Marching Days

On London Palestine Marches, Synagogues and Cultural Christianity

Things I’m reading:

I’m slowly working through Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir’s remarkable 2018 collection The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. It’s a very significant text and feels like required reading for anyone active in this area.

I found this academic article by Raz Segal very topical and helpful: Settler Antisemitism, Israeli Mass Violence, and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Connected to it, this piece from Shira Kline on the political divide amongst Holocaust studies scholars is also excellent.

A great piece on Palestinian anti-Nazi art from the 1940s.

I liked this piece from almost a year ago by Shane Burley - Why Antisemitism is an Insufficient (and Risky) Explanation for Hamas’s October 7 Attack on Israel.

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As I finish writing this on 14/1/2025 it feels like a ceasefire/prisoner exchange deal is on the verge of being announced. I very much hope it is. Even if it happens, the war will not necessarily end, and I suspect that Palestine marches will continue.

I wanted to write something on the police restrictions placed on the planned National Palestine March on January 18^th. In short, despite previously having agreed to it, the police have banned the PSC from beginning their march outside Portland Place, the BBC headquarters, which the PSC hoped to use to highlight criticisms of the BBCs coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza. Jewish and pro-Israel groups (and sadly the line between the two is increasingly non-existent) called for the march to be banned or the route changed due to the proximity of the starting point to Central Synagogue (the entrance to which is in Hallam Street), pressure which was amplified by politicians and the press. Last week the police caved on this and said they would use the Public Order Act to prevent the PSC using that starting point on that day, explicitly due to a supposed need to protect synagogue-attending Jews on Shabbat. In the last couple of days, the PSC has said they will reverse the route – starting at Whitehall and ending at the BBC. Despite the fact that this would avoid the arrival of the marchers clashing with the end of Shabbat services, and very few shul-goers would be around, the police have said that the restrictions around Portland Place will remain, showing a predictable lack of understanding of the times when most Jews are in shul.

Now obviously this is all nonsense. Right-wing politicians of all stripes have been attempting to ban the national Palestine marches from day one, no doubt embarrassed by the attention they brings to the UK’s military support and arms sales to Israel. They have thus jumped on ‘Jewish concerns’ as a useful pretext to demand police crackdowns on public protest. Naturally, Jewish communal groups have been all too happy to go along with this, with spokespeople, including the Chief Rabbi, frequently presenting them as ‘hate marches’. But to use the approach beloved of hasbaraists, if any other country were perpetrating a genocide, wouldn’t you expect to see large protests?

So far, the marches have not been blocked, though one was made to start later to avoid coinciding with synagogue exit times, a harbinger of what is occurring now. Despite the claims, the marches have been peaceful, have never targeted synagogues or Jewish buildings, and have included thousands of Jews on each one, many part of the dedicated ‘Jewish Bloc’. I largely agree with the Jewish Bloc’s statement on this, and with the 800 Jewish signatories to this open letter and appreciate that the march represents absolutely no threat to the nearby synagogue or those who will attend it that day. I could end it there. But I think there’s more to say.

There are a handful of synagogues in central London, in the part where marches tend to occur. There’s Central Synagogue, where I once worked, there’s the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in Marble Arch and there’s the West London Synagogue (WLS) around the corner from it. Very slightly further out there’s Westminster Synagogue near Hyde Park, a Reform synagogue that resulted from a split from WLS in the 1950s and the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater. These synagogues mostly hearken back to the 19^th Century when wealthier Jews were moving out of the traditional area of immigrant settlement, the East End and City of London. The first two are United Synagogue, but not too many of the members are observant, and few members can afford to live close enough to walk there on Shabbat, as Orthodoxy formally requires. The West London Synagogue is Reform, formed more around principles of convenience than theology, when West End Jews did not wish to travel back to the Great Synagogue in the East End for services (the Great was the flagship synagogue of British Jewry, but was heavily bombed during the Blitz and never recovered). On top of these communities you have the remaining East End synagogues, of which the Ashkenazi ones are small and struggle to get a minyan (see the excellent short film ‘The 10th man’), but the Sephardi Bevis Marks, formed in the years after the readmission of Jews to England in the 1650s, continues to thrive.

The upshot is that whatever their membership, the numbers attending these communities on Shabbat is not huge. Most British Jews live North West London, in the boroughs of Barnet, Hertsmere, Brent and Harrow. Those who are Shabbat observant would not come into Central London on Saturday; it is simply too far to walk, And of those that do attend the Central London synagogues, most do not do so on foot, due to the vast cost of living in or near Central London. Most attendees will either drive (though the congestion charge has lessened that) or come by Tube. If they attend a Reform synagogue they do so openly, if Orthodox they keep shtum about it (hence the Anglo-Jewish cliché of making sure to park around the corner from the synagogue, to appear to have walked there).

As stated above, I don’t believe there has been any threat to synagogues or Jews in Central London from the protests. Yes, there have been some arrests made on the marches, but these are not due to protestors harassing Jews, rather they resulted from police spotting placards deemed to be extremist or antisemitic and going in to arrest the offenders. We are talking about speech acts rather than physical attacks. I don’t doubt that there have been cases of visible Jews or Israelis getting verbally abused, accused of supporting genocide in the last 15 months. Unless the person concern is engaged in pro-Israel activity at the time (such as flag-waving), such abuse is unacceptable. But I see no evidence that such acts have arisen particularly around the Palestine marches – they have occurred in a great variety of settings. At the same time, I don’t doubt that many Jews believe that the marches are a threat to them. Propaganda is an effective thing; for 15 months, Jews who regularly read Jewish newspapers and consume Jewish social media have been told that these are essentially anti-Jewish, pro-Hamas marches, and that that they represent a threat to their personal well-being. It would be surprising if at least some of them, especially those whose social world is almost entirely Jewish/Israeli, didn’t end up believing it.

