Weekends: Time to Protest

It happened so fast that I lacked the alertness to grab my phone and make a photo of the scene outside the restaurant where we were having lunch on Saturday. It was in a typical medium sized Dutch town, far away from the large population centres in the west. But there it was, among the shopping families in a busy street we witnessed a pro-Palestine protest of about a hundred people, accompanied by a sizeable police detail, for security no doubt. The shock was not so much the protest march itself, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but the nature of it: covered up faces and regular Dutch folks wearing keffiyeh. Right in front of me, I witnessed what we have been seeing in the news for weeks now, a level of anger and radicalism that has long abandoned the notion of reasonable concern or protest. If you want to take on Bibi Nethanyahu, go for it. Yet it has descended into this relentless ‘from the river to the sea’ rhetoric, overt hate, rabid anti-Semitism and for a fleeting moment I even felt somewhat uncomfortable and alert. This was not your average rally for some good cause. It was a call for even more violence.

These protests are now the norm all over Europe and North America, most Saturdays and Sundays it is bingo. And it is what Douglas Murray discussed in his now famous interview with Piers Morgan last week. If you participate in these marches week after week, there comes a point where you have got to realize that it is no longer about the suffering in Gaza only, but about something else altogether. At that point you may want to reflect and say, it may be better to stay home and find other ways to express my concern. Yet what we increasingly see is larger crowds, calls to attack Jews, even violence and in particular growing masses of people who all blindly follow the rhetoric without question.

And it spreads. In Amsterdam yesterday a large climate march of about seventy-five thousand was hijacked on stage by Greta Thunberg, wearing a keffiyeh of course, as she introduced a speaker who without missing a beat dove into the ‘river to sea’ rhetoric. Although her mike was cut off and Greta resumed talking, a guy who represents a small party called ‘Water Naturally’ grabbed her microphone and told the crowd he was there for the climate and not for politics. He made a good point. But it was just one more datapoint as to how other causes get infected by toxic voices. We are all probably too young to picture the streets of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, but we are beginning to get a good taste of it and it is not pretty.

The thing that should bother all of us is of course the fact that we did not see weekly rallies of protestors for the half-a-million people slaughtered during the Syrian Civil War or the Uyghur genocide. Or the ethnic cleansing going on in Darfur right now, like as we speak. If there have been mass recurring protests on any of these issues, let me know. Yes, there was a massive protest against anti-Semitism in Paris yesterday so there are some counter movements, but it does not feel like we are even close to equilibrium.

Note that the fear and discomfort we now feel reside solely in the fact that there is a spreading moral panic that has pinpointed the Israeli war effort in Gaza as something so reprehensible that anything and everything is allowed. There are no qualifiers, no reasonability tests, no, it is a full on craze that is activating and enabling the most hateful and violent elements. And for the followers of this movement it is somehow both cool and justifiable to join the ranks and walk behind all the reprehensible slogans. And to condone and praise Hamas.

Even upbeat messages about IDF support for Gazans or raising the first ever pride flag in Gaza will do little to stem this tide of unchecked outrage. And the reason is simple: the message in most of the protests is the destruction of Israel which means that a reformed and renewed Gaza, or even a lasting peace between Arabs and Israeli is anathema. From the streets of Los Angeles to London to the small town of Zwolle that I visited over the weekend, the message is clear: only a Palestinian win can set us on the track of justice and cleanse us of the evil oppressors. It is ideological, radical, apparently purifying and therefore beyond any reason. And if it is the murderous gang of Hamas terrorists to bring that about that is just fine. Coming to a theatre near you, soon.

Photo: I missed the moment to take a photo of the protest, but as we strolled back I took a few random photos of the market. Only later did I realize there were two guys in it who had their faces covered up during the protest. To be fair, most of the people went about their day buying cheese and fish and having a good time, despite the protest and the rain.