UK
Where the right wing offensive against the pro-Palestine movement leads
“Ever since Israel began its siege of Gaza the right has exerted relentless pressure to delegitimise and halt the demonstrations in defence of the Palestinian people. But the marches in support of a ceasefire have been massive, peaceful, lawful – and resilient.”
By Simon Fletcher
Israel’s deadly assault on the Palestinians in Gaza continues to reverberate through politics internationally, including in Britain. George Galloway’s election in Rochdale last week is simply the latest expression of this process.
As the response to the situation in Gaza works its way through all its permutations, so the right in Britain aims to exploit attacks on the pro-Palestine movement as a mechanism to build a broader right wing offensive.
Straightforwardly, there is a choice between going along with this or opposing it.
When Rishi Sunak spoke of “forces here at home trying to tear us apart”, as he did from Downing Street after George Galloway won the Rochdale byelection, he was renewing the Tories’ language of the enemy within. And Sunak has claimed there is a growing consensus that ‘mob rule is replacing democratic rule.’ There is no mob rule in Britain, it is a complete fantasy. Through his mob rule comments, Sunak was leading the effort to whip up a moral panic – as Owen Jones has rightly described it – about the pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Ever since Israel began its siege of Gaza the right has exerted relentless pressure to delegitimise and halt the demonstrations in defence of the Palestinian people. But the marches in support of a ceasefire have been massive, peaceful, lawful – and resilient.
It is no surprise that the demonstrations are so large and that there has been such a sustained period of mass mobilisation on the streets. At the end of February the figure for the number of dead in Gaza reached 30,000. Even that huge number understates the cruelty of the human suffering involved. Britain has been one of the USA’s principal allies in supporting Israel’s onslaught. So naturally people are going to take to the streets in large numbers to express their horror and to oppose British government policy.
But from the start the demonstrations were defamed as ‘hate marches.’ Suella Braverman, the then-Home Secretary, smeared the planned demonstration of 11th November and pressured the police to ban it. The intransigence of the demonstrators meant Braverman was humiliated. Having failed once to halt the demonstrations, the right has continued its campaign of pressure to curtail them. The present Home Secretary James Cleverly questioned whether regular holding demonstrations “adds value” and argued that the marchers have “made their point”.
Former Labour MP John Woodcock was made a peer by Boris Johnson, and is now the government’s adviser on Political Violence and Disruption. Alongside Sunak’s rhetoric of mob rule, Woodcock has announced that he is “looking at the threshold for the police to ban a march”. As part of a review for the government he is has submitted proposals to ban MPs and councillors from engaging with named protest groups including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).
The PSC is targeted because it the main longstanding campaign in Britain for justice for the Palestinian people.
The constant demonisation of the protests, and the PSC specifically, is a function of seeking to discredit them so that they do not have to be listened to. Consequently the argument in Britain about the situation in Gaza also requires constant counter-pressure against any attempt to intimidate or marginalise the political movement that defends the Palestinian people.
A lot of what is happening over the pro-Palestine movement is not new. It is common practice for the right to seek to demonise protesters in order to isolate and intimidate them. When a movement is as large and persistent as the present one then the imperative is even greater. But this attempted moral panic underway is a particularly toxic right wing combination, with two main features, in addition to the actual direct pressure and attempted intimidation of the movement for the Palestinians.
One, it has opened up a reactionary deluge of attacks on multiculturalism, diversity and particularly Muslim Britons. It is an ideological offensive that wants to drive the terms of British political debate rightwards.
Two, it aims to restrict political rights in British society such as the right to demonstrate. So the move against the Palestine marches is a move against wider freedoms.
A renewed and more intense period of the right’s offensive followed in the wake of the fiasco in Parliament over the SNP’s opposition day motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Tory MPs may have been outraged when the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, took a Labour amendment. But rapidly, the Tories pounced on his argument that he had taken this unusual step in order to protect MPs’ safety. His actions had come after pressure from Labour directly. The right has used Hoyle’s actions to generate a violent storm about political protest, the Muslim communities, and ultimately immigration and Britain’s multicultural character. MPs and their staff must always be protected from threats of violence, but that cannot be a reason to generate a full-blown campaign to tarnish legitimate political protest or to open the door to racism. As the Labour MP Zarah Sultana has said, “I am concerned that the debate about public engagement with MPs is being used by some as a pretext to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement, whipping up Islamophobia in the process.” Zarah Sultana was right.
The dynamic has been evident but it is necessary to join the dots to spell out what is involved. The (ex-Tory) MP Lee Anderson’s Islamophobic attack on London Mayor Sadiq Khan MP, claimed “Islamists” had “got control” of the Mayor and he had “given away our capital” to extremists. In defence and justification of the comments Anderson then said:
“It absolutely makes me sick to the pit of my stomach to see these extremists on our streets in London terrorising people…
“I think I have a right – I believe in free speech – to say that I think mayor Khan has lost, and the police have lost, control of the streets of London.”
Within this escalation, Tory MP Paul Scully called parts of Tower Hamlets in London and Sparkhill in Birmingham “no-go areas.” And Suella Braverman stated that “[w]e have towns and cities around the United Kingdom where multiculturalism has failed,” where there people who “are in Britain but not of Britain.” As the political reporter Adam Bienkov noted, that is the rhetoric of the far right.
