By occupying Whitehall on January 20, the day after a ceasefire in Gaza came into force, Islamists of the Palestine Coalition revealed what their allies on the left should have known all along. The demonstrations they have been running since the October 7 massacre were not just motivated by a desire to stop the conflict in Gaza. They were an effort to generate rage over Israel’s status as a British ally—rage that could be used to generate support and tolerance for Islamism in the UK. Lamentably, the strategy has made considerable headway with the British left.
Whitehall, a historic avenue near Parliament had been barricaded for the rally, the 24th “National March for Palestine” to take place in England since October 7 2023. Speaking from a stage erected near Downing Street Jeremy Corbyn, an independent MP for North Islington notorious for his support for Hamas and Hezbollah, said “There are going to be a lot more demonstrations,” He added before condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal and called on the U.K. to stop supplying weapons to the Jewish State. “Please don’t think this is the end of the story. This is but a staging post in that long story of the need for peace,” Corbyn had no words of criticism for Hamas for having started the war he lamented.
Corbyn was speaking to a sympathetic crowd of stalwart protesters, most of whom had emerged from nearby Westminster Station to attend the rally. As they spilled out onto the street, they were welcomed by activists from the Socialist Workers party handing out cards bearing the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free. Back the resistance.”
Dialogue with a Diehard
I asked one of them, “You want Palestine to be free ‘from the River to the Sea.’ Do you want Israel to leave the region?”
“I want apartheid to leave the region. I want there to be freedom for anyone who lives there,” he said confidently, apparently referring to the blockade of Gaza.
I ventured that the only reason Israel blockaded Gaza was because Hamas won the elections in 2006, and Hamas want to destroy Israel - they say so in their charter.
“The Palestinians have been under siege since 1948. Before 1948, there were Jewish people and there were Arab people, Muslim people, Christian people living freely together.”
“But the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928—twenty years before the foundation of Israel,” I tell him. “And it is very anti-Western, very anti-Semitic. Hamas is a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“You’re supposing I support the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said.
“That’s what Hamas is,” I tell him.
“I support freedom in Palestine,” he said. “I want the Palestinian people to have control over the land that they’ve lived on for thousands of years.”
“For example, what happened in the Arab Spring, when you had many, many Muslim women rising up against the Egyptian and Tunisian regimes?” he said. “And fighting for democracy.”
“They didn’t get democracy; they got Islamism,” I tell him. “I think that’s what you would get with Hamas. Would you like to see a Taliban-type regime from the river to the sea?” This time, it’s my turn to be incredulous.
“Again, you’re assuming that I want Hamas to continue,” he said.
“Well, it’s their slogan on your sign, isn’t it? ‘From the River to the Sea’ is Hamas’s,” I said.
“It’s also my slogan and that of millions of people around the world.”
Islamist Speakers Incite Rage Against the West, ‘Settler Colonialism’
During the rally, speakers made little reference to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, or the 97 hostages still held out of 251 taken that day (35 believed to be dead). They did not mention that among them were British woman Emily Damari and Eli Sharabi, who is unaware that his British sister and teenage daughters were killed on October 7. Instead, speakers called on the crowd of thousands and those tuning into livestreams to regard mainstream political parties—and hence Western liberalism itself—as dangers to humanity.
There are going to be a lot more demonstrations.
They denied and deflected the role of militant jihadi ideology in the death and destruction in Gaza, blaming it variously on the “settler colonial” model of the Jewish state, Israel’s Western allies, the Western media, and the Western public for their complicity. As Palestine Solidarity Campaign leader Ben Jamal put it, “An injustice to anyone anywhere is an injustice to everyone everywhere.”
Raghad Al Tikriti, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, which former Conservative Communities Secretary Michael Gove once described as “the British affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood,” declared, “We are here to stay. This moment today is for Gaza. Their victory, their resilience is our pride.” Tikriti’s father, Osama Al Tikriti,is the former head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq. She is the sister of Anas Al Tikriti, director of the Cordoba Foundation, which former Prime Minister David Cameron accused of being a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
“We dream of a Palestine where people move freely from the hills of Jenin to the streets of Haifa, from the shores of Gaza to the banks of the Sea of Jerusalem. We must fight to dismantle apartheid and administrative detention and bring down the entire settler-colonial regime,” added Al Tikriti
British Palestinian activist and former parliamentary candidate Leanne Mohammed, 23, raged that U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy should keep “beautiful” Hind Rajab’s name out of his “disgusting mouth.”
