Yesterday's march in London

Yesterday was a momentous day for the Palestinian movement in this country. Despite attempts by the police to curtail and frustrate our demonstration, over 125,000 of you marched to the Israeli embassy to demand that our government stop arming Israel and end the genocide in Gaza.  

These demonstrations are extremely costly to deliver and with the added expenses due to the police’s obstacles this time we are facing a bill of at least £45,000. Can you donate to help us cover this cost and continue campaigning?  

While we have been facing attempts to stop us marching and speaking out, the people of Gaza have been facing constant bombardment. Every day there are new horrors of children too young to even understand what a bomb is, riddled with shrapnel from the effects of one.  

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank Israel has invaded several cities, shooting and bombing civilians and destroying homes. In Kafr Dan, 16 year old Lujain Musleh was shot in the head by a sniper as she looked out of a window of her home – only for the Israeli military to smear her as a “suspect” after they murdered her.  

In the face of such unrelenting barbarity, we cannot and will not allow our voices to be silenced. Can you help us sustain our campaign for an end to this genocide?  

We don’t know why the police continue to frustrate our attempts to campaign for an end to this genocide, but their actions this week led to significant costs to us. Lawyers fees, press conferences, separate stage bookings have all cost us thousands of pounds in extra costs. But these obstacles will not stop us campaigning. In fact we are escalating our campaigns.  

On Friday we staged a protest outside the AGM of the London CIV, where decisions are made on how funds from the London Council Local Government Pension Fund are invested. We were able to put pressure directly on those making these decisions to push for full divestment from companies complicit in Israeli genocide and apartheid.  

Later this month we will be bringing our next national demonstration to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool to take our demands directly to our Labour government. Then on October 12th we will be marching in London again, to protest an entire year of genocide, aided and abetted by the UK government.

We are campaigning on all fronts, but we need your support to pull this off. Can you help?

Because this week has shown us the power of our mass movement when we refuse to be silenced.  

For the first time since this genocide began, our government has suspended the export of some arms to Israel. While these suspensions amount to less than 10% of the UK’s export licenses to Israel and we are calling on the government to ban all arms sales to Israel, these first steps are a testament to each and every one of us who has marched and campaigned.  

We forced our government to finally accept that there is a clear risk that UK arms exports might be used to commit serious violations of international law. And through our future campaigning we will push them to end all arms sales to Israel. Can you donate to help us push them further?

The powers that be may have thought that they could stop us marching. They may have thought that we would stop campaigning. They may have thought that 11 months on from the start of this genocide that we would forget about Gaza. Yesterday proves that they were wrong.

We know that our campaigns are working but we need to make them even bigger. We cannot and will not stop until every Palestinian is free – from the river to the sea.

Please donate to support our work.  

In Solidarity,

Simon Foster

Deputy Director, PSC