Traditionally, here is what happens when Armistice Day falls on a Saturday. Millions observe a two-minute silence at 11am to remember the fallen. Life otherwise continues as it always does. Football grounds are crammed with cheering fans, pubs and clubs are packed with intoxicated revellers, high streets abound with bargain hunters. In short, an average Saturday, sprinkled with standard doses of cavorting, laziness and idle pleasures.
None of these activities had been considered an insulting lack of respect for Armistice Day. But a new exception has suddenly been invented, ad hoc, by those seeking to ban this Saturday’s protest against Israel’s blood-soaked onslaught in Gaza. An activity that is, literally, marching for an armistice on Armistice Day. This transparently cynical ruse has nothing to do with preserving the memory of my great-great-uncle Francis Aylett, mowed down aged 19 at the Somme, or any other lost soldier. Indeed, any insult to their sacrifice comes from those seeking to ban a peace protest whose message they object to.
That the Met apparently could not find a reason to ban the protest, despite coming under the pressure of our demagogic home secretary, Suella Braverman, says it all. Ever since Israel’s forces began the assault on Gaza that has killed more than 10,000 Palestinians, according to figures released by the Hamas-controlled health authority, each protest for peace has passed off, well, peacefully. At the biggest demonstration, which perhaps up to half a million people attended, there were just 10 arrests. Saturday’s protest is scheduled to start at 12.45pm, long after the two-minute silence ends. It begins at Hyde Park, two miles from the Cenotaph, and it finishes at the US embassy, further away still.
British Jewish activists have marched at every protest, and directly organised some actions. They have organised their own Jewish Bloc this Saturday, meeting at the Simon Bolivar statue in Belgrave Square, Belgravia. It is a perverse insult to suggest they would ever consider participating in protests that harass the Jewish community.
So let us be clear about what is really going on here. Those who support what the UN secretary general, António Guterres, describes as “collective punishment” of the Palestinian people know that any semblance of a moral high ground has been razed by Israeli missiles. They know that the vast majority of the British public abhorred Hamas’s atrocities, and also must speak out against a humanitarian catastrophe that leaves newborn babies being incinerated by bombs and pregnant women forced to give birth without medicines or anaesthetic. Nor do they take well to schools, hospitals, ambulances and refugee camps alike being bombed, or a conflict that has already killed 41 journalists, and more children in a month than the annual number killed in conflicts over the last four years.
That polling suggests just 3% oppose an immediate ceasefire leaves Israel’s apologists in government and the media politically exposed. Their counterattack? Turn the world upside down. Demonise those who oppose the mass slaughter of innocent people as the real hateful, dangerous extremists. Portray those defending a military assault that, each day, wipes out entire generations of families as the real respectable voices of moderation.
There is an even more sinister end. Many commentators have not been subtle over their objections to the protests being driven by the number of British Muslims attending. Talk of deporting protesters who desecrate war memorials exploits bigotries about the demonstration being full of Muslim protesters with disloyal extremist inclinations. Anyone who has attended the demonstrations knows this is a vile deceit. Many Muslims have attended – unsurprising given how many of their fellow believers are being slaughtered – and they are like any other protesters: ordinary citizens who are traumatised by an atrocity facilitated by the support of our government.
There is an attempt to stigmatise any form of Palestinian solidarity, too: to deter from acting on their disquiet. This protects the government from public pressure, allowing it to continue offering carte blanche to Israel’s human and strategic catastrophe.
The Metropolitan police may yet bend to political pressure, underlining how rotten 13 years of Tory rule has left our democracy. There are other risks, too. The ceaseless demonisation of Palestinian sympathisers as menacing fanatics leaves far-right activists feeling legitimised, believing their opponents are fair game. These extremists – who support Israel’s onslaught – are mobilising on Saturday, and they understandably believe they have the tacit support of the government, given their position on the protesters is one and the same. If they seek to disrupt the protests, then the government and their media allies should be held to account. The rhetoric of Braverman and her media allies is dangerous.
The most likely outcome is that Britain’s diverse communities will flood the streets this Saturday, in our country’s long tradition of mass movements for peace. Rather than a “hate march”, as Braverman – whose particular specialism is hate – puts it, this protest is driven by a love for humanity. Rather than an insult to the dead, there is no more fitting legacy to remember the horrors of war by seeking to end them. As Harry Patch, the last surviving Tommy, put it: “War is organised murder and nothing else.” Who could look at the mass graves of Gaza and conclude otherwise?
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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