Last weekend I headed down to London to join at least 200,000 others for the 11^th National March for Palestine, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, restoration of funding for the UN Relief & Works Agency and termination of UK diplomatic, materiel and military support for Israel’s ongoing killing spree.

The march itself was exciting: we arrived at Trafalgar Square roughly two hours after setting off from Russell Square whereupon we were told that the back of the procession had only just started to move off. I’ve always been a little cynical about the power of protests to effect change, growing up as I did in the aftermath of the largest protest in UK history failing to stop the invasion of Iraq, and the second- and third-largest similarly failing to bring about a second referendum on EU membership. That said, I also know that no positive social change has ever happened without a campaign of peaceful protest; in other words, peaceful protest is necessary, but not sufficient.

There is also no denying the appeal of submerging oneself into the electrifying atmosphere of a huge, impassioned crowd, all engaged on a single issue and working towards a shared goal. In fact, in contrast to the failure of those much larger campaigns, the Palestinian solidarity movement has already had a lot of success, from winning over public opinion (around two thirds of Brits now support a ceasefire) to imperiling Biden’s re-election chances enough that even he has been forced to (slightly) walk back US rhetorical support and try to throw Netanyahu under the bus. Also, much like my experience in Cuba, it is a refreshing change of pace to feel such common cause with my compatriots, and to see that despite what our billionaire-owned media and decade-plus of Tory political dominance would have one believe, there is still a lot of political good to be found on this isle.

But, speaking of the media, I finally get to the point of this post. After the march, I searched online to see how many people were estimated to have attended. As a result I saw how the various media outlets chose to report on the day’s events, and I found myself morbidly fascinated with it. Media bias against Palestinians is nothing new, of course: a past post of mine (to which the title of this post is an homage) discussed the use of ‘mystification’ in press coverage of violence in and around Gaza and, more contemporarily, a recent report has provided quantitative analysis of bias in coverage of the current conflict. I’m sure that people with more protest experience than me will already be very familiar with this sort of misrepresentation, but, nonetheless, I’d like to briefly explore how different outlets chose to present the march.

Media Coverage ¶

First, the basic facts of the march:

• the march was the 11^th national march in London to be organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Friends of Al-Aqsa and others;¹
• between 200,000 (media estimate) and 250,000 (organisers’ estimate) people attended the march;
• attendees ranged across all demographics, from families with pushchairs to university students to the elderly; and
• identifiable blocs in the march included trade unions, Palestine Solidarity Campaign local chapters, student groups, socialist groups,² Islamic organisations, Jewish groups and more.

Number of Attendees ¶

Let’s start with the size of the march. There was no ticketing system in place so any figures will be estimates, presumably from randomly sampling the density of different parts of the procession and averaging those figures out to the area of the whole march. As a result, I think some variation in figures in inevitable and, on its own, not necessarily a sign of anything nefarious, although personal biases are likely to influence which figures someone feels sound more plausible (and this goes both ways, i.e., the organisers are incentivised to inflate numbers just as much as the police are incentivised to undercount).

So the quoted range of 200,000–250,000 seems plausible. And, to their credit, several publications put the former straight into their headlines, such as the Guardian, ITV News and the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya. However, many others (such as the Independent) attempted to downplay the numbers by two orders of magnitude by describing merely thousands of marchers; it is clear from past headlines that they do not have any editorial objection to the phrase ‘hundreds of thousands’, so this was presumably a conscious choice.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this was from Sky News, who chose to go with the vague phrase crowds of protestors;³ again, they are not usually so reticent about using the more accurate descriptor ‘hundreds of thousands’, and even used it to describe a previous march when doing so allowed them to imply that the numbers somehow posed a threat to the Cenotaph.⁴ And lastly, catering to the pond slime goblin demographic, the Express helpfully described the march as a numberless mob.

Timing ¶

The timing of the march was remarked on by a few publications, but different ones chose to focus on different dates. The Express highlighted that the march took place on a chaotic Easter bank holiday weekend, whilst the Socialist Worker instead highlighted that the event took place on the anniversary of Palestine Land Day, and also mentioned that the numbers at the march showed it was right to take to the streets despite Ramadan and Easter. Generally Easter seems to have been mentioned in news coverage more often than Ramadan, though the opposite was true for the speeches at Trafalgar Square. Few UK sources referenced the Land Day anniversary, though Israeli outlet Haaretz did bring this to the forefront in its coverage of a march in the Galilee on the same day, suggesting that this may be more due to cultural familiarity with the event than anything else.

