Friday evening offered couple of choices for anyone looking for a bit of anti-war activity in east London. The Stop The War Coalition organised a candle lit vigil in Whitechapel. I plumped for a meeting called “Gaza: The Martyrs’ Meadows” organised by Easy Talk, which is a website and operates a radio station during Ramadan. Apologies if the report is a bit sketchy but as far as I could work out there was only one non Muslim in the audience and it would have looked peculiar if I’d sat taking notes.
The first thing to remark on is that it was big for something that had been organised in the same week. Perhaps two hundred people were there and they were virtually all Bangladeshi. Unsurprisingly for an event arranged by a Muslim oriented network the women were at the back and the men were at the front.
First up was Junaid Ahmad who took as his theme “Heroes of Palestine”. His rage was justifiable as he rehearsed the catalogue of the Israeli state’s massacres going back more than half a century but it sometimes got in the way of his argument. His central thesis was that Hamas is doing God’s work and that its fighters, who are guaranteed a place in paradise, are an inspiration to every Muslim.
Next was Haim Bresheeth and it was his second anti-war meeting of the week. An academic at the University of East London he fought three times in the Israeli state’s army and was there to denounce its current war crimes and to offer the anti-Zionist secular Jewish perspective.
It was Azzam Tamimi I’d particularly wanted to hear. He was addressing the topic “Hamas Bringing death to Gazans or symbol of resistance”. A neater example of a rhetorical question you would look hard to find. The main weakness in his very informative and balanced introduction – and most of the audience would disagree with this assertion – is that he did not locate the rise of Hamas in the political collapse of the PLO and the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on national liberation movements of that type. He presented Hamas as the legitimate representation of the Palestinian struggle precisely the PLO has made its peace with both imperialism and the Israeli state. For him it was unproblematical that a religiously defined organisation was the vehicle for overthrowing a religiously defined apartheid state. An interesting nuance which was new to me is that the Palestinians don’t want a state. They just want their land, a territory that has seen off half a dozen or more rulers from the Persians to the British.
Tamini was very strong on three particular messages. The first was that anti-Semitism had no place in a campaign to support the Palestinian people. Any attacks of any sort on Jews or Jewish property are wrong. His second point was that the events on September 11 and July 7 were counter-productive and had to be condemned. From that he extrapolated that any action taken by Muslims had to be within the law.
What can we draw from this meeting? The first thing is that the Muslim community in Bethnal Green identifies very strongly with what is happening in Palestine. One young woman paid £250 in an auction to raise funds for the people of Gaza for a painting. The meeting was very receptive to the messages against anti-Semitism which were reinforced by both Yvonne Ridley and Azzam Tamini. Chaim Bresheeth received the only applause of the evening. The audience was using its religion to interpret what was happening in the world and, along with the speakers, seemed to share the conclusion that Hamas’ election wins makes it the legitimate government in Gaza, that it is right for them to resist the siege and the theft of Palestinian land and that the British government is an accomplice in the Israeli state’s war crimes. It’s hard to find fault with that reasoning.
Liam redux 
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