Open letter to Met police chief: Let me tell you what 'Globalise the intifada' actually means
Sir Mark Rowley, your primary concern is not public safety but protecting the interests of the British establishment. And it has decreed that no opposition to Israel’s genocide will be tolerated
Dear Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley,
I heard on the BBC News last night that you are planning to “take a more assertive approach to the way [you] police pro-Palestinian protests” in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.
I wondered what this might mean, given that you and other forces have already arrested thousands of entirely peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters – many of them elderly, a number or them disabled or infirm – for holding a placard opposing the Gaza genocide.
Journalists have been detained by your counter-terrorism squad for writing, too critically it seems, about Israel’s slaughter of children in Gaza.
Prominent Jewish activists like Haim Bresheeth and Tony Greenstein are being investigated or prosecuted on terrorism offences, for publicly echoing the International Criminal Court and major human rights groups in accusing Israel of committing crimes against humanity.
What more are you planning? Tarring and featherings. Hangings in the public square. Let us hope not.
The BBC says that, following the attack in Sydney, you will arrest anyone using slogans like “Globalise the intifada”. Last night your force arrested two people at an anti-genocide protest outside David Lammy’s ministry of justice building for using what you apparently term “racially aggravated” speech.
Mr Lammy must be delighted by your intervention. After all, he doesn’t want the British public being reminded that, in his previous role as Foreign Secretary, he endlessly justified Israel’s genocide in Gaza and even warmly shook hands with Benjamin Netanyahu, a suspected war criminal and fugitive from international justice.
In a statement you issued with the chief constable of Manchester, you wrote: “The words and chants used, especially in protests, matter and have real-world consequences.”
Yes, isn’t that precisely the point? Alerting the public to Britain’s two-year complicity in genocide is exactly why protesters use these slogans – and to shame the British government. You’re right: that does matter!
Is it because the government fears these “real-world consequences” that you are acting ever more harshly to choke off the last remnants of the right to protest on Palestine?
‘No active investigation’
Strangely, though, Sir Mark, the Met does not seem to be interested in applying your principle equally. Not all words have consequences, as far as your force is concerned. Nor do all actions.
For example, a legal dossier was submitted to the Met in April concerning at least 10 British citizens who have served in Israel’s genocidal army in Gaza. They are documented to have participated in the Israeli military’s killing and maiming many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children.
And yet there has been not a peep about it from the Met since. A spokesperson for your counter-terror officers would only say there was “no active investigation” on the matter.
Words don’t seem to matter much either, as long as you’re supporting Israel’s genocide.
Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has incited war crimes by praising as “heroes” Israeli soldiers in Gaza – whom he mistakenly describes as “our soldiers”.
He has given religious blessing to what the ICC suspects are crimes against humanity, including Israel’s mass starvation of Gaza’s people. He calls these crimes the “most outstanding possible thing a decent, responsible country can do”.
Is the Chief Rabbi going to be arrested?
It seems not. Quite the opposite, in fact. By all accounts, he has your ear, Sir Mark. He is the one who has been demanding that you arrest anti-genocide marchers who call to “Globalise the intifada”.
Indeed, it has become ever less clear what, if anything, we are allowed to say in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they face a slow extermination by Israel.
Last year the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled that Israel was not only illegally occupying and colonising the historic lands of the Palestinian people but that its rule over them amounted to apartheid.
The court demanded Israel immediately end its illegal occupation and withdraw its soldiers and militia-settlers from these Palestinian lands. No one really believes Israel is going to respect the court, any more than it has respected international law over the past many decades.
Which is precisely why the anti-genocide marchers chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Because Palestinians are living in their entire historic homeland – from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea – under Israel’s apartheid rule. And as all major human rights groups have noted, including Israel’s B’Tselem, not one of those Palestinians enjoys a fraction of the rights Israel confers on Jews living in the same area.
“From the river to the sea” is an anti-apartheid chant. It is a call for liberation from the oppression experienced by all Palestinians. It is a recognition that freedom – and equal rights – can only come from Israel’s decolonisation and the eradication of its Jewish supremacist ideology.
Anti-Palestinian racism
None of that matters, it seems.
It is yet another chant Mirvis and Israel’s apologists want banned. Politicians from both sides of the aisle demand the same. Reports are that you are now considering treating it as an arrestable offence – hate speech – like “Globalise the intifada”.
