March for a Ceasefire in Gaza on Armistice Day 2023

image: Philip Crispin

It was a beautiful sunny day. I walked up from Hyde Park Corner through a park thronging with gathering marchers and up to Reformers' Tree and my crew. A while later we walked up to Speakers' Corner to join the march on Park Lane.

A man dressed as an undertaker tolled a bell as he towed a coffin behind him. On the coffin was a memorial to four-month old Maria Alshanti 'killed by Israel in Gaza'.

'Do not ask for whom the bell tolls.' It tolls for all of us at this moment of disaster. 'We are all part of the main.' To the West's leaders: Where is our common humanity?

Here, thank goodness, was solidarity.

Part of a vast procession, we set off around noon and reached Vauxhall about 4 where the marshalls advised that there was still half an hour to go to the destination but that the speakers would have finished by then.

The Police put the number of marchers at 300,000, the organisers 800,000. Given the snail's pace of the march and the sheer mass of bodies stretching over several miles, I'm sure the latter was the more accurate figure.

At this time of terrible tragedy and of the failure of the majority of the West's leaders to stand up for justice and humanity, it was immensely heartening to be on a march with so many people of good will.

I didn't see or hear a single thing I took issue with. The marchers came from all walks of life, from all ethnicities. Families and friends walked. People had come from far and wide on a march for peace.

There was good humour but also a real sense of pain and outrage at the failure to call a ceasefire when so many innocents were dying due to the perpetration of war crimes - and a sense of real foreboding for what might happen if this inhuman and appalling collective punishment were to continue for much longer.

Sunak, Starmer, Biden and Braverman were roundly condemned in chant and in art - the expediency and hypocrisy of geopolitical decisions plain for all to see.

Home-made posters displayed inventive wit and talent. 'Someone call a snakecharmer, Starmer's on the loose', saw the Labour leader's head give a sinister smirk from the body of a snake.

As so many marching had pointed out, what better day to call for a ceasefire than on Armistice Day? A poster bearing knitted poppies (two white ones for peace, and one red one for the blood shed) and a knitted Palestinian flag stated precisely that: 'Calling for a ceasefire on Armistice Day'. A man with a keffiyeh on his head raised his hands heavenward in front of a banner of a dark red poppy which bore the legend: 'Honour the martyrs of Palestine'. Images of bloodied hands haunted the procession. 'They tried to bury us but they didn't know we were seeds,' proclaimed another message, a tree of liberty growing up from the soil.

Celtic's Green Brigade had banners aloft and an Irish tricolour fluttered alongside a Palestinian flag on a long telescopic pole. An old Irishman with two crutches bore two hand-written messages: 'Israel stop bombing hospitals and schools. Hate is a British value. We Irish have experienced it for over 800 years.'

Many other posters bore sad facts and statistics concerning Palestinian sufferings and deaths over the past 100 and more years, reaching back to the Balfour Declaration.

There were quotes from:

Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw ghetto, and anti-Zionist who spoke out in support of the Palestinian people: 'To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors.'

From Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonialist and author of The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin White Masks: 'We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.'

And from Nelson Mandela: 'We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.'

The spirited crowd whistled and waved when police helicopters buzzed and hovered overhead. They cheered when residents of houses along the way waved Palestinian flags, banged pots and led antiphonal chants. There was great applause for a fleet-footed parkour traceur or alpiniste who leapt along several grand facades and narrow balconies behind Buckingham Palace to a seemingly deserted mansion or hotel to hoist the Palestinian flag from an inviting flagpole.

My favourite poster was a superb image of Palestine's national bird, the Palestinian sunbird. But here was no iridescent plumage sheen. This bird looked full of woe. All funereal black on a black and white print, it perched on barbed wire (the perimeter edge of the Gazan 'prison') under a message of 'CEASEFIRE NOW'. Behind the bird lay a wasteland of ruined buildings and smoke from a conflagration which made day night.

May peace, justice, wisdom, sanity and a sense of common humanity prevail. This suffering and desolation must stop.