Ben Jamal@BenJamalpsc
There is a question often thrown at those who protest and march for the Palestinian people on the streets of London- Why do you care so much about a “ conflict” thousands of miles away? It is not a genuine question- It is an accusation built on the premiss that there must be a sinister motivation, rooted in hatred. There is an answer which speaks to the principle that lies at the heart of all internationalist solidarity- that justice has no borders- that an injury to anyone anywhere is an injury to everyone everywhere. It is an answer that is also a riposte to those organising what is a hate march tomorrow- the far right - who believe that what truly binds people is not a common humanity but the identifying markers of nationality, race, religion or ethnicity . But there is a second answer which Karma Nabulsi the Palestinian academic and activist always used to give to this question- “Because Palestinian history is British history.”
Tomorrows march is both a protest and a commemoration. It commemorates the Nakba, the catastrophe enacted between 1947 and 1948, which saw the state of Israel established through a process of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians - Over 750k driven into exile including most of my extended family- over 500 Palestinians towns and villages wiped off the map. This great crime was the inevitable outcome of a Zionist project driven by the belief that the Jewish people had a right to colonise Palestine and establish their own state. This was a truth openly acknowledged by Jabotinsky – the Godfather of revisionist Zionism , the ideology, which ,through Likud, has dominated Israeli politics in the last 78 years. He once wrote “ it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting Palestine from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority". Such a project ,he knew , could only be enacted via the use of overwhelming force. But the Nakba which is protested tomorrow is not a moment of historical trauma but an ongoing process of enforcing a system of racist domination though ethnic cleansing, colonisation, dispossession, murder , torture, and now genocide. And the roots of all of this lie in the Balfour declaration , and the 28 years of British mandate during which the British state, accepting the racist logic of Zionism laid the pathway for the inevitable act of violent dispossession that is the Nakba . Remember Balfour’s words “Zionism , be it right or wrong, … is rooted in age long traditions…. In future hopes of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land” Never mind that when Balfour wrote those words , those 700k Arabs constituted 94% of the population.
Not only has Britain never acknowledged its historical responsibilities, it has for 78 years, continued to be a willing partner in the enactment of Israel’s system of racist oppression, maintaining that active complicity even as the crime of apartheid descended into the crime of genocide.
So those marching tomorrow do so because they understand this history .They march because they understand that opposition to the racism that will be exhibited on the Tommy Robinson march ,which threatens the future of marginalised communities in the Uk, demands opposition to all systems of racist oppression wherever they exist. Nelson Mandela understood this when he said that the freedom of the South African people from the chains of apartheid would be incomplete until Palestinians were also free. That is why people will chant as they march tomorrow – in our thousands and our millions we are all Palestinians. This is not a march of hate . It is a march in support of the principles that bind us all, rooted in a love of our common humanity.
