Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2009, pages 58-59
Waging Peace
LONDON DEMO Demands End to Gaza Siege
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ASSEMBLING from across Britain under the banner “Remember Gaza...End the siege now!,” some 10,000 people marched in London on May 16 from Russell Square to a rally at Trafalgar Square.
The demonstration was called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the British Muslim Initiative, the Stop the War Coalition, the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Palestinian Forum in Britain as an adamant reminder that Israel’s air raids and blockade of Gaza were continuing despite cease-fire agreements. Gazans, as a consequence, remained cut off from essential supplies, including not only food and medicine but also materials needed to rebuild their destroyed homes and shattered infrastructure, devastated by Israel in its December-January assault.
At the rally, Lindsey German, a Stop the War leader, reminded everyone that the demo was not only about the people of Gaza but about whether those present would make their voices heard to British policymakers.
Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the European Parliament, summed up the prevailing mood by urging demonstrators to “highlight in every way you can this crucial cause that is vital to the peace of the world.” She called for a “boycott [of] everything Israeli.”
Speakers ranged from trade unionists to students to the Palestinian representative to Britain, Manuel Hassassian.
A number of those addressing the crowd expressed anger at the fact that Avigdor Lieberman, the ultranationalist foreign minister in the current Netanyahu administration, was allowed to sit down for tea with British leaders at Downing Street one week earlier. Martin Linton, a lower house Labor MP, scoffed at Lieberman’s oft-quoted demand that Arab Israelis be made to swear allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state. Linton said that Lieberman, who “as a West Bank settler doesn’t even live in Israel, should instead have to swear his allegiance to a Palestinian state.”
—Roger Gaess
