Police are not protecting Jews by proscribing opposition to Israel’s crimes
JVL is well aware of the increased anxiety of many British Jews following the murderous attacks in Manchester and Bondi but we do not believe the response of the London and Manchester Police Chiefs is appropriate.
The sentence, “Antisemitic hate crime has surged, protests have intensified, and online abuse has grown since 2023” is particularly unfortunate. It puts legitimate peaceful protest between two forms of correctly illegal activity. It unfairly casts doubt on the intent of those, including the substantial Jewish Bloc, expressing their horror at the continuing genocide in Gaza and the complicity of our government in it.
The Jewish Bloc, which proudly proclaims its Jewish identity, has always been prepared to challenge any antisemitism it has encountered on the demonstrations; it has very rarely, if ever, encountered anything it needs to respond to. On the contrary it has always been welcomed by all the disparate groups on the marches and our platform speakers have been warmly applauded.
The protests in London and elsewhere have not attacked synagogues or Jewish schools or been a reason for increased security surrounding them.
“Globalise the intifada” is not a chant regularly heard at the mass London demonstrations. If it is used as a taunt to individual or groups of Jews it may amount to harassment but otherwise it should be accepted as what it literally means: a call to make resistance to Israeli crimes global. There has been an obscuring of history to try to make the word Intifada synonymous with terror rather than resistance. The first Intifada was a largely non-violent mass civil society resistance. It was the violence of the Israeli response that provoked in turn the far more violent second Intifada.
The Police statement is correct when it says that “All members of society have a responsibility to consider their impact on others”. However, it then interprets this in a one-sided way. It does not recognise that attempts to brand people who act to support Palestinian rights as antisemites are insulting and demeaning and a form of intimidatory harassment: an attempt by some who are zealots in their support of Israel to silence opposition.
Agreed! The nutters on LBC are pushing for a total ban.
and this clown was on BBC News24 last night talking to Katie Silver…’there is no evidence that Israel has been involved in Genocide…the marches need to be stopped’ – https://www.jewishagency.org/mark-leibler/
well written; i hope the police read and take note.
This is a careful and quietly cogent article by JVL, helpfully defining what this reader has puzzled over – the meaning of “globalise the intifada”. It contrasts with the wild assertions re causality in the aftermath of the Bondi attack and the hapless attempts of two dodgy UK Constabularies to curry favour with their bosses in the Home Office.
I wonder what those people criticising Mr. Albanese in Australia for not acting to counter what is referred to as “antisemitism” wanted him to do? He is clearly just the normal run-of-the-mill politician that James Joyce might have described as a “gobshite”, but no more guilty of allowing crazed and undiscriminating savagery than any other politician in the “Western World.”
There seems to be the assumption that a generalised threat can be countered only by repressing all those deemed, however loosely, as carrying that threat. This is the Trumpian logic behind refusing visas to virtually all Palestinians, who are clearly guilty of being from a place of violence and therefore, by implication, guilty in some way or other of provoking it.
I suppose it took the rejection of apartheid in South Africa to overcome the automatic labelling of the resistance of the ANC as “terrorist”, even though they never renounced their right to resist with arms their oppressors.
Right On!!! In fact it is the pro-Israel lot who by identifying all Jews with the state of Israel implicitly make all Jews accountable for crimes committed by Israel, thus inviting attacks on Jews.
Hear hear. All lives matter. Not just the powerful Jews who are decimating free speech , the media and the Palestinians who have an equal right to life.
Zionists have been given carte blanche for decades by their shoe shine boys and so have become demented. As would anyone, really. And then they actually invite us to tar all Jews with the same brush! It’s astonishing that people so obsessed with ‘optics’ have no idea how they present. It really is turning into “Spout our BS even though you know it’s BS or we’ll use our superpower – we’ll call you a Nazi”.