Hundreds of loud and angry protesters gathered last night outside the Israeli embassy in London in solidarity with Palestinians facing ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, and to demand freedom for Palestine and sanctions on Israel.
Angry and determined demonstrators chanted, “One, two, three, four occupation no more. Five, six, seven, eight Israel is a terrorist state.”
Placards on the protest read, “Freedom for Palestine,” “Save Sheikh Jarrah,” and, “Sanctions for Israel.”
Speakers called for imposing sanctions on Israel and Western imperialist support for the Israeli military occupation. They also pointed to the solidarity from trade unions and workers in the fight for a free Palestine.
Among the speakers were trade union leaders and officials from the Unite, NEU, Unison and UCU unions.
The protest was called for by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Friends of al-Aqsa, Stop the War, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) among others — “to remind the Israeli government that its recent expulsion of the Salhia family from their home (in Sheikh Jarrah) will not be ignored.”
A keynote speaker at the protest was British MP John McDonnell, who drew attention to the brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah by Israeli apartheid.
Ahead of the protest, PCS director Ben Jamal described the continuing assault on Sheikh Jarrah as “a violent, systematic process of ethnic cleansing.”
“House by house, Palestinians are being driven from their homes as Israel seeks to take over a key neighborhood of Jerusalem,” he was quoted as saying by British daily Morning Star.
“More and more human rights groups are rightly identifying these policies of racial domination as amounting to the crime of apartheid.
“Israel acts with impunity because it believes the world is not watching. It destroys families’ homes under the cover of darkness. But it must be held to account.”
Jamal said the protesters were demanding that the British government, public bodies, companies and corporations “end their complicity with Israel’s system of apartheid.
Source: Palestinian News & Information Agency