Brighton & Hove Demonstration Against Slaughter in Gaza

Brighton is a small town on the south coast of England where there is an active Palestine Solidarity Campaign group.

Despite short notice, nearly a thousand people turned up to a rally in the main shopping centre, Churchill Square, to express their anger at Israel’s barbarous action.

Speakers included a local activist Trinni, former Labour Councillor Francis Tonks, Jackie Chase who led the Free Omagh Degayes Campaign (imprisoned in Guantanamo Square) and Tony Greenstein, speaking as a Jewish opponent of Zionism and their terror bombing of Gaza.

I made a number of points:

1. Those who condemn ‘terrorism’ when it comes to 'suicide bombs' are fully supportive of Israel’s far greater State Terrorism. Dropping one ton bombs from warplanes on civilian populations, murdering nearly a hundred children to date in Gaza, receives the applause and support of Gordon Brown, Bush and the BBC.

2. The BBC, our supposedly neutral tax payer funded broadcasting organisation, has deliberately and wilfully presented Israel’s genocide as ‘retaliation’ against the Hamas peashooters, which have killed less than 20 people in 8 years, whereas in fact it was Israel’s ‘incursion’ into Gaza on 4th November 2008 that killed 6 people which broke the ceasefire. So say nothing of course of the starvation siege of the Palestinians.

3. The Arab regimes and Egypt, which have sat by, silently supporting Israel, should be overthrown if the Arab masses are to have any self-respect. They are complicit in Israel’s actions.

4. The irony of the ‘rockets’ that have been fired at Ashkelon, Beer Sheba and Sderot is that these areas were the homes of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 onwards into the Gaza Strip. The land they are firing on was their homes and having been expelled into overcrowded refugee camps they are now being subject to new massacres, the purpose of which is to expel them once again.

5. An even greater irony is that Israel’s siege, intended in the words of one Israeli general and war criminal, to put the Palestinians ‘on a diet’ is no difference in method from the words of Hans Frank, Governor General of Nazi occupied Poland during the war when he imposed a starvation siege on the Warsaw Ghetto. The irony is that the Israeli state and its army have taken up the baton from the Nazi army. The Gazan Palestinians are no different in kind from the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and it is no surprise that the Zionists, who collaborated with the Nazis during the war, should now seek to ape the persecutors of the Jews.

Above are some pictures from the Brighton demonstration. It demonstrates that despite the incessant media lies that we have to put up with, that ordinary people know when our rulers and their watchdogs are perpetrating war crimes. Also shown are a few shots of our own police spies.

Tony Greenstein