Very early in the siege of Gaza, Robin Simcox – the Commissioner for Countering Extremism in England and Wales, and formerly at the right wing Henry Jackson Society – used the pro-Palestinian demonstrations as a lever to attack multiculturalism directly, attacking a “three decade-long failed policy mix of mass migration and multiculturalism.”
Returning the demonstrations for a further round of headlines, Simcox has claimed they have caused London to be a “no-go zone for Jews every weekend”.
Denouncing “threats of violence from a mob of Islamist and far-Left extremists” the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick last weekend used the present debate to say it represented a “damning indictment of the failures of multiculturalism”, and said Britain must “end the disastrous experiment with mass migration.” Indeed he was even clearer on Twitter/X: “How do we cure this sickness and build a united country? It starts by consigning the disastrous experiment of mass migration to history.”
So this is where the right wing reaction against movement for a ceasefire leads: an ideological offensive that involves open Islamophobia in the media, attacking both the Muslim Mayor of London and Muslims generally; attacks against demonised “far left” and “Islamist” marchers; rhetoric about mob rule and forces trying to tear the country apart; a new attack on diverse communities such as “no go areas”; and open attacks on multiculturalism and immigration.
The storm over Anderson’s statements also gave a new platform for the right wing Reform UK party.
Whilst Labour took a clear line over Lee Anderson’s Islamophobia, it is not able or willing to resist the wider ideological drive because it has conceded so much ground. It was the Labour leadership that pushed Hoyle to upend Parliamentary procedure in the first instance, the incident that gave the latest offensive momentum. It has not intervened to do anything to try to hold back its underlying driving forces. Indeed, Labour’s initial response to the Palestine demonstrations was to try to forbid MPs attending them. David Evans, the party’s general secretary, instructed Labour councillors that ‘they must not, under any circumstance’ attend any protest or demonstration. Constituency parties were urged not to take their banners on the protests. Labour’s position on Gaza conferred legitimacy on Israel’s actions in Gaza in several direct ways, placing it at odds with sections of the population. But on top of that, as the mass movement was faced with a deluge of opposition from the right, Labour’s negative stance towards it played into and reinforced the narrative of its critics.
The zeal with which figures such as Braverman have undertaken their charge points to the kind of opposition the Tories will be to the incoming Labour government. They will be waiting for it to fail and itching to continue their aggressive approach.
Since the attacks on the Palestine movement are a trojan horse for a racist ideological right wing offensive against Muslims and multiculturalism, so – equally – every success of the mass movement for the Palestinians is by definition a setback for the most right wing and poisonous politics in Britain.
And defence of the rights of a peaceful political movement in opposition to a human rights catastrophe is an ABC of progressive politics.
- This article was originally published by Simon Fletcher’s Modern Left on March 8th, 2024.
- You can become a subscriber of Modern Left to receive exclusive content and support the platform here; and follow Simon Fletcher on twitter here.
Keep up the urgent call for a ceasefire in Gaza – Ben Jamal, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
“Where was I? This is the moral test our leaders are failing as they continue to lend political, diplomatic, financial, and military support (including the ongoing sale of arms) to Israel”
Ben Jamal, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, explains why it’s so important we continue to build the mass protests for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Palestinians right now are facing the darkest moment in their enduring struggle for liberation. Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 30,000 people – 70% of them women and children – with thousands more missing, presumed dead under the rubble. Denied access to food, water, and essential supplies, at least 400,000 Palestinians face starvation.
On Christmas Day, in an astonishing sermon from his pulpit in Bethlehem, the Palestinian priest Munther Isaac, said this. “Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. A genocide. We will rise and stand up again from the midst of destruction, as we have always done as Palestinians. I want you to look at the mirror… and ask: where was I?”
Where was I? This is the moral test our leaders are failing as they continue to lend political, diplomatic, financial, and military support (including the ongoing sale of arms) to Israel, even as it stands trial for the crime of genocide.
By contrast, hundreds of thousands of British citizens from all corners of society have been responding with extraordinary waves of solidarity. The marches PSC has been leading in London, with partners including CND, have seen crowds of up to a million people gathering. Interspersed with these huge mobilisations, we have been leading protests, vigils, marches, and boycotts, in towns and cities across the UK. PSC has seen our number of branches grow from 75 in October to now almost a 100, and our subscriber base go from 75,000 to over 300,000.
The Government has responded with a wave of repression. Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have demonised those protesting as hate mongers, with pressure exerted on the police to be even heavier handed in their policing of marches. Now Lord Walney – a previous Chair of Labour Friends of Israel and a government advisor on political violence – has called on party leaders to ban their MPs and councillors from engagement with PSC.
These actions are an assault on our democratic rights and should be resisted. They are also an attempt to turn the conversation away from Israel’s genocide and the Government’s responsibility to take action to halt it.
But we will not allow this to distract us nor silence the voices of Palestinians. The best response we can give is to continue to protest until a ceasefire is called, the occupation is ended, apartheid is dismantled, and the Palestinian people from the river to the sea are finally able to live in freedom with their rights respected.
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