A counterproductive protest

On Sunday 27 October, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz organised a conference on the ongoing Gaza war at JW3, a Jewish cultural and community centre in northwest London. The conference was addressed by numerous Israeli and Palestinian activists, including Palestinian socialist Ayman Odeh, Rula Hardal, the Palestinian co-leader of the “A Land for All” initiative, and two leaders of the left-wing Standing Together movement.

A small counter-protest against the conference also took place. Protestors waved Palestinian and Lebanese flags, with banners and placards reading “Stop Arming Israel” and “Stop Funding Genocide”. Given most speakers were staunch opponents of the war and occupation, and none were representing the arms industry, holding an ostensibly anti-war protest outside their conference seems an odd choice.

Reports suggest protestors chanted “Palestine is not your home” and “genocide supporters” at speakers and attendees walking into the conference. It is not even clear whether chants of “Palestine is not your home” were intended as addressed only to Jewish attendees. Perhaps the protestors believe that Ayman Odeh, Rula Hardal, Sondos Saleh, and other Palestinian participants should be expelled from their homeland, for the crime of believing it should be shared with Israeli Jews.

Videos from the protest show some chants of “Palestine is not your home” being prefixed with “settlers, settlers, go back home”. Who are such chants aimed at? The choice to chant that where the conference organisers oppose the settlement of the West Bank strongly suggests the protesters consider all Israeli Jews to be “settlers”. If so, where do they believe is “home” for Jewish Israelis, most of whom were born in Israel and descend from Holocaust refugees or Mizrahi Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern or Arab countries?

A case could be made for protests specifically targeting the participation in the conference of Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel responsible for perpetuating policies of occupation and colonial violence against Palestinians. But footage of the protest gives no indication that Olmert’s presence specifically was the objection. Olmert was speaking alongside Nasser al-Qudwa, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, to discuss prospects for peace. Do the protesters believe al-Qudwa is also a “genocide supporter” who is not entitled to a “home” in Palestine?

The conference attendees were overwhelmingly Jewish. Many, perhaps most, will have been staunch supporters of a ceasefire, and of an end to the occupation. Polling of British Jews shows a clear majority opposes Benjamin Netanyahu. For the counter-protestors, none of this matters. None of the attendees are potential allies in a broad anti-war movement aiming to bring about a halt to the slaughter and increase aid to Gaza. They are all “genocide supporters”.

The politics represented inside the conference by the likes of Odeh, Hardal, Saleh, and even al-Qudwa represent a far better hope for winning material redress for the Palestinian people. The politics represented by chants of “Palestine is not your home” — not outside the headquarters of a settler organisation, but outside a Jewish community centre in London, hosting a conference where speakers argued for a ceasefire, an end to the occupation, and a shared future — are a vicarious-chauvinist fantasy, which dreams of expelling and dispersing Israeli Jews as an answer to the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. That such a fantasy is unlikely to ever be realised does not make its promotion — often, tragically, by people who claim to be left-wing — any less inimical to struggles for equality.