A welcome march against anti-Semitic hate

Two protest marches took place in London at the weekend. On Saturday, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered once again to protest against Israel’s response to the October 7 massacres. The thousands who took part denounced the actions of the Israel Defence Force, even though they are trying to remove the persistent and murderous threat to their homeland in the form of the Hamas terrorist group. 

Some marchers were no doubt motivated by compassion for the suffering of the people of Gaza and wish the war to end for their sake. Others were promoting their opposition to Israel and even their hatred for Jews, though to make this obvious is to break the law and some arrests were made.

The second march was different in character since it was explicitly against racism and intolerance. Thousands of Jews and non-Jews, including Boris Johnson, took part in an act of solidarity against anti-Semitism in central London yesterday. The march was not explicitly pro-Israel nor anti-Palestinian, though participants might have felt both sentiments to a greater or lesser extent. 

Anti-Semitism is a pernicious doctrine that we had hoped to see diminish here, but recent weeks have exposed the extent to which it remains a serious threat. A determination to stamp it out should be shared across the political spectrum. 

It was dispiriting that a member of Labour’s shadow cabinet, Darren Jones, said he would not march against anti-Semitism because he has constituents “who have different concerns and different opinions about this issue”. If that is so, surely he should be confronting those views, rather than appeasing them.