"Terrorist supporters off our streets," was one of the most penetrating chants echoing across the East Finchley High Road outside the Phoenix cinema last night. A small group of anti-Israel protesters on the opposite side of the street held posters and chanted slogans about Palestine running “From the River to the Sea", implying the obliteration of Israel.
But within an hour from the start of the film showing inside the privately-hired Phoenix, all the anti-Israel protesters had been seen off, retreating into East Finchley tube station to the chants of a football song: "Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio,".
It was the first time that anti-Israeli demonstrators had been forced to retreat on London's streets since the October 7 attack.
Over a thousand pro-Israel demonstrators and East Finchley locals had gathered, saying they wanted to protect the showing of a film, Supernova, about the massacre of 356 people who had been enjoying a music and dance festival inside Israel near its border with the Gaza Strip.
Early on Thursday morning graffiti stating "No to Israeli art-washing" had been emblazoned in thick red paint across the front windows of London’s oldest continuously running cinema.
Within hours, locals raised over £3,300 to help the cinema remove the graffiti and to hire security and metal barriers.
Social media messages asked pro-Israeli groups to come and protect the cinema - which they did in numbers that surprised even those who called for the support.
In one incident, two anti-Israel protestors, a young woman and a young man, were shepherded by police into a fenced-off alleyway alongside the cinema. The pro-Israel demonstrators said the couple had attacked them using the woman as a provocateur with several men then muscling in for a fight. They said the anti-Israel group had also pushed a demonstrator off her wheelchair. The facts were hard to verify.
The police were praised by locals for maintaining as much order as was possible.
Speakers blared out the traditional three-word song that was also heard in Soviet Russia in the Seventies and Eighties when the Communist regime had jailed Jewish dissidents: "Am Yisrael Chai”: the People of Israel Live.
Buses going north and south along the High Street were briefly blocked by the crowds who, despite police efforts to marshal them, had spilled into the street from the barricaded pavements.
The pro-Israel protesters carried posters demanding the release of all the hostages. Over 100 of the 253 people taken to Gaza alive or dead on October 7 had been party-goers from the Nova music festival, the subject of the documentary being shown.
One poster read: "Imagine protesting against remembering 364 murder victims." Some people wore circular stickers saying "Israel = Democracy, Hamas = Isis". Another poster read, “Enough is Enough", reflecting the frustration of the Jewish community over many months of anti-Israel demonstrations marching through central London every Saturday, with few or no police arrests against the elements behind them.
One of the pro-Israel demonstrators explained his presence: "What made us finally react so strongly was the shocking fact that some people in London would protest and vandalise a cinema when all it was doing was to show a film about the barbaric murders of over 300 innocent civilians enjoying a music festival.”
“People supporting mass-murder and rape and trying to prevent a film being shown about innocent victims have no place in the public spaces of our city."
Not everyone in the pro-Israel crowd was Jewish. A woman held up a poster reading: "Christian Friends of the Jewish People Say No!! to antisemitism."
A petition online to stop the planned protests and protect the Jewish community had garnered nearly 10 thousand signatures. It said: “We respectfully demand that the relevant authorities take immediate and decisive action to disallow this planned protest to prevent any escalation."