Mohammed, who nearly ousted Labour Health Secretary Wes Streeting from his Ilford North constituency in last July’s general election, was furious that, in a January 16 speech on the ceasefire, Lammy had dared to lament the death of Rajab, the five-year-old Gazan child killed during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, in fighting that also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue.
Ignoring Hamas’s barbaric killing spree on October 7 as the trigger of the current conflict, Mohammed declared, “History did not begin 15 months ago, and it will not end with a ceasefire,” adding that, “A ceasefire was never enough. You cannot walk away from this struggle. What we have built here has to burn in our hearts and move us to action until we breathe our last breath.”
“I am not now nor [will I ever] allow the genociders in the Labour government, the U.S. administration, nor the European Union to get away with this; and nor must you,” she declared. “Israel will continue as long as the leaders in Downing Street, Washington, and Brussels allow them to. This is not the moment to rest. Let’s bring down this system of injustice. Ceasefire today, liberation tomorrow.”
Scottish-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla, who played Dodi Fayed in The Crown, implored those who had not turned out to demonstrate to join the next protest.
“In your silence is an abdication of your power to those who abuse it and turn it into a killing machine,” the actor said. “We are here holding the space for a better future for everyone. We need your voice too. Join us to seize the future from the arms of murderers and war criminals so it may bend towards justice. A free Palestine is a freer you.”
Support from Al Guardian and RMT
Such emotive rhetoric was repeated by prominent liberals. Owen Jones, a columnist for The Guardian, blamed the Western media for conspiring “to suppress Israel’s genocidal intent,” making journalists “complicit in every death and every maiming.”
In addition to assailing Israel for the deaths of journalists, Jones lamented the devastation in Gaza, declaring, “This crime is too extreme. Too depraved. Too shameless. If we [let them get away with it], it won’t just be the ruin for the Palestinian people but the ruin for human civilization as well.”
The Islamists even enjoyed the support of at least one labor official. Eddie Dempsey, assistant general secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT), shouted to the crowd, “Solidarity to you all, brothers and sisters. Solidarity from the RMT Union!”—blissfully unaware that Islamists in the crowd would never extend to non-Muslims such epithets of kinship, however ideologically aligned.
The messianic narcissism of revolutionary politics was all around, unchanged since the 1970s. Middle-aged women sporting buzzcuts or dyed bright pink or lilac dreadlocks tied up with floral patterned rags danced, banged drums, scraped guiros and sang slogans like “In our millions/In our billions/We are all Palestinians.” And of course, I heard chants of “From the Sea to the River Palestine will live forever !” and “Two, four, six, eight, Israel is a terror-state!”
A shrine memorializing children killed during the fighting in Gaza started by the Hamas-perpetrated October 7 massacre in Israel. While the sorrow over the deaths of children in Gaza is legitimate, rally organizers used the rage over these deaths to distract attendees from the misdeeds of Hamas and incite hostility toward Israel in an obvious attempt to generate support for Islamism in the U.K.
(Hannah Baldock)
The goals of universal human rights and pluralism are irreconcilable with Islamist ideology, but the lament for Palestinian suffering was real and moving at Saturday’s demonstration. Empty onsies and children’s clothes were pinned on lines alongside Whitehall and the photographs, names and stories of some of the Gazan children killed in the Israel-Hamas war that followed October 7, 2023, were displayed in a makeshift shrine close to Downing Street, forlornly festooned with flowers and teddy bears. The crowd closest to the stage observed a sombre two-minute silence for the war dead.
But for all their talk about the need for “peace” in Gaza, the protesters at this rally made it perfectly clear that conflict will continue both in the Levant—and in the UK—for the foreseeable future.