Arrests ¶

Many publications elected to highlight the number of arrests at the march in their headlines. From the BBC I might be willing to accept that this represented a clumsy attempt to provide ‘balance’; however, they don’t appear to have published anything about the march at all. From other publications, who are not subject to such strict neutrality requirements, this must be viewed as a conscious choice, though it is worth pointing out that journalists rarely choose the headlines for their own articles.

The supposedly left-leaning Guardian chose to lead with the four arrests in their headline, despite the arrestees only making up 0.002% of the total attendees. They also devoted the third and fourth paragraphs of their article to coverage of the arrests. ITV News likewise began their headline with the number of arrests and devoted the first, fourth and fifth paragraphs of the article to them.

But simply giving the tiny number of arrests outsized prominence is one thing: several other papers went further in ways I find fascinating. The Standard, for example, published an article before the march focussed entirely on the policing of the event, headlined Met Police vow swift action as pro-Palestinian protests return to central London. There is, of course, nothing illegal about peaceful protest, despite their best efforts to imply that by cutting off the remainder of the Met Police statement (which was about taking swift action in response to criminality). The article then goes on focus on the October 7 attack, describing Israeli attacks on Gaza as killing and wounding thousands, again in a curious case of being off by a factor of ten.⁵ It then digresses into how much policing the protests is costing the Met and highlighting debunked claims from weeks earlier that London had become a no-go zone for Jews; coverage of the actual demands of the protest were relegated to the final few paragraphs of the article.

The Standard’s other coverage of the march talked of thousands descend[ing] on the capital like some sort of Biblical plague and again gave undue prominence to the tiny handful of arrests, although they also included the words of a Holocaust survivor who attended wearing a badge with the colours of the Palestinian flag, which rather jars with their otherwise highly biased coverage and isn’t something I’ve seen other sources mention.

Of course, as a journalist, it’s generally discouraged to just outright lie about things. People might find out, and point it out, and then you and your publication will look rather silly indeed (and you might get in trouble with Ofcom). Thus, the preferred type of mistruth is the not-technically-untrue statement, and I can hardly think of a finer example than the Telegraph and the i, who both chose to publish headlines about the arrest of a terror suspect at the march.

Now, clearly, the idea here is to suggest that the police arrested a suspected terrorist at the march, with the implication that they caught Jihadi John strolling through the Strand and that this is the kind of march that terrorists might attend. In reality, though, they mean that someone was arrested in relation to inviting support for a proscribed organisation [i.e., Hamas], which is an offence under s 12(1)(a) of the Terrorism Act 2000. Also, the police do not have the power to prosecute people, but instead arrest them for suspected breaches of the law. Therefore, whilst we can say that this person was arrested under suspicion of breaching a section of a piece of legislation about terrorism, and so technically calling them a terror suspect isn’t necessarily wrong, it is clearly pretty dishonest and not at all related to the plain understanding of the phrase, nor the order of events that its use here suggests.

Although one very interesting detail that I’ve only seen mentioned in the Telegraph (which is very surprising as it represents something of a bias own goal) is that one of the arrests was apparently of an Iranian anti-Hamas protester who was arrested on an anti-social behaviour offence. So, of the tiny number of arrests that have been unduly highlighted by several publications, at least one was seemingly not even part of the march.

Chants ¶

The more frothingly reactionary coverage focussed on alleged chants from the march, which is part of an ongoing effort to adopt the most uncharitable possible interpretation of long-established slogans of the Palestinian liberation movement (such as from the river to the sea).

On this tack, the Express headline spoke of horrifying long live Hamas chants, which became terrifying in the lede before returning to being horrifying by the third paragraph. Some protesters appear to be exclaiming evil, long live Hamas and f*** you Israel, they fretted, and a video in their liveblog titled People chant Long Live Hamas during massive march in London came accompanied by the claim that protesters have been filmed chanting Long Live Hamas.

Watching the video, however, as many Express readers surely won’t, shows only a single guy shouting that, before being stopped by those around him (via insistent shushing, because this is England) and walking off. For the numerically-challenged out there, people generally refers to a number greater than 1, as does protestors and chants; most words with an -s on the end, really.

