According to their own literature, the organisers of next month’s planned London 'Enough' demonstration against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories are ‘a group of charities, trade unions, faith and other campaign groups …[who] have come together because … [they] want peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike’.
Such peace demands, they say, that the British government ‘stand up for international law and human rights’ which they accuse the British government of having failed to stand up for in the case of the Palestinians.
In light of the current internecine war in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah, a war that has resulted in over 50 Palestinian fatalities, many of whom have been innocent non-combatants caught up in the cross-fire, a good test of the sincerity and good faith of the organisers of next month's demonstration will, paradoxically, be whether they are willing to use the occasion to call for a return of Israeli occupation in the name of very same Palestinian human rights as they claim led them to organise it in the first place.
This is because, since the outbreak of the current violence in Gaza, a yearning has apparently overtaken many of its hapless residents for a return of the Israeli devil they once knew.
In this clip from a BBC TV news report, a resident of Gaza, whose life-savings have literally just gone up in smoke in the cross-fire, is seen gesticulating despairingly at the neighbours of his standing around in the background and pitifully to declare of them: ‘Most of the people, if you asked them, will tell you: we pray that Israel will come back and rule us.’
Well, for better or ill, of course, the Israelis won’t, unless to root out the Hamas forces still firing rockets at their civilians from bases there, even after the end of Israel's occupation of Gaza.
But it’s not, of course, just the sheer daily terror that Palestinians with guns seem willing to afflict upon their fellow Palestinians in Gaza that should be of concern to those here opposed to Israeli occupation out of professed concern for the human rights of Palestinians. There is also the disturbing systematic anti-Semitic brainwashing their young children undergo daily, as do other young Muslim children throughout the Middle East, with the full knowledge and connivance of the various political authorities there, as this clip reveals.
Should the organisers of next month’s London demonstration be genuinely concerned for the human rights of Palestinians, oughtn't they also to be demonstrating even more about these human rights’ violations, rather than just focussing on what, in light of these two clips, seems a perfectly understandable and justifiable reluctance on the part of the Israelis to countenance a right of return which seemingly so exercises the demonstration organisers?
And do these same organisers not also see how, given Hamas’ avowed commitment to destroy the State of Israel and to expel from the land on which it stands all its Jewish inhabitants, why Israel refuses to relinquish any part of the West Bank, until and unless doing so forms part of a comprehensive peace settlement between itself and its neighbours, a precondition of which is a recongition by all parties of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state?
Apparently not. As well as being seemingly blind to the realities of daily life in Gaza since the withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlements, many of the organisers of next month's demonstration also seem clueless as to the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Not all are, of course, and those who aren't should give even greater cause of concern to right-minded people here than those useful idiots, especially the Jewish ones, who have signed up to the demonstration without apparently having a clue as to what the real agenda is of those who campaign so relentlesslsy for an end to Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and a full right of return for Palestinians.
