Happy smiling faces, catchy chants, drum beats, marching side by side together for a worthy cause. Those people on the right side of history are getting more out of these weekly demonstrations to free Palestine than the Gazans.
The most that the marches are achieving is a strong sense of camaraderie, a good walk and some all-round back-slapping for the virtuous fellows that they are because the IDF and Benjamin Netanyahu haven't taken any notice of a single one of the 16 that have taken place in London every Saturday.
Those people who attend the marches every week care more for themselves than they do for the Gazans. I say this because instead of wasting their time sewing division amongst the communities in the Capital, depriving businesses of Saturday trade and damaging the tourist industry that we all rely on, if they really cared they would go and get a Saturday job, work for eight hours and then give all the money that they had earned to a charity providing relief for Palestine.
With what? 50,000 people on each march at the £11.44 minimum wage, this would allow them to send £4.76 Million of aid each week. £24 Million per month. I wager it would transform the lives of thousands of the Children that live in Gaza.
I suspect that if you asked the citizens of Gaza if they would prefer to have £24 Million a month in cash from London or to watch the videos of old white people, scruffy young white people and ultra-religious brown people chanting 'Intifada' while waving Palestinian flags made in China (who have imprisoned 1M Muslims) and paid for by the Iranian government (consistently murdering their own Muslim citizens), they might choose the former.
Of course, this will never happen. It will never even be considered. These people will tell you they are raising awareness for a great cause, undertaking something of immense importance and they will keep on doing it until Palestine is 'free' - whatever that means. But just as long as they don't actually have to personally sacrifice anything at all, do any work whatsoever or give anything up. Just as long as they can dance and sing and shout and judge and hate and have a jolly good time doing it.
But the thing is, they will stop eventually. Israel will have cleared out Hamas to the extent that this is even possible, the situation will return to a more low level conflict and the demonstrators will get bored and either look for another cause or most likely go back to whatever else they used to do on Saturday afternoons, smug and self-assured that they are a 'good' person.
But they won't have helped the Palestinians one tiny bit. So, they really should be asking themselves who is getting more out of these marches? Them or the Gazans.
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