Report From The Pro-Palestine Protest In London

Moments ago, Reid and I returned from a massive pro-Palestinian rally in London. Even this framing, however, is not quite right. With 50,000 attendees, it was a hodgepodge of different interests, some competing, some comporting, others seeming to have nothing to do with anything: anti-Israeli, anti-capitalist, pro-communist, pro-peace, anti-Jewish, and others who were just generally outraged.

Genocide:

I’ll mention three quick caveats before I detail my observations: 1) In the four hours we attended, I approached approximately 100 people and asked the question, “What would you like the world to know?” After they responded, I followed up with some variant of, “What solutions do you have to this problem?” Slightly fewer than half of the people I approached were willing to speak on camera. Consequently, there was significant selection bias, that is, people who were willing to speak to me may have held certain beliefs and people who refused to converse shared other sets of beliefs. There’s no way to know this unless you asked the people who wouldn’t speak to me what they believed, and as they wouldn’t speak to me there’s no way to know what they believed. 2) I don’t know what the individuals I spoke to actually believe. I only know what they told me. 3) There are laws in the UK that prohibit people from stating that they support groups that the government has designated as terrorist.

With these caveats in mind, here are my observations:

1) Of the individuals born in the UK with whom I spoke, the vast majority explicitly blamed capitalism for the conflict. Many but not most were members of socialist organizations who were distributing leaflets or socialist newspapers. Others were ostensibly unaffiliated but were animated about the global injustices they believed capitalism caused historically and continues to cause. When asked for solutions to the capitalist menace that plagued the world, I was regurgitated tired Marxist platitudes, “Workers of the world must unite,” and “The working class must band together against their oppressors”.

What was particularly interesting was when I asked these individuals what role religion plays in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, universally they responded with “little” or “almost none”. I attempted to ask follow-up questions to tease out their reasoning, but the context made this extremely challenging. It would have been illuminating to do Spectrum Street Epistemology on this particular claim.

Socialism:

2) When not blaming capitalism, colonialism was another frequent culprit. One attendee looked at the problem through a racial lens, blaming “white supremacist colonialist settlers,” while others looked at the conflict through a values lens, stating that the war is an inevitable outcome of the urge to colonize peaceful peoples.

3) Cliches abounded, “Peace now,” “Dignity for all peoples,” “Human rights for everyone,” but solutions were in short supply. When I asked respondents what they thought the solution was, very, very few people had a practical response beyond, “Stop bombing” and “Start dialogue”. I noticed that native-born people in the UK frequently added “It’s complicated,” but I did not hear this even once from someone with a foreign accent.

Platitudes Abound:

Solutions: “It’s complicated,” “I don’t know”

Two State Solution:

4) Physically, the vibe was far more chilled than I expected. I didn’t feel physically or verbally threatened. The police were also quite nice—on two separate occasions I bumped into police officers and they said, “Excuse me, sir,” even though I was the one who was not paying attention. Perhaps it’s just gray hair privilege.

5) While I felt physically safe at the event, I frequently heard the chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. While I am far from an expert in this area, my understanding of this phrase—which seems to be supported by internet searches and recent governmental action in Vienna—is that Palestinians should control land from Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in other words, all of Israel’s borders. That seems to entail not merely the erasure of the Israeli state but with it the challenge to any Jewish presence. Again, while being outside my area of expertise, this seems to be a mainstream interpretation of the phrase. If this is incorrect, please let me know in the comments.

Finally, I was expecting unrestrained Jew hatred and frothing at the mouth, enraged attendees, but I only caught whiffs from the individuals who were willing to speak with me. While nobody said anything that caused me to reflect on my views, and I did not hear anything that I considered to be particularly insightful, my takeaway was that while feelings were strong, solutions were in short supply. And that, frankly, is cause for concern.  

I Know You!: