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Apparent campaign to discredit pro-Palestine marchers – and remove police commissioner who won’t ban marches – undermined by evidence and eyewitness accounts, including one from before Falter complained

Gideon Falter, pro-Israel chief executive of the so-called ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ (CAA), made headlines last week when he posted a video claiming that he had been stopped by the Met Police for simply trying to cross a road, on his way back from synagogue, during a pro-Palestine protest on the grounds that he was visibly Jewish.

Falter and his supporters have used the claim to demonise peace protesters as a threat to Jews – and to demand the resignation of Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley. Coincidentally, Rowley has refused calls by right-wingers to ban pro-Palestine marches.

But eyewitnesses – including Jewish bystanders – and photographic evidence appear to contradict Falter’s claim. Importantly, one account of the actions of Falter and an entourage with him was posted before the ‘scandal’ became a thing – and describes Falter with a security detail clearly creating an incident:

Other bystanders saw the same – and added that the group had been around for a while, trying to disrupt the protest:

The bodyguard can be seen in video footage of the incident shot by photographer Tom Bowles:

Gideon Falter, CEO of Campaign against antisemitism is seen in discussion with the police during the Pro Palestine March on Saturday. He brought his own security detail. pic.twitter.com/U6HlA89yOD

— Tom Bowles (@tomsdinner) April 19, 2024

Sadly nobody asked so the question remains. https://t.co/f0y8e3ukqf

— Ferret (@Ferretgrove) April 21, 2024

A group consisting of a Holocaust survivor and descendants of Holocaust survivors, who were on Aldwych Road only a few metres away from Falter’s stunt, contacted Skwawkbox with their account of events and their significance:

It has been widely reported that Gideon Falter, chief executive of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, was threatened with arrest when he approached a pro-Palestine demonstration on 13 April in the Aldwych area of London.

Mr. Falter is reported to have said that his interactions with police officers “show that the Met believes that being openly Jewish will antagonise the anti-Israel marchers and that Jews need protection, which the police cannot guarantee. Instead of addressing that threat of antisemitic violence, the Met’s policy instead seems to be that law-abiding Jewish Londoners should not be in the parts of London where these marches are taking place. In other words, that they are no-go zones for Jews.

We are writing to disagree strongly with these claims. This is because throughout his interactions with the police we were standing only a few yards away from him, yet we experienced nothing but warmth and solidarity from the pro-Palestine demonstrators and not a hint of antisemitism.

Our group was “openly Jewish” in that we all wore placards saying that, as descendants of Holocaust survivors, we oppose the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Indeed, one of us, Stephen Kapos, is a child survivor of the Holocaust who was interviewed by Sky News at the time.

Every major pro-Palestine demonstration in London has included a large Jewish bloc which has received nothing but support and warmth from their fellow demonstrators. Claims that these protests are no-go zones for Jews are completely untrue.

Yours Sincerely,

Haim Bresheeth (son of two survivors of Auschwitz)
Mark Etkind (son of a survivor of the Lodz ghetto and Buchenwald)
Stephen Kapos (survivor of the Holocaust in Budapest)
Peter Kapos (son of a Holocaust survivor)
Yosefa Loshitzky (daughter of survivors of the Holocaust in Poland)

A Holocaust survivor and descendants of Holocaust survivors, photographed during Falter’s altercation with police

An image of the entrance to Bush House on Aldwych Road shows how close the group (red) were to Falter (blue) during the incident

A set of photos posted by another bystander shows the Holocaust group and Falter, confirming how close the ‘openly Jewish’ peace demonstrators were to Falter’s supposed ‘no-go zone’:

I too was there and they were definitely not there to just “cross the road” they were lurking around looking for provocation just a few 100 yards from the Israeli counter protest! Note there were other Jews supporting the march such as holocaust survivors pic.twitter.com/aU2aeh3EqC

— Eli786110 (@Aliwala786110) April 21, 2024

Falter had told the Times that he simply ‘came across’ the Palestine protest and tried to cross the road ‘as the front of the march got to us’:

At Aldwych, we came across the pro-Palestine protest and we started to cross the road as the front of the march got to us. Suddenly I felt hands on me. I looked around to see a police officer who was shoving me onto the pavement.

This was contradicted by the photos taken of him and his group before the march got there – and by subsequent responses and video clips from others who were there, including a Jewish police officer:

I forgot that I actually did take a short video of the Gideon Falter incident on the Palestine march last weekend. He had clearly come over from a small pro Israeli protest to try to antagonise people with his video guy to capture it. pic.twitter.com/VBQ5HHAFZo

— John Lubbock (@jwsal) April 21, 2024

They literally were there to provoke and cause an issue by walking literally head on with the peaceful protestors. SO DESPERATE FOR ATTENTION pic.twitter.com/LVRspnXD99

— Zubair (@zubairb02) April 21, 2024

Few if any UK ‘mainstream’ media outlets have covered the contradictory evidence, of which the above is only a small selection.

Gideon Falter has been found at least once to have made untrue accusations of antisemitic conduct. In 2009 he accused Rowan Laxton, a Foreign Office official of shouting ‘F***ing Jews’ in response to incidents in Palestine, leading to Laxton being convicted of ‘racially aggravated public disorder’. The appeal court judges, however, unanimously agreed that Laxton had not said any such thing:

Last year, he was also filmed driving a van ‘very close’ to pro-Palestine protesters and tried to get police to force them to move because ‘they are obstructing the highway’ – as the footage showed other vehicles moving freely past:

Gideon Falter ….. filming looks like more than a hobby. It’s obsessional https://t.co/u8WQ5TWE0a

— Jackie Walker – HRH, MP, MBE, ABC (@Jackiew80333500) April 21, 2024

According to Electronic Intifada last year, the CAA – which has taken ‘credit’ for forcing the Unite union to ban book talks and film showings exposing the weaponisation of antisemitism to attack the pro-Palestine left – is or has been funded by an Israeli ‘quasi-governmental’ group:

the CAA has been given almost half a million dollars by the UK partner of the Jewish National Fund, Israel’s quasi-governmental settler-colonial agency.

The donations were hidden in obscure Charity Commission documents uncovered by our research. In an email to The Electronic Intifada, the CAA confirmed it had been in “past receipt of donations from JNF UK” but denied current JNF funding.

“JNF UK has never exercised or sought to exercise any influence over our activities,” the CAA claimed…

…In 2018, the CAA declared in its accounts disclosed to the Charity Commission that a donation of almost $220,000 had come from a “related party.”

This amounted to nearly half of its income for that year.

Funding a “crisis”

The following year, the CAA declared that $230,000 had come from a similarly undisclosed “related party.”

The 2019 figure amounted to 20 percent of its income but 60 percent of its expenditure.

In 2019, JNF UK declared expenditure of the exact same amount as the donation declared by the CAA that same year.

JNF UK paid $230,000 “for grants provided to a UK charity, which has a trustee who is also a trustee of JNF Charitable Trust.”

According to its website, “JNF Charitable Trust” is simply the official name of the JNF UK charity and they “are the same” group.

The 2019 JNF UK accounts also stated that in 2018 it had made a donation of almost $220,000 to the same unnamed “UK charity.”

Skwawkbox approached the CAA for comment, providing examples of the above counter-evidence and details of the Rowan Laxton incident. The group had not responded by the time of writing.

Update: Sky News has now published a 13-minute video of the entire interaction between Falter and the police – and, unlike Falter’s edited version, it shows the officer telling Falter that he had already observed him trying to provoke the pro-Palestine protesters and was not falling for Falter’s ‘disingenuousness’:

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Zionist Mark Lewis panned by James Wilson in series of Twitter posts

Earlier this month, university lecturer James Wilson won substantial damages from two so-called ‘antisemitism campaigners’ who had foully smeared and endangered him and his family in their efforts to discredit him as an opponent of the ‘left antisemitism’ narrative that supporters of Israel have weaponised for almost a decade now against supporters of Palestinian human and political rights.

Now the victorious Wilson has taken aim in his social media feed at Zionist lawyer Mark Lewis, who at one time represented at least two of the defendants. Lewis, a pro-Israel activist who spoke about ‘unapologetic Zionism’ at the launch of a UK pro-Israel group considered by many to be far-right and boasted of wanting to make people whom he considered ‘antisemites’ homeless, has been lionised by the Zionist right for his pursuit of their opponents.

He has also been sanctioned by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for abusive conduct on social media – and wished a young Jewish supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour dead – and was heavily criticised by a judge in a different case for his conduct of the case and his lack of proper research on behalf of his clients:

a matter of very real concern that the Claimants put evidence before the Court, on an ex parte application, that was not true…

…he had simply failed to carry out sufficient (or any) research or to take adequate instructions from his clients.

And, as James Wilson has pointed out – alongside much more – Lewis was forced to apologise to the court for providing misleading information in Wilson’s suit about the financial health of one (by the time of the hearing, apparently former) client, Edward Cantor who, he had claimed, did not own property that could be sold to pay any penalty levied by the court:

As Luke Turner, who responded to Wilson’s posts, pointed out, Lewis’s distaste for ‘antisemites’ did not prevent him representing two extreme right-wingers – described by the judge in the case as bullying and ‘whiffing’ of antisemitism – when they wanted to sue Turner for posts about them:

The irony of that particular quote is really quite something, given who he was representing in my case, and the "whiff of threat and antisemitism" described by the judge in their "aggressive" course of "bullying" towards me. https://t.co/Dly6C3Aqwb

— Luke Turner (@Luke_Turner) April 20, 2024

And in a pair of posts showing screenshots of communications from Lewis, Wilson – himself a now non-practising solicitor – showed that Lewis demanded thousands of pounds, from the victim of the smear, to settle Lewis’s case against them, while expressing his and his clients’ expectation of victory in the case and repeating that Cantor owned nothing that could be used to pay any penalty. The tactic and the refusal to accept Wilson’s settlement proposal racked up enormous legal costs for the failed defendants:

I am worried about recovering my costs. I do not want to bankrupt Mr Mendelsohn or make Mr Cantor and his family homeless.

But if Mark Lewis @MLewisLawyer), Daniel Berke (@DanielBerke1) and Beth Grossman (@DoughtyStreet) refuse to pay my costs, then I may have no choice.

— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) April 21, 2024

And Wilson concluded his posts – for now at least – by taking aim at Simon Myerson, a supporter of Israel and part-time judge recently sanctioned for abusive comments on social media. Myerson had shared a post calling Wilson the ‘scum of the earth’, which the judge in Wilson’s case described as:

abuse of the same dehumanising kind as was used of Jewish people by the Nazis in the 1930s.

The judge also rejected the defence’s claim that Wilson’s correspondence with Myerson about his sharing of the abusive post demonstrated any kind of aggression or unreasonableness on Wilson’s part.

As Jewish author Michael Rosen, who was also targeted by some of the same people, pointed out, perhaps with his tongue firmly lodged in his cheek, it is noteworthy that the UK ‘mainstream’ press – which will run for weeks with any allegation against a left-winger or supporter of Palestinians – has shown no interest in covering the outcome of the Wilson case or the abusive conduct of those on the losing, pro-Israel, side:

However, Skwawkbox has covered the case in full and a timeline of it can be found here.

The case is not the first conducted by Lewis against supporters of Palestinian rights that ended poorly for his clients. In 2020 Jane Heybroek, a human rights barrister, won a stunning victory when actress Tracy-Ann Oberman and TV presenter Rachel Riley dropped their libel claim against her over an article retweeted by Heybroek criticising their behaviour and contributed toward her legal costs defending the action.

Mark Lewis was asked for comment about Wilson’s comments and analysis but had not responded at the time of writing. He was also ‘tagged’ by Wilson at the start of his Twitter analysis about Lewis’s involvement in the case:

Since one of the Defendants’ solicitors, Mark Lewis (@MLewisLawyer) of Patron Law (@LawPatron), is mentioned in the statement, I am tagging him here. If he wishes to reply, I’ll post his reply below my statement.

— James Wilson (@per_incuriam2) April 13, 2024

SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.

If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.

