Over 800,000 filled the streets of London for Palestine on Saturday (Picture: Guy Smallman)
The movement for Palestinian liberation will not win by trying to be respectable.
The sheer size of Saturday’s demonstration and the government’s attempt to shut it down meant that every demonstrator would have felt that what they were doing was powerful.
And it was that power which brought down home secretary Suella Braverman.
For all the talk of hunting down protesters. Our numbers and our unity have hurled back the cops’ and Tories’ attacks on the movement. We need to build on that sense of unashamed, non-defensive defiance.
There can be no concessions to those that say the movement must damp down its militancy to appeal politely to those in power. Protesters should continue to raise the most radical slogans, occupy train stations and block roads.
Everyone who has been out on the streets in solidarity with Palestine should feel buoyed by Braverman’s sacking and use it to argue that massive protests can have a real effect. Now it’s important to maintain the momentum.
This Saturday there are demonstrations for Palestine planned in almost every town and city in Britain.
Those need to be built as big as possible. They are a further chance for people to take their fury at Israel’s crimes on to the street.
But we also need to build more massive national demonstrations and to bring together all the battles against the British government that so slavishly supports those horrors.
Rishi Sunak’s government is falling apart, desperately digging up figures from the past to sustain itself.
It will use Islamophobia and racism in an effort to divide the movement for Palestine. And it continues with its war on working class people at home too.
This is the time to take on the Tories. If the national strikes we saw last year were happening at the same time as the Palestine movement then the government would be even shakier.
Yet just as the crisis bites, the trade union leaders are reining back the resistance. Sunak does not have to worry about a mass strike movement.
And Keir Starmer who refused to back workers’ strikes now lines up with the Israeli assaults.
We need more protests over Palestine and more direct action. And we also need to fight for more strikes.
If the union leaders won’t call it then grassroots activists must do it themselves. The workplace day of action this week was a good initiative. But we must spread such resistance much further. We need to aim high—to paralyse and to smash the imperialist war machine.
The movement for Palestine is not tired, it is not in retreat. It needs to keep driving forwards to bring down the Zionists and all who support them.
There are more union banners on protests
