12.09.2024

Yet another stop: Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and chief steward on the day, remonstrating with police liaison officer

Campaign continues to build

Restrictions on protests, attempts to intimidate activists and suspension of export licences testify to the fact that the establishment is under massive pressure from below, says Carla Roberts

Despite the best efforts of the Labour government and the Metropolitan Police to sabotage the latest, the 18th, national demonstration in solidarity with Palestine, 125,000 people (according to the organisers) turned out in London on September 7 to once again demand an immediate ceasefire, the end of the genocide and the banning of all weapons sales to Israel. It was heartening to see many on the march making a beeline to pick up copies of the Weekly Worker we were handing out.

Up to about 24 hours before the demonstration, the police had tried to delay the start to 2.30pm and imposed draconian conditions on the organisers, who say that “their bizarre, last-minute demands would have meant essentially kettling people at the assembly time for two and a half hours”, in the words of the Stop the War Coalition.¹ As it was the march set off at 1.30pm and was constantly stopped en route by the police. Understandably, the organisers were furious, not least given a 5pm dispersal order!

Since October 2023, the demonstrations have been militant but good-natured and almost always entirely peaceful, continues the StWC, “with three times fewer arrests on our marches per capita than at a regular Glastonbury festival, and many less than at an average Premier League football match. Almost all the arrests that have taken place have been for wearing T-shirts, holding placards or singing slogans that the police judge to be illegal.”

Still, most of the bourgeois media continues to dub them ‘hate marches’ and “every single one of them has had control orders imposed, normally without prior notice and always at the last minute”, complains the StWC in its interesting statement, which outlines an array of obstructive behaviour and threats - for example, in the run-up to the November 11 event last year, which then home secretary Suella Braverman tried to have banned altogether.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government not only continues this attack on the right to protest - but is expanding the scope: “We are now moving more quickly to make arrests [at large events]. We are much more focused on identifying reasonable grounds for arrest,” Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Matt Twist just told the rightwing think-tank, Policy Exchange, which combined its report with an “investigation” by Michael Gove, which found that “Palestine-related protests in London have cost the Metropolitan police £42.9 millions”.² We can think of a rather obvious way to save tons of cash: leave the protestors be! But that will not happen, of course. The heavy-handed policing is needed for news management purposes.

As if to underline the point, only eight people were arrested on September 7, most of them because - in another clear provocation - the police allowed a few dozen counter-protestors to gather nearby in Kensington High Street, waving Israeli flags and the Union Jack, and shouting abuse at the marchers. This led to some predictable fisticuffs - though most people on the demonstration did well to ignore these Zionists.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has written to all supporters, asking for donations to cover the “added expenses due to the police’s obstacles: this time we are facing a bill of at least £45,000 [for] lawyers’ fees, press conferences, separate stage bookings”. That is just the PSC’s expenses - the demonstrations are organised by a coalition of six groups, including also the StWC, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Friends of Al Aqsa - all with their own fundraising efforts.

The PSC email also says: “We don’t know why the police continue to frustrate our attempts to campaign for an end to this genocide.” Well, let us help you out. The British government is coming under increasing pressure to stop its political, financial and military support for the Israeli government, which is continuing its “war against Hamas” (in reality, its brutal campaign directed against the entire Palestinian population).

From the Zionist state’s point of view, of course, its actions are entirely rational and designed to, if you will, defuse the demographic time bomb, as Moshé Machover outlined in last week’s Weekly Worker: “Large-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs would result in a single state in the entire territory, with a large Jewish majority, which is the ultimate aim of all mainstream Zionist parties.”³

Draconian

But, while many western governments feel the need to continue supporting this campaign of genocide - in exchange for a (relatively) stable ally in the politically unstable Middle East - mass demonstrations put them under increasing pressure. There has also been a palpable increased level of ‘unease’ in some of the mainstream media (we cannot put it stronger than that), with the BBC, for example, markedly and repeatedly asking the question, ‘Why is there no full weapons ban to Israel?’ Much of the media’s criticism is aimed at the expanding illegal settlements and the violence meted out against the Palestinians there rather than the daily bombings and campaign of starvation and disease employed against those trapped in Gaza.

Be that as it may, the pressure has been building up. Foreign secretary David Lammy’s much-reported partial weapons ban might be very partial indeed - the government has suspended only 30 out of around 350 arms export licences. But The Spectator is wrong to ask, “What is the point?” The point is politics. Militarily, the decision matters not - which is shown by the fact that licences for the important F-35 and F-16 fighter bombers have not been withdrawn.

