What a “hate march” looks like

For anyone with any difficulty identifying a “hate march”, it looks like this report of this year’s Jerusalem Day demonstration from Deutche Welle.

A crowd chanting “Death to Arabs”, “may your villages burn”, “Gaza is a graveyard”, forcing the Palestinian population to board up their shops and stay inside for fear of the attacks they make on targets who cross their path. It happens every year on May 15th – an Israeli national holiday to mark the conquest of East Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six Day war in 1967.

This march is a naked celebration of racial supremacy; a model for what a fascist march through a diverse community might look like if it had overt state backing; and it punctuates and celebrates the ethnic cleansing which is displacing the Palestinian population in Jerusalem as well as the West Bank.

There’s a really strange dissonance from a young woman interviewed in the middle of the clip who says “Jerusalem is the heart of Israel. Its the place where you can recognise notes of peace and harmony and basically all the goodness and moral compass that Judaism is trying to show the whole world”. She really seems to believe that. Its hard to think that she’s looking at the same event that the rest of us can see with our own eyes; or what she has to ignore to interpret it like that.

An increasing number of Jewish people across the world are rejecting this kind of disavowell. Many, in the UK, will be on the Nakba Day march today to oppose this “racist system of oppression … ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide” and “against the far right in Britain who glorify Israel’s racism and brutality.” A support that will be in evidence today on the second “Unite the Kingdom” march called by Tommy Robinson, deliberately timed to clash, for those “who have had enough of migration and mass immigration”.

That, I fear, will be what a hate march looks like.

But, as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign puts it “Our unity and solidarity is stronger than their hatred and division.”

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