[Salon] From Nakba to fascist parades: How Britain's far right threatens Muslims and Jews

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/nakba-fascism-parades-how-britain-far-right-threatens-muslims-jews

David Hearst   5/21/26

>From Nakba to fascist parades: How Britain's far right threatens
Muslims and Jews


Each year on Nakba Day, a British Palestinian couple I know go to the
march to commemorate the mass displacement of more than 700,000
Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948.

A funny thing happened to the couple on their way to the march this
year. Opposite them in the tube were a couple who were evidently
unhappy with what they saw.

My friend's wife had a bag with Palestinian embroidery and pins which
said: "Free Palestine", "Stop Arming Israel" and "Israel out of Gaza".

The couple opposite stared but kept silent. One of them tried to take
a picture of the badges but failed.

Two stations later they rose to get off, but not before one of them
turned around and said: "You don't belong here. You should go back
home!"

There was much astonishment in the carriage after they left.

A debate started and it soon became clear the carriage was in sympathy
with my Palestinian friends. They were doctors in the NHS who had
arrived from Jordan three decades ago. Both were Palestinian whose
families came from Yaffa and Jenin.

A  woman to their right said: "I am Irish. I know what you feel. We
had this for 800 years and were considered subhuman by the Brits. They
still look at us as foreigners."

Two Black British men opposite them laughed. One of them said: "They
occupied the world for 200 years and we are not leaving. We are here
to stay," he said.

Once up at street level, my friends found the streets from South
Kensington all the way to Waterloo place packed with pro-Palestine
supporters. Never in their time in Britain had they seen numbers like
these.

The number of the pro-Palestine march protesters was far higher than
the police admitted. The presence of two rival marches on the streets
of London on Saturday had been presented to the police and the media
as two extremes.

A slur had been invented that the pro-Palestinian marchers had
intended to pass by a synagogue, whereas that had never been the plan
or their route.

But the numbers told their own story.

Tens of thousands were pro-Palestine, while supporters of far-right
agitator Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, could barely
fill Parliament Square.

Islamophobic rhetoric

Particularly noticeable on the Nakba Day march this year was the loud
and vocal presence of British Jews, both secular and religious.

It was far more problematic being a Jew in the hate-filled square of
British fascists, for reasons that became obvious as soon as anyone
opened their mouth.

"Men, are you ready to get fit? Are you ready to become the best
person yourself? As men, as British men we need to get fight ready
because a fight is coming to this country," Yaxley-Lennon barked.

Yaxley-Lennon gave one interview to the Polish-American model Weronika
Karagowska, who asked him what he would do as prime minister. He
replied: "I would stop Islam. I would end foreign funding for this
country."

Presumably, by "end foreign funding" he meant he would end, or at
least return the money he himself got from the Philadelphia-based
Middle East Forum, or the US billionaire Robert Shillman, or the
Australian Liberty Alliance, or the Jewish Defence League?

"All the migrants would be taken out of the hotels and sent back
tomorrow by the military," Yaxley-Lennon continued. "I would have
remigration. It's time for many Muslims to leave this country. It's
time to go. You have got your homes to go to. This is our home we have
got nowhere to go to. We are not allowing change any longer, you see
people are fed up, people are fed up."

Kellie Jay Keen, who styles herself as a "woman’s rights activist",
amplified the anti-Islam rant. "It’s not too late to get Islam out of
our classrooms. It's not too late to get Islam out of that building.
It's not too late to get Islam out of every official office in this
country, and more than not too late - it is absolutely vital if we
wanna save this country, we have to remove Islam from every single
place of authority."

Yaxley-Lennon and Keen made awkward bedfellows for the pro-Israel
figures who had funded this gathering.

The tension they created with the Israel lobby was absolutely clear
when a former Israeli army spokesman Jonathan Conricus was interviewed
by Piers Morgan.

Conricus, who said he enjoyed being in Parliament Square, defended
Keen for calling for the removal of Islam from all UK officialdom.
Conricus attempted to differentiate between Islam, the religion, and
Muslims, the people who practised it. The distinction was contradicted
by Yaxley-Lennon himself who openly called for Muslims to "go home".

