Sunday’s Demo is a March Against Peace and Against the Hostages

The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, with the support other Jewish communal bodies and various spurious ‘advocacy’ groups, have called a march for Sunday 10^th August. One set of slides presented it as a ‘National March for the Hostages’, with the tag line ‘Let them all go’ and the hashtag #UntilTheLastHostage. Another proclaimed ‘No Recognition without Hostage Release’ with the hashtag #StopAppeasing Terrorists. A third slide spelled this demand out in more detail:

‘Prime Minister, we are demanding the immediate release of the hostages and stating unequivocally that any recognition of Palestine must be conditioned on their return. To do otherwise risks legitimising extremism and undermining any hope for a just and lasting peace. The government must be unequivocal: no recognition until all the hostages are returned home.’

This last messaging has recently been omitted from social media posts, but it is still the primary way the march has been covered by the UK Jewish Press, and tallies with a range of recent statements from the Chief Rabbi and the President of the Board of Deputies condemning the UK government for recognising Palestinian statehood. The non-recognition aspect may have been downplayed to keep the Progressives on side, but it is clearly still present. ‘This is not a political issue it is a human one. It transcends, party lines, ideologies and national borders’ proclaims the new messaging (no doubt thinking about their charitable status) while taking a stance that is hugely political, pro-Likud and explicitly nationalist.