Liverpool demonstration for Palestine – a report

1,360 words, 7 minutes read time.

This Sunday, I attended the regular Liverpool Friends of Palestine march against the ongoing Israeli military operation in Gaza. This was the seventeenth consecutive Sunday that this march has taken place, though the first I have attended, for various reasons, for several weeks.

As usual, we gathered outside the Liverpool Metropolitan Catholic Cathedral, situated at the end of Hope St, about a ten-minute walk from the city centre.

As you would expect from such a regular event, the numbers in attendance weren’t massive, but I wouldn’t say they have dwindled since my last appearance perhaps five or six weeks ago, with maybe a hardcore of two hundred to two hundred and fifty present, at a rough estimate.

I always take an interest in the composition of the participants. It’s difficult to guess a percentage, but there are always a large enough contingent of people who seem as though they are of Arab/Palestinian extraction to stop it from seeming like just another Leftist bandwagon-jumping exercise. There are always an impressive number of Muslim women, most but not all young present, one of whom tends to lead the chanting via a megaphone.

A small woman with an impressively big voice!

The usual Left suspects were of course present, with many people carrying the almost ubiquitous Socialist Worker’s Party ‘Free Palestine’ placards, though several go to the trouble of cutting off the SWP logo from the top, presumably to disassociate themselves from this organisation. The Revolutionary Communist Group sellers of the ‘Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism’ newspaper are probably the left group that spends most time on the Palestine cause, and not only since October 7^th last year, and so of course they are always present, The Socialist Party/TUSC, as usual, had a couple of selles of ‘The Socialist’ paper, but it would seem they are now outnumbered by their fellow Militant remnant Socialist Appeal, which in a surprise ultra-leftist turn which will have their founding-father old Ted Grant spinning in his grave, are about to become The Revolutionary Communist Party (not to be confused with 1980’s RCG which somehow evolved into Spiked). I bought the second edition of their new ‘The Communist’ newspaper. Although it’s more than thirty years since my involvement with Militant, I can’t help myself from taking an interest in the fortunes of the groups that emerged from its early ‘90’s demise, and on a personal level always liked Ted, so am pleased they are now probably the strongest Trotskyist group in the country.

Strangely, as I’ve noted on previous events, no representatives of ‘Official’ Communism, the Communist Party of Britain, which I was also once a member of, and which is of course associated with the Morning Star newspaper, were to be seen. I say strangely because one of their leading local members, a Unison Regional Secretary who the last I heard had become International Secretary for the national party, used to also be the leading light of Palestinian solidarity in the area.

The only Labour Party banners I’ve seen on these marches come from Wallasey, ‘over the water’ as we say here, and the generally more leftist Walton branch, though I didn’t see them yesterday. The banner of the Wirral (also ‘over the water’) Green Party was there as usual. As for the Trade Unions, the RMT are always represented, as was the case yesterday. In the past, I’ve also seen FBU and Unison banners, though this wasn’t the case yesterday.

The march was, again as usual, minimally policed, and peaceful, with a lot of support from members of the public, either beeping car horns, or applauding from the pavement. The latter was particularly pronounced as we made our way down Bold St, which is considered the ‘bohemian’ centre of Liverpool, and where the excellent, independent, cooperative bookshop News From Nowhere is situated, along with many fine eating and drinking establishments. This public support is always heartwarming. The ongoing onslaught against Gaza and the Palestinian people in general, really does seem to have won most ordinarily none-political people over to the side of the Palestinian cause: maybe it’s simply our instinct to side with the underdog, but it’s unusual to see a ‘foreign’ conflict win such wide support. Only once, several marches ago, have I seen any open hostility, from two young men demanding we ‘care more about British people’, though they were engaged, politely but forcefully, by a couple of demonstrators pointing out that our support for Palestine did not exclude us from support for British workers.

Oddly though, yesterday, as we proceeded down Bold St, one youngish woman standing outside a café was crying and being comforted by a friend. Was she crying through sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian people, particularly the children of Gaza, or was she perhaps a Jewish woman who believed the media hype about these marches being intrinsically anti-Semitic?

I’ll never know, but I can honestly say that I have seen no hostility at all to Jewish people on these marches, and Jews opposed to the actions of the Israeli state would be warmly welcomed. It may be the case that anti-Zionist Jews, like the Jewish Socialist Group or ultra-Orthodox Jews opposed to the state of Israel on religious grounds, have attended, and maybe did so yesterday, though I’ve personally seen no visual evidence for this. They have certainly attended similar events in other parts of the country, and have been active in the cause Palestinian Solidarity.  

The mainstream media have attempted to claim that the slogan ‘From the River to the Sea/Palestine will be free’ is itself anti-Semitic, though I see no reason why this should be so, as a single, secular state need not necessarily exclude Jewish people; and there is also some evidence that the chant is a subversion of a slogan whose origins was amongst extreme Zionist Jews in Israel, ‘From the River to the Sea/of Palestinians we’ll be free.’

This chant was much in evidence, as usual, yesterday, so if you define these words as anti-Semitic, then most of us were anti-Semites, but I don’t accept this for a moment.

Other popular slogans: ‘Ceasefire Now!’, ‘Free Palestine’, ‘End the Genocide Now,’ and a new one for me, ‘While your Shopping/ Bombs are dropping’, plus there were the usual calls for McDonalds to divest themselves of their investment in Israel as we passed their biggest branch on Church St, the main shopping area in Liverpool. I was quite taken with a double-sided, home-made placard carried by an older Muslim woman, which said ‘Don’t Rorry Netanyanu. Satan Loves You’ on one side, and ‘Israel Equals Modern Fascism’ on the other.

On this occasion, I had somewhere else I needed to be, so I left the march around this point, not continuing to the usual destination and the closing rally at Victoria Square.

At previous events, there have been some impressive speeches at the end. Someone from the RMT usually speaks, as does the representative of the Wirral Greens, and one of the three Labour councillors who quit the party and were re-elected as Independents last year. Somebody from the very active local branch of the Pensioners Association usually speaks and speaks well, but the best speeches, as you might expect, tend to come from Palestinians themselves, particularly those who have been there, in Gaza, delivering much-needed aid, or to report the devastation caused by the seemingly never-ending Israeli attack, which in less than five months has seen more explosives dropped on an urban area that is a mere twenty-five by five miles in size, than were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. That figure truly demonstrates the almost unprecedentedly brutal nature of the Israeli operation.

All in all, another excellent, well-supported, conflict-free event. The regularity and numbers involved in this and similar events in every part of the country, and around the world, make it clear on which side the most people stand, and it is important to keep this momentum going, as well as to support all meaningful peace initiatives, until this brutal onslaught comes to an end.

Anthony C Green, Feb’ 2024