But you, Sir Mark, have no understanding of what either of these pro-Palestinian slogans mean. And no interest. Why? Because you, like our political leaders and our media editors, are imbued with an anti-Palestinian racism. You are soaked in the same feverish loyalty to British colonialism as the rest of the establishment. It is your entry card to that depraved club.
Let me try to educate you, to get you to listen through the hands clasped to your ears.
“Intifada” means “shaking off” in Arabic. It translates as uprising. It can take the form of non-violent civil disobedience, as it has repeatedly in Palestinian history, or it can be militarised and violent, as it was against British colonial rule of Palestine in the 1930s and as it was against Israel’s violent occupation in the 2000s.
But in the late 1980s, the Palestinians’ defining intifada involved general strikes, street demonstrations, boycotts of Israeli goods, and a refusal to pay taxes to the Israeli occupier.
Again, in 2018, the people of Gaza launched mass non-violent protests against their imprisonment in the enclave and a decade-long, suffocating Israeli siege. Israel responded by maiming tens of thousands of the demonstrators.
Those calling for a “globalised intifada” are echoing these latter kinds of acts of civil disobedience. Chiefly they are pushing for worldwide, peaceful solidarity with the Palestinians by hitting Israel in the pocket, through the international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Israel’s supporters have long been desperate to close down the BDS movement by defining it as “economic terror”. Now you, Sir Mark, are once again giving them exactly what they want.
Note this too. The Bondi Beach attack should not be treated as any kind of “context”, as you put it, for your decision.
All the evidence is that the two gunmen were loyal to Islamic State (ISIS). But Islamic State has always despised the Palestinian struggle for national liberation, including the armed resistance of Hamas.
There is a good reason for that – though I notice you, along with British politicians and media, never mention it.
Islamic State wants to revive the “caliphate” – a Muslim empire in the Middle East that existed before the arrival of modern nation-states.
A Palestinian state – the goal of all Palestinian resistance movements, secular and religious alike – is anathema to the zealots of Islamic State. Hamas and Islamic State have directly opposing and irreconcilable goals. Which is why Hamas has always limited its military actions to the region it is in, and never sought to “globalise” its military resistance.
So there is precisely no evidence that any Palestinians, even Hamas, wish to wage a violent struggle in Europe, the US or Australia with their calls to “Globalise the intifada”. Their physical fight is confined to their homeland, even if we, in Britain and the West, continue to export our meddling to their region by aiding Israel in brutalising the Palestinian people.
Democratic death spiral
Let me make a final point, Sir Mark. There will be more terror attacks on Jews in the West. However unjustified, however depraved, that is inevitable when a state claiming to represent Jews – and aided and abetted by western powers – keeps killing, maiming, jailing, torturing and humiliating peoples across the Middle East.
Such attacks won’t even necessarily come from an organised group, such as Islamic State or al-Qaeda. There will always be someone somewhere watching Israel kill and disfigure Muslim, Christian and Druze children – and see western capitals defend its right to do so – who will be so horrified and sickened by the spectacle that they will decide to improvise a form of vengeance.
And with Israel and every western politician telling them that there is no difference between the state of Israel and the Jewish people – that the two are identical – there will always be someone somewhere who decides to take out their fury on an easy Jewish target rather than a much harder Israeli military one.
However indefensible, there is nothing inexplicable about this.
Which means, given Israel’s criminality, the terror attacks will keep coming.
Which, in turn, means that there will keep being reasons for Israel and its apologists like Mirvis to demand that basic freedoms in the West be curtailed – that speech and protest on Palestine be criminalised – to ensure the safety of Jews.
However much you deny Palestinians and their supporters the right to march and chant against genocide and British collusion in it, the terror attacks will continue. Which means the erosion of basic rights will continue too. We are in a democratic death spiral – and all to protect Israel’s genocide from public opposition.
I suspect you know all this. And I also suspect you don’t care. Because your primary job is not public order or public safety but protecting the interests of the British establishment. And that establishment has decreed that Israel’s genocide has the UK’s full backing, and that no opposition will be tolerated.
The Palestinians will continue to be killed. And with your connivance, our most fundamental rights will continue to vanish before our very eyes.
Yours,
Jonathan Cook
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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This is such a brilliant piece of writing. And it will be extremely useful in helping the rest of us counter the many spurious arguments being used to quash opposition to our government's lethal support for Israel. Thank you.
The police acted the same way when women fought for our right to vote. The police lost. We won. We will win here too because bad is bad, and all we’re doing is fighting for the bleeding obvious.