In Trafalgar Square this afternoon I watched a group of foreign teenagers wearing Burger King hats – on a school trip, maybe – pose for a photo in front of the central fountain. In the back of their shot is a middle-aged man being serenely carried away by police. He will rank among the 442 arrested so far for participating in the Palestine Action protest yesterday. The police, so it seemed, were intent on arresting every single person expressing explicit support for this now-proscribed organisation.
A couple hundred people, notably trending towards old age (wherever the so-called radical youth is, it is not here) sat in silence at the feet of Trafalgar Square’s steps, the National Gallery looming imperiously behind them. They held the same sign: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine action”. I wonder if there would have been more if it were not such a blustery day. That, or those committed to pro-Palestine demonstrations were swayed by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary’s interventions yesterday – though one does not get the sense from Palestine Action that they spend much time listening to those guys at all.
The national atmosphere is fraught. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, two British Jews were killed in a terror attack outside a synagogue in Manchester. In response Keir Starmer called for today’s event – and a concurrent one in Manchester – to be cancelled in respect of “the grief of British Jews.” Meanwhile, Shabana Mahmood said the demonstration would be “fundamentally un-British.” I encountered a frustratingly well-rehearsed refrain from the demonstrators: “What happened on Yom Kippur was dreadful, but cancelling peaceful protest lets terror win.”
British or not, it was muted. A woman wandered around the crowd offering cake and biscuits. A child with a Pikachu teddy zipped around my knees on a tiny scooter. I saw a spaniel, a cockapoo, a jack-russell-y thing. I overheard a policeman politely asking an obliging crowd to move around, so he could arrest the next old person “as safely as we can”. And off they were carried, each time to a smattering of applause and shouts of “thank you!” from the crowd. There were no flares; it did not look like many were itching for a fight. “Shame on you” were the sharpest words I heard. One sign suggested sending Tony Blair to the Hague, but he has heard worse.
Two things are inevitable at demonstrations like these. First, dogs – who must have a stronger sense of social justice than many of us give them credit for. And second, enterprising SMEs who see a big crowd and think, “I can sell them things”. This time, you could buy sew-on patches for your clothes that read “Free Palestine” or “Save Gaza” or, slightly dishonestly, “PRESS”. Two for £7.
Over the span of the previous two Palestine Action protests – since being proscribed a terror group in July of this year – 1,422 people have been arrested, and more than 130 charged. “They let the Tommy Robinson guys do what they want,” a man in a “globalise the intifada” t-shirt with pink flowers in his hair says – in reference to last month’s Unite the Kingdom demonstration. About 110,000 descended on Whitehall and Westminster there, brought together by a loose coalition of anti-immigration angst and an ambient sense of disenfranchisement. Some, by the simpler draw of straightforward racism. Twenty-four were arrested then. It was very different here. I turned to leave – no one within a 350 metre radius of this place had any sense that something was happening – and watched a police man, smiling and laughing with the woman he was arresting. As if to say, this is just de rigeur.
[Further reading: Hamas agree to release hostages, but…]
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