Some ‘pro’ Palestine marchers simply enjoy frightening Jews - The Jewish Chronicle

This week, organisers of the “pro” Palestine march were charged with public order offences. The main charge is that having been told not to leave the designated protest site at Whitehall on Saturday – they wanted to gather at Portland Place, by the BBC, near a synagogue – they did leave Whitehall, holding what looked like garage flowers to lay for the dead.

I thought it was a feint, or unconscious homage to the character Lorenzo St Dubois in The Producers. If everyone has a flower instead of a gun, etcetera. The flowers felt cynical, as in: can we incite fear while holding flowers? (Surely Jewish fear is confected, etcetera.) Chris Nineham, Stop the War grandee and chief steward of the march, was charged. So was Piers Corbyn, whom a Twitter wag called not only the worst Corbyn, but the worst Piers; so was Ben Jamal, head of the PSC, handsome like a Ken doll is handsome, preening fantastically.

As a keen voyeur of the British bourgeois Socialist, who can tell you that Nineham was educated at Westminster School and Cambridge, and that his father was warden of Keble College, Oxford – almost the full house! - I wonder: who is enjoying this more? Me or them?

Not me: I am too busy fretting about young Jews who do not now feel safe in the London they were born in. I have never wanted to ban “pro” Palestine marches, though I understand they are the crucible of the greatest wave of Jew hatred in this country since, well, 1290, I suppose, and that is the fault of the organisers, who should have purged antisemitic elements but didn’t want to because if they did, they would have.

Democracy isn’t a consumer good that you purchase; it requires active involvement and self-restraint. I know the counter-arguments, because they are shouted at me online, as if from a briefing document written by someone who lies to themselves because they cannot help it: the existence of the small Jewish bloc within the marches, as if Jews can’t be fools in turn; 0.03 per cent of British Jews signed a letter in support of gathering at Portland Place (I checked); and the preposterous idea that Zionism stole Judaism from Jews. I think that’s it.

I think some of the protestors wanted to go to Portland Place because they enjoy frightening Jews, and hearing “From the River to the Sea” shouted while you are at prayer is frightening if you are human, and I don’t think everyone on the march believes that Jews are human. We have become quasi-mythical beings again, because history is not linear, it’s a wheel.

These marches are not peaceful. I have stood with counter protesters and as the “pro” Palestine march passes, they cannot stay away from an opportunity to demonstrate personal goodness and expiate unspecified failure and rage. They make Hamas triangles with their fingers to designate us targets; they scream abuse; they make it clear that, were if not for the double line of police officers, they would attack us. Not all, of course, but some, and some is enough.

I suspect this is news to the bourgeois Socialists who lead this movement. They are as hierarchical as anyone, comrade (it’s pronounced “com-raid,” which is funny). A sanction was placed on this march: you cannot gather near a synagogue on Saturday. You might think, as anti-racists, they would welcome this news and act on it. Are they not for peace? I’m laughing now. They have done nothing for Gaza except help secure its murderous leadership. These are bourgeois Socialists and they equal any mogul in their entitlement. They use weirder language though: attack them and attack Utopia.

I treasure Howard Jacobson’s line, “I’ve never met a Socialist who didn’t hate his father”, and this, I think, is what is playing out. They cannot tolerate opposition yet they crave it. That’s one for the psychiatrist but it makes them, among other things, bad social democrats, as responsible for the fracture of our polity as anyone. Before the ceasefire vote last year, Ben Jamal told a crowd: “We want so many of you to come that they will have to lock the doors of Parliament itself.” No one should want that.

But you don’t go to a “pro” Palestine march to find self-knowledge. The response to this small sanction was the kind of hysteria women are usually accused of. They must be allowed to protest outside the BBC; the synagogue “is not even on the route”; 0.03 per cent of British Jews signed a letter saying it should go ahead (I paraphrase); this is the hand of Israel (again, I paraphrase).

It was, they said, a violation of their democratic rights, to which I say, have we been in the same city this last year? They are oblivious to one immutable truth: the anti-democratic is not us, but them.

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Pro-Palestine protests