Where have all the Gaza marches gone? Think back to October and November and they regularly attracted up to 200,000 people in a blizzard of antisemitic placards, balaclavas and red flares. Remember those thugs climbing bus stops and scaffolding to raise merry hell, while the police held their flags for them then tweeted to reassure the public that they were safe? Remember the cops musing on the context of “jihad” as chanted by Hizb ut-Tahrir (which was later proscribed)? Remember those young women wearing paraglider pictures on their backs? Remember the Iranian counter-protester with the Israeli flag fleeing for his life from the mob? Remember ? Whisper it, but that is all starting to feel like a former time. By the spring, the rallies had shrunk to 20,000 or even 10,000 attendees; these days, they are orders of magnitude smaller, if they take place at all.
It’s a similar story at the universities. With students away for the summer holidays, the provocative Gaza encampments have either been dismantled or have become facsimiles of their former ignominy. As Tanya Gold , the Oxford Action For Palestine group has officially suspended its “resistance” for the duration of the silly season, with one student leader taking a well-earned break from anti-Israel subversion to bask in the summer sun of Ibiza.
(Talk about “globalise the Intifada”.) The young crusties calculated that there will still be a war when the night start drawing in, I suppose. Even Frantz Fanon must h.