Over 300,000 marched in London on Saturday, in a powerful demonstration of support for a Palestinian state and against the genocidal war being waged by the Zionist regime in Gaza.
This demonstration was the first to take place following the Israeli security cabinet voting to approve prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for the military to take over Gaza City in preparation for the complete occupation of Gaza by the Israeli army.
Across the world, mass demonstrations took place to condemn the slaughter and starvation that has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, and this latest plan by the Israeli regime to send troops into Gaza City and forcibly remove or kill the one million Palestinians who have sought shelter there.
Thousands of workers and youth took to the streets in cities including Paris, Madrid, Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Istanbul demanding an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israeli imposed starvation in Gaza.
The central demand of the London and all the other marches and demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people was for an end to the international support for the Zionist regime.
While over 300,000 workers and youth were marching in London against Zionist genocide, the Labour government of Keir Starmer was determined to enforce the ban on any show of support for the Palestine Action group.
Palestine Action was banned under the Terrorism Act 2000 in July on the insistence of Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper that the group was a threat to national security. Anyone expressing support for the group is liable to arrest and facing a possible sentence of 14 years in jail.
Over 200 people had already been arrested across the country for holding placards expressing support for the Palestine Action group, in some cases even holding a Palestinian flag and demanding an end to genocide was enough grounds for arrest.
The Metropolitan Police warned of mass arrests on Saturday, in an attempt to intimidate and silence the growing mass opposition to an Israeli regime that the International Court of Justice has accused of genocide and whose prime minister Netanyahu has international arrest warrants issued against him by the court.
For Starmer and the Labour government, the real criminals are not to be found in Netanyahu’s regime that has bombed, slaughtered, maimed and is now deliberately starving over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
For Starmer, the criminals are peaceful protesters, many elderly pensioners, holding placards. But all the threats didn’t deter supporters from expressing their backing for the group.
Over 530 people were arrested as ‘approximately 1,000 sign holders’, according to the campaign group Defend Our Juries, gathered in Parliament Square on Saturday, denouncing Zionist genocide and holding placards with the message ‘I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’.
The Guardian paper reported one woman being dragged away by the police pointing at Parliament saying: ‘Arrest the people over there, arrest the people complicit in the genocide.’
The great mass of workers and youth are taking up the demand for action to end the continued political, logistical and military support that the Starmer government has given to the Israeli state.
What is required immediately, is for the working class of the world mobilising to take action by calling general strikes to bring down their governments that enable genocide and replace them with workers governments and socialism.
The TUC Congress is meeting on September 7th in Brighton and workers must force the leaders of the trade unions to call a general strike or be removed and replaced with a leadership prepared to bring down this Labour government and go forward to a workers government that will not only recognise the state of Palestine but provide it with all the material support required for the defeat of the Israeli occupation and the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
We urge workers and youth to join the Young Socialists lobby of the TUC on Sunday 7th September to demand an immediate general strike in support of Palestine. This is the way forward.