Morgan rightly asked whether Conricus would say the same thing if the
far right turned against Judaism. And Conricus had no reply.

Fascism Parades

Strip away the many Stars of David at Parliament Square and this was a
white supremacist gathering for Christians only.

A banner from the White Vanguard movement said it all too clearly:
"End Zionist Occupation of Britain. Stop White Replacement."

The civilisation these fascists had come to protect had clearly
stopped being "Judeo-Christian". Whatever that means. The Christians
in history made the most ardent persecutors of the Jews.

Another banner at the march read: "Fuck Islam, Christ is King." Which
clearly was a message that Israeli Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli,
who had invited Yaxley-Lennon to Israel last October, had not paid to
be posted.

None of the speakers at the Unite the Kingdom march will be arrested
or questioned for hate speech, and the inequality of the law that
currently defines antisemitism and Islamophobic hate speech, and
consequently the inequality in the policing of these marches, was made
all too clear.

The legal definition of hate speech clearly does not apply to every
British citizen equally.

Anyone holding up a placard saying the same thing about Judaism would
have been swiftly arrested for antisemitism. But this is not the main
danger of allowing such parades of fascism to take place, let alone in
front of the Houses of Parliament.

This danger transcends the Palestinian conflict. It is one posed to
all British citizens of this country whatever their ethnicity or
country of origin. It is now becoming mainstream to attack all Muslims
in Britain wherever they came from and whenever they came.

Michael Gove, the former Tory minister; Wes Streeting, candidate for
the labour leadership; Yvette Cooper, former home secretary and
current foreign secretary; Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader; all have
played on the Islamophobic trope that Muslim communities are suspect
voters, harbourers of extremists, to be treated as breeding grounds
for terrorists.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer talked up the "cumulative effect"
of pro-Palestinian marches on antisemitism.

Muslim contribution

Their generation of politicians have all played up the glory days of
Britain defeating fascism in the 1940s. And yet they all conveniently
airbrush the role played by Muslims in defending Britain in its hour
of greatest need against fascism.

At least 2.5 million Muslims fought with the Allied forces in the
First World War and 5.5 million in the Second World War. Nearly 1.5
million Muslims were killed in action.

They came mainly from India and Africa and fought in Somalia,
Abyssinia and Madagascar. Between 9,000 and 12,000 Palestinians fought
for Britain in Egyptand Mesopotamia.

But the greatest Muslim contribution was in the British Indian Army
fighting the Japanese in the Far East Campaign. One million Muslims
fought in this army.

Their descendants are the ones being told by politicians from a wide
range of mainstream opinion that they are no longer British enough to
remain in this country.

If Starmer succeeds in his last-ditch battle to remain prime minister,
the Labour Party will keep the left fractured, and Britain will surely
get Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, as its next prime minister.

With Farage installed, every Muslim in this country will have something to fear.

Unlike the smear that Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party
made Britain unsafe for Jews, it will really be true that with Farage
in power, Britain will become unsafe for Muslims to live in.

Once they start to leave, the Jews will not be far behind. Because
they will surely be the next target of the white supremacist surge
that Farage represents against the presence of "foreigners".

Extreme danger

In supporting the far right across Britain, Israel is putting the
whole community of Jews in Britain in extreme danger.

My Palestinian friends went home fortified by the support their family
had been given by white, black, Asian, Jews and Muslims alike on the
commemoration of the day their families were expelled from their
lands.

The night before my friend’s wife had phoned up her aunt in Jenin. She
had endured a massive Israeli military operation to clear Jenin camp
and displace up to 45,000 Palestinians.

This time her aunt was in despair. The white tents of settlers had
appeared on their farmland north west of Jenin. This could only meant
one thing; the tents would become an outpost, and very soon their
farming land and their only income would disappear altogether.

As everyone now knows, the settlers run the West Bank.

"They tell us to go home. I would like nothing better than to go to my
family’s home in Jenin. But we are here in Britain because we have
been expelled from this land and Britain is responsible for what
happened in 1948 and what happens everyday since then for the past 85
years. Where does Britain want us to go now?"

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.