Free Gaza Protest, London

On Saturday, I attended the Gaza protest in London and covered as much of it as I could on Twitter with my iPhone. If you’d like to review my tweets from the day, you can follow this link.

It was a freezing cold Saturday. I went to pick up a dear Palestinian friend from Victoria station. He came with a colleague based in Jordan, also of Palestinian origin. On the way, I bumped into Catherine from MPACUK who was making up some signs on the tube. She kindly let me take a picture, which you will find along with all the others I took on my Gaza set on Flickr. It already felt like a unique day. Before long I was about to realise that this was the largest demo in support of Palestinian freedom in British history.

My friends and I walked a bit and then caught a 16 bus. There were several senior citizens from Sussex, some wearing badges in support of the Palestinians. We struck up a conversation. I was surprised to hear some of my language (no, not that kind) on the Palestine issue from them. They were forthright, sincere and determined.

On getting to the park, we said our dhuhr prayer in a small congregation, which was quickly added to. How beautiful it was to pray openly in Hyde Park without resentment or abuse.

We managed to get near the front to hear some of the speakers. There were the usual suspects with the usual speeches. Brian Eno was good, but the Unison rep got some boos from some of the socialists present. Annie Lennox was a bit less ambivalent, but still not strong enough. The IHRC rep had some strong words too. The rapper, whose name I didn’t catch, urged us to boycott Coca Cola and Starbucks. This I have done for several years. He was right to remind us.

We were frozen to the bone and just wanted to march to the embassy, the speeches usually are meant to rally the crowd before departure, but this crowd already grasped the issues and was already passionate about them. Not at any time during the whole day did I spot any Muslim who looked like they might be in danger of overstepping the mark. There were a couple of interesting looking characters, but they might well have been agents provocateur. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The crowd just kept on growing and growing. A figure of 100,00 was quoted several times. That’s what it would have taken to fill Wembley Stadium in the old days. It could easily have been that many or more.

This was a very vocal march. Lots of passion. Lots of variety. People of all colour, all backgrounds, all religions and no religion were there. As my friend suggested, this was not about religion, it was about humanity speaking up against inhumanity. When I asked him if he considered the march futile, he said that it would at least give those suffering in Gaza a psychological boost that they have not been forgotten, but he doubted that their conditions would be materially improved by the march. I had to concur. We both felt that to have remained silent would have plunged Gaza into a little more hopelessness, if that were at all possible.

I have of course been using Twitter extensively over the last fortnight, earning several on-line distinctions, down to obsessiveness in fighting Hasbara and bloody-minded persistence rather than any ability or quality. I managed to get into the New York Times last Sunday with a question I posed to the Israeli Consulate who bavely (or foolishly) took questions from the Twitter crowd.

Last night I was the most re-tweeted person in the world for an hour. So given that Twitter finally found a global voice during the Mumbai attacks, I knew that the situation in Gaza would propel this new and incredibly fast-moving medium to centre-stage and I was determined to be part of that. (Feel free to search for my tweets using my handle, shahidkamal and the hashtag #gaza if you want to see what I’ve been writing.)

I’m not going to refute Israel’s Hasbara here, countless others do it far more effectively and you can if you wish follow links to a lot of them through searching for my Gaza posts on Twitter. I should mention at least Avi Shlaim’s wonderful article in The Guardian, which signalled a turning point in the media’s approach towards Israel, which previously had been to forgive Israel every atrocity because of the Holocaust. The leading figure and eternal-thorn-in-the-side-of-the-beast-of-Zion is probably Norman Finkelstein, whose persistence, lucidity and cogency is simply staggering, but I’ve read few pieces as sharp as Shlaim’s recently. With a precision unknown to an Israeli F-16 pilot, he shatters every myth and lie about Israel’s monstrous atrocities and even more monstrous lies in a searing and rousing piece. (Naomi Klein, another brave Jewish genius) has been doing the best thing we can right now and calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions.

There were several poignant moments in the march. One was seeing two boys standing on columns in Bayswater waving flags and shouting slogans. No aggression, just passionate support. Another was seeing the wide procession of red-dye-stained dolls in makeshift boxes. It was still hard to take in the enormity of the child murder that is taking place in Gaza right now, but it was a chilling moment. How easy it is for us to switch off, even in the face of such obvious cues.

At one point, riot police came running through the crowd to a chorus of boos, barging me unceremoniously out of the way. There was no need, but they’re riot police. In a crowd situation, they can do what they like. Like an Israeli in Gaza, only with far less impunity and bloodshed.

As we approached the Russian embassy on Notting Hill Gate, I could see why the riot police had been in such a rush. Some people were confused as to whether this was the Israeli embassy or not and had taken to some impromptu graffiti. It was soon protected by a cordon. Apart from a young man on a tall column, silently waving a flag, there didn’t seem to be any trouble at all. A couple of policemen would have sufficed.

We rounded the corner to Kensington Church Street and I prayed `asr on the street with some other Muslims. During my salah, two kind people put something down for me to do sujood on. We rejoined the procession and the riot police ran past us. We had to stop for a while again and eventually, the end of the crowd neared (we had already lagged some way back). More and more police vans kept joining us. My friends and I surveyed the damage at the Starbucks in Kensington Church Street. A window had been smashed and the door had been egged. It seemed rather “Fight Club”.

As we inspected, a couple of young men started talking with us about a suitable response. They were advocating a military response by Arab states. I really felt my age in the face of such youthful passion. The problem is that the military of any Arab country is unlikely to take on Israel. It doesn’t suit their local economies and many of them are too corrupt. The young men, from Hizb ut-Tahrir as it turned out, made a passionate case. I do think a strong military response is justified, but I feel that it is unlikely. Egypt does have a larger army than Israel, but Israel has one of the best trained fighting forces in the world. As for fighting spirit, that is more likely to come from a legitimate resistance movement like Hizballah or Hamas, who are better equipped for guerilla urban warfare.

I then got to pray maghrib, with tears in my eyes. This was Kensington Church Street. Palestine was not free, but London was. As a Muslim, I was praying on Kensington Church Street, openly, with no judgement, no resentment, no abuse, no hostility. It was as if my city had opened its heart to me and let me in. I prayed for Palestine and I offered thanks for London. I had asked a couple of policemen questions and my friends were shocked. There is no way they would be able to do the same thing in the middle east without risking a beating at worst or a hostile rebuke at best. I have a lot to be grateful for. I still say this is the best place in Europe to be a Muslim.

As we turned the corner, the atmosphere seemed a bit prickly. The whole of the embassy had been cordoned off by a guard of riot police from all sides. Shoes and banners had been thrown, but other than a couple of suspicious looking people, the atmosphere had been very good. I think the reports of violence were massively overplayed, and possibly provoked by an agent. On the other hand, unsurprisingly, the figures were underplayed by the BBC, which as I’ve said on many occasions, serves only as a propaganda outlet for the government. As the government supports the racist butchery of the Zionist state, the BBC reflects that in the way that it frames the discourse.

Later, there were a hundred or more riot police forming a cordon around the embassy in the face of perhaps two hundred protesters, many of them youngsters and older people. Overkill in my opinion. And overkill is the appropriate term on which to end this post. What else can you call what’s happening in Gaza?

Tagged as: gaza, London, protest