as well concerts, football matches, plays and public meetings on Saturday?
The treatment of the Palestine protests is discriminatory. While we are kept considerable distance from synagogues, the right-wing protests against us are given very lenient treatment and allowed often within touching distance of our protestors.
This discrimination is the thin end of the wedge – if it succeeds then there will be more restrictions on these and other demonstrations. I said in my speech at Saturday’s demo that they want to clamp down on protest to remove Palestine from the public eye, and to chill people into doing nothing. Both in the US and Britain there’s no sign of that happening.
Source: Counterfire