But politically, the decision shows that the protests are having a real effect. Lammy might claim that it was merely “legal opinion” that the government has been following, but we all know that such “legal opinion” can be very flexible indeed - and is often stretched to fit the requirements of the governments of the day.

The success of the pressure is also, negatively, shown by the increasingly draconian actions meted out against pro-Palestinian British journalists like Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson. It is amazing that their arrests, the confiscation of their phones and computers (which they will never get back) and the imposition of ridiculous bail conditions - Wilkinson, for example, is not allowed to write about Palestine, her main area of expertise - are entirely ignored by their fellow journalists in the mainstream press.

We have also seen Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, being served with three charges for speeches he gave in the aftermath of October 7, including one charge of “supporting a proscribed organisation” under section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act, which carries the threat of some very serious prison time.

It might be of little comfort to those comrades, but these horrific charges do show that the protests are working. The increasing popularity of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign has also added to that pressure - again, this does not necessarily mean companies like Coca Cola, Starbucks or HSBC are in serious financial trouble. But image matters and theirs have been seriously tarnished.

BBC bias

The pro-Zionist bourgeois mainstream is doing its utmost to hold back the tide.

The latest example? The front page of the September 8 edition of The Sunday Telegraph, which screams in huge letters about how the “BBC [has] ‘breached guidelines 1,500 times’ over Israel-Hamas war” since October 7 last year, that its “coverage was heavily biased against Israel”, and that the BBC “repeatedly downplayed Hamas terrorism, while presenting Israel as a militaristic and aggressive nation”. The article is padded out with quotes from the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the National Jewish Assembly, and backed up with a commentary by a disgusted Danny Cohen, the former BBC’s director of television, who warns that there was now an “institutional crisis”, which must be urgently investigated by an “independent inquiry”.

Needless to say, the entire press has picked up on the ‘scandal’, repeating word for word the report’s findings of a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” by the Beeb after the authors “analysed four months of the BBC’s output across television, radio, online news, podcasts and social media” using artificial intelligence. The report certainly helps to show up the limitations of AI, if very little else.

The author, Trevor Asserson - more on him later - basically fed the BBC’s output into a computer and cross-referenced it with the words, ‘war crimes’, ‘genocide’, ‘breach of international law’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. And - would you believe it? - “Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict!” No shit, Sherlock. Perhaps the reason for that is the fact that it is Israel committing genocide and not Hamas? Too obvious?

Even the most ardent supporter of Zionism would find it difficult to claim that Hamas’s (prison break) attack on October 7, during which 1,139 people were killed, can be characterised as a ‘genocide’: 695 Israeli civilians died, as did 71 foreign nationals, and 373 members of the security forces. We will probably never know how many of them died at the hands of Palestinian fighters - and how many because of Israeli bombardment and the ‘Hannibal directive’ (better to kill Israelis than let them fall into Palestinian hands). Nothing Hamas has done before or since October 7 could be called ‘a campaign of genocide’ against the Israeli population - not if you are actually trying to be honest.

That is where we need to take another look at the report’s author, about whom the Torygraph will only tell us that he is “a British lawyer”. Even a cursory glance at Google, however, shows that he just so happens to be based in Jerusalem, is a self-declared Zionist and has represented the pro-Zionist Campaign Against Antisemitism during the investigation by the misnamed Equality and Human Rights Commission into the “anti-Semitic Labour Party” - which, according to Asserson, was “a hotbed of racism under Jeremy Corbyn”.⁴

Danny Cohen, on the other hand, had signed a pro-Israel letter opposing the cultural boycott of Israel (along with JK Rowling and several MPs who are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel - The Guardian, October 22 2015).⁵ While he was director of television at the BBC, we should add. As the Radio Times reports, this role has been considered “the second most powerful position at the BBC”.⁶ Not very impartial there was he?

The BBC said it would “carefully consider” the report, which has been submitted to Tim Davie, its director general, and Samir Shah, its chair, as well as all its board members.⁷ A spokesman for the corporation added that it had “serious questions” about the report’s methodology.

In November 2015, the PSC had drawn attention to Cohen’s name on the letter,⁸ and had written to the chair of the BBC Trust to complain and to ask for action to be taken against Cohen. An email from BBC chief complaints advisor Dominic Groves sent in January said: “The BBC agrees that it was inadvisable for him to add his signature, given his then seniority within the BBC as director of television.”

We might add that the corporation might also want to take a “serious look” into the politics of the report’s authors and the ‘experts’ defending it. They are doing exactly what they are accusing the BBC of doing.