standoff

There were two things missing

from the item by Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism writing for the Sunday Times about how ineptly and incorrectly he was treated by the police, how he was made the problem, why the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police should be removed.

One was any acknowledgement of the limitations of policing repeated sizeable demonstrations – the standoff between pro-Palestinian supporters and any kind of Jew being frequent, expensive, troublesome and to be contained at all costs, not the least because of hurt and damage and the inequity of numbers involved.

And the second was because you are asking beat coppers – ordinary police men and women – to use language as flexibly as Tony Blair (who trained as a barrister, remember).   And they can’t.

So if you wear what European Jewry called a yarmulke and the more modern call a kippah – that little skullcap -you are a “discernible” Jew.  Deduction is not an insult, even in parlous times.  Demonstrating crowds turn uncontrollable with horrifying speed, and violence against Jews and Muslims has increased since the war began..  Containment may not be comfortable,

even occasionally discourteous – but it is an unarmed and often effective method of policing, albeit expensive in budgetary terms..

As when, some time ago, a policeman approached me in my fur gilet and asked me if I could get off the street (now, there’s a line !) there was an anti fur demonstration just round the block.  I said gently “But this is fake, it’s made of cotton …”   “Madam” said the officer wearily” they don’t know the difference, we just don’t want any more trouble.”   I went and had unwanted coffee.

In the age of reruns, the Foyle’s War segment (Saturday 20^th,9.00, ITV3) was positively valuable.  Never mind Sister Act for the 40^th time, that script (FW), one of the later ones, contained historical reference people don’t even want to think about. Britain is involved, from before the founding of the state of Israel, from the division of who gets what in the Middle East, after the First World War (see the Sykes/Picot agreement).

The Middle East – all of it, and that’s a lot of territory – is an inflammatory mess, largely armed by one Vladimir Putin, and the war between Israel and Palestine is the present chapter of how two wrongs only ever make for a third.

It is both true and untrue that I have been trying not to write this piece.  My politics are my own – yours are yours – I don’t want to interfere in something to which I am peripheral  though I deeply believe in the importance of information – whether it’s about power then or power now.  

Hamas is a death cult, never mind whose death, and sections of the Palestine community turned a blind eye to that knowledge and caved in, because they were already desperate and disappointed past bearing with the Palestinian Authority.

Under its present government, Israel took its eye off the ball of national security.   Hamas violated Israel on 7 October with rape, torture, murder and kidnap – what is called “terminate with extreme prejudice” in bad movies.

  It is war – hideous, expensive and destructive.

And here we are.

The Metropolitan police force isn’t quite as much maligned as Israel but it has its problems – flat recruitment, lack of funds (Mrs. May’s worst day’s work) and appalling management which fails to support the men and women who try to do it right, at every level and in every way.  And they incidentally only have income because they work overtime as a norm.  The money just doesn’t go round.

Rowley will stay where he is for the same reason as Sunak will stay where he is – because another change is not helpful to an already beleaguered government.

Enormous numbers of police from various forces will try to keep the two sides of stand off bitterness (Palestine and Israel) from violence on the British streets, which seems desirable to me.

The broadcast media will finally get its collective head round the fact that war is horrible and stop going “Ooh” and ”Aah !” to the joy of the bloody brethren of Hamas , the British will have a General Election and with luck, so will Israel.

All parties file under “must try harder.”