Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of London this Saturday chanting “Free Palestine!” and flying Palestinian flags. Police maintained close surveillance of the street march, although they did not intervene directly despite Interior Secretary Suella Braverman’s warning that flying a Palestinian flag could be considered a “criminal offense” in the context of the current conflict in Israel. .
The crowd chanted slogans such as “Israel, terrorist state” and “Stop the massacre in Gaza!”, but there were no direct references to Hamas, nor chants referring to the use of violence.
“Many Britons have felt intimidated this week by the messages sent from the Government, but we are supposed to be in a democracy and that we still have the right to freedom of expression,” alleged the artist David Hugh Lockett, opening the demonstration with a replica of the Guernica.
“The horror that Picasso expressed is the same horror that the population in Gaza is now experiencing,” Lockett warned. “Hamas’ actions were aberrant, but they cannot justify what is happening, with the green light from the United States, the United Kingdom and even our Labor opposition leader Keir Starmer.”
A Palestinian flag of more than 15 meters opened the march and was waved by dozens of arms in clear defiance of Suella Braverman’s instructions to the police, following the incidents of anti-Semitism recorded this week.
“They cannot deny us the right to peacefully demonstrate and demand justice and an end to the indiscriminate military aggression against the civilian population in Gaza,” said Ben Jamal, spokesperson for the Stop the War Coalition and one of the organizers of the pro-Palestinian march. the largest recorded on British soil since the beginning of the conflict.
“We have called on protesters in London to fly the Palestinian flag and keep it high,” said another of the organizers, Ismail Patel, head of Friends of Al-Aqsa. “The British have been able to express opposition against their own government in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and have never been obstructed in this way from expressing their opinion.”
To cries of “Shame on Sunak!” They intensified as the march passed through Downing Street, where dozens of pro-Israel protesters held vigils during the week for the victims of the Hamas attacks.
From Glasgow, the senior minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, Humza Yousaf, married to a woman of Palestinian origin (Nadia el Nakla) and with his in-laws trapped in Gaza, warned that Isreael’s military retaliation has gone “too far” and that the “collective punishment” of the civilian population must be “condemned by the international community.”
The pro-Palestinian marches took place in a long dozen British cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, amid warnings to protesters that displays of support for Hamas would not be tolerated.
Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn closed the London march with a direct tirade against Israel’s actions. “If we believe in international laws, if we believe in human rights, we have to be condemning what is happening in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli army,” Corbyn proclaimed at an open microphone, criticized at the time for confronting anti-Semitism in the Party. Labor.
