Palestine march: London May 16, 2026

At these events I seldom ask permission to take a picture, ¹ but for this lady made an exception. Given din level and fleeting window of opportunity – the one unconducive to verbal exchange, the other making speed of the essence – my request was hand signalled, granted by slight nod and momentary pause on her part.

Jewish opposition, secular and Judaist, to Zionism was a recurring theme.

The boy third from left is leading the call and answer chant:

One-two-three-four …

To which each wave of passing marchers roars out the response:

Occupation no more!

The caller, his voice not yet broken and clear as a bell, continues:

… five-six-seven-eight …

Israel is a terrorist state!

For the first time I’d not driven down on a Friday night, to overnight unobtrusively on a Muswell Hill street before bussing down to Central London in the morning. Instead I’d at 06:50 taken the twenty second walk from steel city house to the bus stop over the road, caught a No 18 to town, and there boarded a coach laid on by Sheffield Palestine Solidarity Campaign …

… which some hours later decanted us by the Dorchester on London’s affluent Park Lane …

Face masks may indicate concern for others in necessarily close proximity, but were seen in higher numbers yesterday. For the first time the police were using live facial recognition cameras.

… opposite a Hyde Park through which we made our way to the march’s official start point, close to the big museums, on Exhibition Road.

Going with the solidarity coach had several advantages but did demand my paying attention to where I was in the crowd – which, contrary to the Guardian’s customary stenography, was not 20,000 as fed by the Met but, as I judge from no small experience, well over 200,000. ² Advised by the organisers as we cruised southwards on the M1 to stay with the Sheffield section on pain of missing the homebound coach, I tried to balance my ventures up and down a mile of protest and love with keeping note of the six metres by three Palestinian flag borne by people I knew, if only by sight. ³

But the flag’s horizontal carriage didn’t aid visibility for one ducking and weaving through the thick of things. Easier to keep in mind whether I was in front or behind, and use the Sheffield Jews Against Israeli Apartheid  banner as my lodestar:

My personal musings concluded, the pictures can do the talking from here on in. I have to say though that I’d clearly wandered into the wrong march. Not a single instance of hate speech!

As for ‘racism’ (since antisemitism is not unproblematically labelled as such, ⁴ while an IHRWA definition that could have been crafted by Smotrich and Ben-Gvr serves to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism) or indeed any form of ‘othering’, these images bear witness to diversity in spades.

Police politely pressed two Palestinians for ID. A woman with posh accent advised they need only furnish this, even with the day’s ‘temporary’ extension of stop and search powers, ⁵ if under arrest.

Europe’s Nazi occupiers made a similar equation

Top tactics for top tacticians – for the full experience, make a beeline for the drummers. That’s where the excitement levels are always at their most dialled up intense.

Meet Flip: gentle giant with green mohawk, and Sheffield PSC’s much loved documentarist.

Early on she spotted my camera and told me with watermelon smile that if she was obscuring a shot I was to let her know. I assured her I’d no such thing. At events like this, hundreds of shots go in the trash because someone or something moved across my line of sight to vaporise the story. A few more would be a drop in the ocean and in any case not once did she get in my way.

Whether I got in hers isn’t for me to say.

A few of the speakers …

So often shown in deeply unflattering light, I was glad to get this one of Diane Abbot

John McDonnell’s neoliberal ‘prudence’ speaks to economic illiteracy but he’s a Palestine stalwart

Take the floor, Zara – it’s your party

Our genocide-compliant leaders and media say the green letters make a hate slogan, disregarding the fact Zionists use it as a call for literal ethnic slaughter. The white lettered part is also ignored.

After snapping this man, who like me and many others had zoned out of the worthy speeches, I looked to the railings in St James Square where my fellow travellers had been gathered only a few minutes before. They were gone. Just as well, then, I knew my way back to the Dorchester, and had it from the Whatsapp group created that morning for conveying such key information that our driver had not been moved on by the police.

All the same, I needed to get my skates on. This absolutely had to be my last shot of the day …

… though I did stop en route, to take this one of a comrade making her own return.

* * *

1. Legally in Britain there is no expectation of privacy in a public or publicly viewable space. Ethically the same applies where people assemble in outrage at a genocide abetted by their government. (My rule of thumb is to not depict anyone in a personally unflattering light.) Occasionally my L-series 70:200 mm lens – whose reach and affordance of wide apertures at every focal length allow shallow depth of field where required, to single out faces in the crowd not by tight cropping, which would lose that context of mass unity, but by confining sharpness of focus to those who had drawn my eye while leaving everyone else in greater or lesser blur – evokes a look, often not detected till I’m home and sifting the results, of suspicion. These too I delete, though you may spot one or two borderline cases I called otherwise. Having covered ten such events since 7/10/23 – more if I count Julian Assange protests – I note wrily that the Angry Glare count falls to near zero when I drape self and/or kit in keffiyeh and Palestine flag. As if it just would not occur to hostile intelligence gatherers to do likewise!
2. One indicator of the true number of marchers is given by the fact that, as I was listening in St James Square on Pall Mall to mercifully short speeches, the tail of a crowd seldom fewer than ten abreast – and at many points thrice that – was still in Piccadilly.
3. I’m not as well connected with local Palestine activity as I should be. Given the demands on this site imposed by ruling class and empire devilry, on which the sun never sets, I am wary of spreading myself too thin. One could always do more of course …
4. The DNA of most of today’s Palestinians shows them to be Semites who probably and over millennia converted from Judaism to Christianity or Islam, while that of many Israeli Jews, blue eyed Ashkenazi in particular, suggests a reverse trajectory in Eastern Europe. So whatever antisemitism is – and I deny neither its reality nor the infamies done under its malign star – it has little in common with the racism endured by black, brown and hispanic peoples who to this day in the West, unlike Jews, feature disproportionately in low pay jobs, in the criminal justice system and, in the case of the lead imperialism, on death row.
5. I sense a dedicated post is in order, on how empire excess in the dominions has a way of returning to haunt the metropolis. Zionism was a British colonial project, and continues to benefit modern imperialism in ways documented here and here. Without seeing this we won’t understand the zeal, including rounds of repressive legislation in the Orwellian name of ‘combatting hate crimes’, with which Western ‘democracies’ show unconditional if queasy support for the unhinged state they underwrite. Nor the dread which grips every settler colony – Algeria, apartheid South Africa, the Six Occupied Counties of Ireland – of being cut loose by Western backers the day asset is deemed to have tilted to liability.