In this interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Sumi Madhok speaks about her latest book, Vernacular Rights Cultures which subverts prevailing frameworks around human rights by exploring how subaltern groups mobilise for justice through particular political imaginaries, conceptual vocabularies and gendered political struggles.

Read a review of the book for LSE Review of Books here.

Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice. Sumi Madhok. Cambridge University Press. 2024 (paperback); 2021 (hardback).

Q: In Vernacular Rights Cultures, you critique the Eurocentred discourse around rights and identify the “politics of origins” as an important aspect of this. What is the “politics of origins” and why do you push against it?

The politics of origins is the key framework around which global human rights is organised. It is a racialised and binary global human rights discourse, which stipulates that human rights originate in, belong to, travel from and operate for the West. This politics of origins is a shared discourse; shared by not only celebrants and detractors of human rights but also by critical and progressive scholarship on human rights. Significantly, it organises the global human rights discourse into a series of binary distinctions, the key ones being between West/non-West, universalism vs cultural particularism and “Asian values” vs “Western political and civil human rights”. An important way in which these binaries constantly appear is by asking the question, are rights are Western? This question is relentlessly rehearsed, by both celebrants and detractors of human rights, ie, both by those who claim human rights are given to the rest of the world by the “West”, as well as by those who use the originary argument to refuse it, saying that human rights have no cultural or political traction in contexts outside the “West” because they are not part of ”non-western” cultural values.

One of the things the book does is to sidestep the politics of origins and the binary formulations that foreground rights conversations across scholarly, practitioner and policymaking contexts.

One of the things the book does is to sidestep the politics of origins and the binary formulations that foreground rights conversations across scholarly, practitioner and policymaking contexts. Two things to note here: firstly, the politics of origins is not without consequences. In the hands of the detractors, and particularly authoritarian nation states, it places a handy argument to delegitimise democratic protest, politics and questioning of excessive state power on the basis that human rights are illegitimate, alien and foreign and therefore with little cultural traction and legitimacy. In critical/progressive scholarship on human rights, on the other hand, this originary story shores up the “West” as the sole epistemic subject of human rights, although this time via critique and through displaying wilful ignorance and historical unknowing of rights struggles in most of the world. Therefore, for instance, you could be the most radical theorist of human rights and yet, you wouldn’t be under any obligation to display any knowledge, let alone theorise, about rights politics outside the Euro-North Atlantic world.

Secondly, participants in rights politics in “most of the world” don’t think of their worldmaking projects and rights struggles as universalist or not universalist or particularist. One of the things they’re asking for is for their struggles and worldmaking projects to be considered part of the universal and for these to be heard and to matter epistemically – that’s a big part of the struggle. However, this aspiration is often thwarted by the refusal to think outside of the politics of origins, resulting in an almost unmoveable impasse in global human rights. A key intervention of the book is to shift this stasis and move rights thinking out of this impasse.

Conceptual diversity is part of my broader project on anti-imperial epistemic justice.

Q: Why do you emphasise conceptual diversity as a “key intellectual project of vernacular rights cultures” (177)?

Conceptual diversity is part of my broader project on anti-imperial epistemic justice. The book is a key constituent of this project. Conceptual diversity is important in order to theorise and conceptually capture the stakes and struggles of rights politics in most of the world. We urgently need conceptual scholarship from most of the world, one that illuminates the critical conceptual vocabularies and the political imaginaries of rights politics taking place in different parts of the world. This is crucial because when people do think about rights struggles in most of the world, that work is mostly embedded in Eurocentric frameworks and tends to be either not only overly descriptive but also converts “the other and elsewhere” into “case studies” of global human rights, as though these have no epistemic authority of their own.

Q: Why do you foreground haq, a transregional vernacular of rights prevalent in South Asia, over a universalist idea of human rights?