So what chants did I actually hear? Here’s a rough list:

• In our thousands/In our millions/We are all Palestinians;
• What do we want? Ceasefire! When do we want it? Now!;
• One, two, three, four/Occupation no more/Five, six, seven, eight/Israel is a terror state;
• I say Labour Party, you say Racist Party! Labour Party! Racist Party!;
• Stop. Killing. Children.;
• From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free/From the sea to the river/Palestine will live forever;
• From the UK on to Gaza/Globalise the intifada;
• There is only one solution/Intifada revolution;⁶ and
• ¡Viva, viva, Palestina!

There were a couple others that were in Arabic, and someone playing Lowkey through a speaker at one point. There were also several half-hearted efforts to get some Boycott [McDonald’s/Costa/Starbucks] going as the march passed certain businesses.

Counter-Demo ¶

Lastly, many publications chose to highlight a tiny counter-demonstration that encountered the march near Waterloo Bridge.⁷ Sky News were particularly keen on this point, publishing not one but two stories about it and including a video; most of the Express’ live coverage of the march also revolved around this confrontation.

However, the videos are pretty remarkable for their manipulation. In reality (at least at the time I passed by the area), the counter-demo was only around three rows deep and just about outnumbered by the number of police standing between them and the march. However, the Sky News video and many of the photos featured elsewhere are carefully (and somewhat awkwardly) staged so that the counter-demo takes up one half of the image, the march takes up the other and the line of police recedes down the middle:

Sky News

The video does pan from side-to-side, but it’s taken at a low enough angle that only the front row of each demonstration is visible; knowing now what to look for, you can nonetheless just about make out the shallowness of the counter-demo. The photos used on the Express’ liveblog are even more deceptive, having been taken from the counter-demonstration’s side to better hide its smallness (and betray the publication’s sympathies).

Whilst the Sky News coverage did elsewhere concede that the pro-Israeli counter-protesters were few in number — fewer than a hundred, vastly outnumbered by the thousands marching past them, they nonetheless devoted an entire long-form article to the incident. Meanwhile, the Times of Israel referred vaguely to a smaller number of demonstrators in an article that exhibits almost all of the issues I’ve been discussing here, with the addition of being interspersed with embedded Tweets from random people calling the march things like a pro-terrorist mob. However, the fact that they elected to cover the march at all does make it even stranger that the BBC neglected to.

Conclusion ¶

In a footnote to my Cuba piece, I wrote the following:

Ultimately, the reports of all such organisations are, like all other reports, additional data points. They should not be relied on exclusively, they should be interrogated as with any other source and the organisations themselves should never be above criticism or reproach, but they can and should be utilised when trying to form a comprehensive understanding of a subject.

This exercise has, I think, largely borne out that view as correct. Whilst a lot of the coverage of the march was biased, suspect or just plain dishonest, it was in two of the most anti-march pieces that we found interesting tidbits not covered elsewhere, both of which served to undermine the very arguments being put forth. Beyond giving us a more detailed picture of the event in question, this also happens to be quite funny.

The focus on the counter-protest was also emblematic of the way in which the media are desperate to construct a narrative of this being a disputed issue: in reality, the counter-protest was a minor footnote. Most of the people marching were not even aware it was there; I had to point it out to the friend I was with, and I only noticed it because someone else told me.

The full scope of the Israel–Palestine conflict defies simple explanations, and one should be suspicious of anyone purporting to offer one. I do not wish to suggest that there exists any easy or obvious solution to resolve it long-term, and I believe that reasonable minds can disagree on many points. I believe that achieving a ceasefire today is only the first step on a long road to lasting peace. I am on the record regarding all of this.

But right now, in the face of six months of absolutely shameless barbarity, more comprehensively documented perhaps than any such atrocity in human history, I am gripped with a rare moral certitude: Israel’s assault on Gaza is one of the most evil things I’ve ever witnessed, and it must end.

However, I do believe that the counter-protestors had as much right to demonstrate as we did. The overwhelming disparity in our turnouts shows why: nothing could better highlight just how isolated those supporting this genocide and defending the actions of a insane pariah state are than a tiny group of them being largely ignored (and effortlessly drowned out) by the hundreds of thousands of people filtering past them, marching proudly on the right side of history.