Beware the friend who is only trying to help. Not, perhaps, as a rule for life but certainly when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the clashes that battle provokes around the world. So often those who think they’re doing their bit serve only to make an already impossible situation even worse.
The week began with an instructive example, when Gideon Falter, head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released a video clip of himself being steered away from one of London’s weekly Gaza demonstrations by a police officer on the grounds that: “You are quite openly Jewish, this is a pro-Palestinian march.” Falter argued that he had flushed out proof that the Metropolitan police regard the marches as an unsafe environment for visibly Jewish people, even though the Met allows them to go ahead week after week.