I suspect that even some of the people writing the propaganda, the newspaper editors, journalists and social media warriors, buy into this narrative too, based on the famed capacity of people to believe their own bullshit. It’s not hard to understand why people might think like this – if you are trying to avoid thinking about the consequences of Israel’s war of destruction in Gaza, it’s much more palatable to focus on the ‘global rise in antisemitism’. The former risks implicating you in (arguably genocidal) violence, the latter presents you as the victim, a much more attractive narrative. It also puts diaspora Jews at the centre of things – suddenly we go from outsiders to a distant conflict to co-victims of antisemitism and Islamism with our Israeli brothers and sisters. It makes us feel like we really matter.

A key source of the fear of the protests is that most British Jews, outside the radicals of the Jewish bloc, have never been anywhere near one. All they see is the carefully curated videos from groups like the Campaign Against Antisemitism, presenting the marches as rife with antisemitism and pro-Hamas sentiment. One factor that serves as a deterrent to traditional, observant or Orthodox Jews attending is that they are always held on a Saturday, beginning around 11.30-12 in the morning. Even if they wanted to politically, Orthodox/observant Jews will simply not come because of Shabbat. But even many traditional Jews, who do travel on Shabbat to some degree, may stay away because they will be in shul at that time, which tends to go on until 12.30-1 and is often followed by family lunches. Everything in the timing of these marches tells observant and traditional Jews that they are not designed for them. Personally, I work in a synagogue on Shabbat mornings, and the travel time means that it would be impossible to get to the marches before 2pm, thus missing most of it. As a result, I have only made it to one of them, despite my strong political agreement with their cause.

The timing issue is not new. Throughout my life, all left-wing marches, on all kinds of issues, have exclusively taken place on Saturdays. Occasionally they have clashed with Jewish festivals, like Rosh Hashanah in 2003. I’m not saying this is an intentional attempt to keep out religious Jews. I’m saying that it’s an issue nobody ever thinks about.

I assume the tradition of holding marches on Saturdays goes back some way – perhaps to the CND marches of the 1950s, perhaps earlier still. What is abundantly clear – but never mentioned – is that the choice to hold marches on Saturday is a hangover from cultural Christianity, which is still a major force in much of Britain. Despite being half of the weekend, Sunday is not considered as a possible marching day because of its status as the traditional Christian day of rest. So many traditions follow from this: the religious programmes on TV and radio, the ‘Sunday roast’ tradition, people going for walks in the countryside, a tendency to choose Saturday over Sunday as the primary shopping day.

When Jews raise complaints of antisemitism we are listened to, to an almost embarrassing degree, by Tory and Labour politicians desperate to use us to fulfil their reactionary and carceral agendas. But when we raise issues of events clashing with Shabbat and Jewish festivals? Crickets. I experienced this while a member of my local Labour Party some years ago. The CLP loved to talk about how tough it was on antisemites, supporting expelling them from the party etc. But when I pointed out that they had scheduled the monthly meeting on Kol Nidrei, they seemed not to be able to compute the issue. It would be impossible to accommodate all religious festivals they said, even though they would clearly never hold a meeting on Christmas Day or on Good Friday, the equivalents of Yom Kippur. This is not antisemitism. It’s hegemonic Christianity, Christo-normativity we might term it.

The police have said the march is only being prevented from starting in that location on a Saturday and would be permitted on another day. When PSC director Ben Jamal was asked about holding it on a Sunday he replied: ‘On Sunday, the transport situation is terrible and so Saturday is the day we demonstrate’. This is ludicrous. Yes, trains are worse on Sundays - which is in itself a symptom of cultural Christianity - but they do run, and millions of people travel on them, and the tube runs absolutely normally. To say that ‘Saturday is the day we demonstrate’ is basically ventriloquising Tevye and crying ‘Tradition!’. Owen Jones wrote on Twitter that ‘because of work, family and travel, national protests only happen on Saturdays’, as if this was some iron-law of the British constitution or Das Kapital. Come on. The sky would not fall in if on occasions, Palestine marches, or any left-wing demos were held on a Sunday. It would vary our very formulaic and unimaginative approach to left-wing events. It would demonstrate a bit of creativity. It might even attract others who work on Saturday or are busy that day taking their kids to clubs.

Now I understand that the PSC doesn’t want to be seen to cave in to the police. And it fears conceding the idea that the marches are a threat to synagogues. But I think there’s a way for it to avoid these concerns. It should state that it is moving the march to Sunday (or to another Sunday) – in order for more Jews to attend, particularly those normally prevented from attending by shabbat observance. It should say this loud and clear – they are doing this not because the marches put Jews at risk, but on the contrary because Jews wish to join, without having to compromise their religion. For Jewish inclusion, rather than Jewish fear. I’m not saying the numbers would be huge, but there would be some and their presence would be a powerful rebuttal to the ‘hate marches’ discourse. And Jewish bloc members could do outreach in the community to try and encourage more such people to attend – perhaps meeting points at NW London tube stations in order to travel down together, as many local PSC groups do. It wouldn’t hurt if the PSC could book a Jewish anti-war speaker too, albeit someone more centrist than the Jewish bloc, like a Rabbi (many more would be available on a Sunday) or one of the relatives of an Israeli hostage, who have been campaigning for a ceasefire for the last year. I’m sure some in the PSC wouldn’t be keen on this, but surely after 15 months of marches that haven’t succeeded in forcing an end to the war it’s worth trying something a little different? A greater presence of shul-going Jews on the march would send a message to the rest of the community that they are welcoming to Jews and make it far more difficult for the government to demonise and restrict future marches. It would be good for the PSC, good for the Palestinian cause in Britain, and even good for the Jews.