Haq is a fantastically cosmopolitan concept. The word is first sighted in classical Hebrew and in Semitic languages like Aramaic and Mandaean. It then comes into pre-Islamic poetry and into the Quran. Over the centuries, it travels extensively to become the principal. word for a right across East Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, Turkey, South Asia. It comes into South Asia though Persian, which was a state language of undivided India and Pakistan before partition by the British Empire. The word has been used by people across two continents, and in my own tracking, in at least eight different languages to speak about their entitlements and rights. This begs the question: what is the conceptual nature of haq? What kinds of things is it being used to articulate and demand as a rights claim, and what is (or isn’t) it able to accommodate? Who are the subjects of haq? What sorts of rights politics does it animate? In what ways does rights politics for haq expand existing human rights politics, scholarship and theoretical frameworks? For instance, paying attention to conceptual languages of haq shows that it not only sutures the politics of rights to the politics of justice but also grounds rights in alternative justificatory premises and conceptual meanings. In other words, the rights politics in most of the world, appears as the politics of structural justice. It is therefore, not the civilisational, racialised, minimalist, depoliticised, humanitarian politics of moralism and despair. Rather, it is one that is located within political struggles for freedom, rights and justice, and underpinned by a conception of justice as non-exploitational and structural.

The word [haq] has been used by people across two continents, and in my own tracking, in at least eight different languages to speak about their entitlements and rights.

Q: Establishing a “feminist historical ontology” underpins your methodology. What does this involve and what is gained from taking this theoretical perspective?

The book refuses methodological nationalism and statism and the “great men” stories that it champions, not least, because more than ever, there is a need for scholarly accounts of rights and human rights to move outside of methodological nationalism in order to document and theorise rights politics that can form solidaristic coalitions for rights and justice across the globe, while also being able to hold nation states to account. At the same time, the book is also invested in giving an epistemic account of the critical conceptual vocabularies of rights politics that are used in contemporary subaltern movements. However, the question that arises is how does one do this? In order to give an epistemic accounting of this politics of rights, I’ve had to both devise a theoretical framework for their study, which I call vernacular rights cultures, as well as a methodological device, which I call a feminist historical ontology. Rather than looking at human rights or rights politics in different nation states or privileging state actors in global fora, I tracked the way the word haq appears in subaltern movements across different geographical areas, focusing on South Asia, specifically central eastern Pakistan, and north-western India. Vernacular rights cultures are not authentic or pure hermetically sealed sites in the Global South. These rights cultures are co-produced through and invoked within multiple, diverse and conflictual encounters with developmentalism, extractivism, dispossession, militarism, statism, legal constitutionalism, and activism; therefore, it is at the intersection of these and not as some freestanding “authentic” abstraction, that haq as a contemporary idea operates.

Rights cultures are co-produced through and invoked within multiple, diverse and conflictual encounters with developmentalism, extractivism, dispossession, militarism, statism, legal constitutionalism, and activism

Feminist historical ontology has two constitutive parts:  it brings together historical ontologies with a feminist critical reflexive politics of location. The first borrows from the philosopher Ian Hacking and his work on historical ontology, which tracks how concepts come into being and acquire traction at particular historical points. Concepts enable us to describe and visualise the world, and result in what Hacking calls “making up people”. In my ethnographies of rights mobilisations, I tracked the work that haq was doing in “making up people”. Haq not only signifies political subjectivities and worldmaking imaginaries but also brings into being a particular relation to the self. It’s important to note that critical conceptual vocabularies of rights are not simply formalistic or technical literal terms, but that they produce political imaginaries and set in motion processes of subjectification, which have very particular consequences on the ground.

Haq, too, is a gendered concept; it brings into being gendered subjects of rights and puts in place a gendered set of political possibilities, futurities and actions.

Like all phenomena, concepts are gendered. Haq, too, is a gendered concept; it brings into being gendered subjects of rights and puts in place a gendered set of political possibilities, futurities and actions. In order to be able to foreground the gendered nature of concepts, historical ontology, therefore, requires a supplementation with a critical reflexive feminist politics of location that draws on feminist anti-imperial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, decolonial and critical race scholarship in order to reflect existing hierarchically and oppressively arranged site-specific gendered power relations on the one hand, and Eurocentred knowledge production on the other. Accordingly, feminist historical ontologies (of rights in this case) are methodological devices that produce an orientation towards generating conceptual accounts of rights encounters in the world that are responsive to a critical reflexive politics of location, to gendered power relations and struggles, to political imaginaries of subaltern struggle and worldmaking, and to the coming into being of gendered subjects of rights.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.