Pro-Palestinian protestors descend on Town Hall to demand end to Israeli weapons investment and Haifa twinning
Camped out: protestors at Hackney Town Hall, Friday 10 May 2024. Photograph: Hackney Citizen
A group of pro-Palestinian campaigners are camped out in front of Hackney Town Hall to protest against Hackney Council’s links with Israel, in the light of that state’s attack on Gaza.
The protestors, who set up their tents yesterday (Thursday 9 May 2024), have said that they will not dismantle the encampment until the council agrees to their two demands.
The first is that Hackney Council “immediately cease its investments in Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons company.”
The second demand it that the local authority “severs its twinning with the Israeli city of Haifa.”
They are also demanding that the local authority should “fully divest from Israel’s occupation and genocide and build links with Palestine.”
According to data obtained by the protestors, the council’s pension fund currently holds £25,700 in stocks of the company Elbit Systems Ltd, a supplier of equipment to the Israeli Defence Forces.
A local activist at the Town Hall stated: “The council divested from Russia very fast after they invaded Ukraine, and it isn’t that hard to find an investment fund which isn’t complicit in genocide.
“The council just can’t be bothered to do it, and would rather ignore us. That’s why we’re here and will stay here until they finally come to the table”.
The encampment includes half a dozen tents, signs, chalked political messages on the paving outside the Town Hall, a large Palestinian flag, as well as protestors making speeches and handing out leaflets.
At one point they were joined by Cllr Claudia Turbet-Delof, who is one of four councillors currently suspended by Hackney Labour party for voting to hear a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and to hear a motion supporting an internal investigation into how Labour handled the case of former councillor Tom Dewey.
The camp outside Hackney Town Hall started last night, demanding @hackneycouncil stop supporting #ApartheidIsrael
Five of us stayed overnight
Thanks to @Shakira_RN for the vegan chocolate croissants for breakfast and to the Hackney resident who stopped by to take our coffee order pic.twitter.com/GRLmarm4BF— Heather Mendick (@helensclegel) May 10, 2024
Thanks to councillor Claudia Turbet-Delof for stopping at our camp for Palestine outside the Town Hall and expressing solidarity #HackneyDivest pic.twitter.com/G55iCTwMP0
— Heather Mendick (@helensclegel) May 10, 2024
Outside Hackney Town Hall now #HackneyDivest pic.twitter.com/EmlG3upTVY
— Heather Mendick (@helensclegel) May 10, 2024
Messages in chalk in front of Hackney Town Hall this morning
Two police officers turned up early to read and approve every word#HackneyDivest pic.twitter.com/PflCtU0WaR— Heather Mendick (@helensclegel) May 10, 2024
Hackney Council can wash off our chalk messages, but we’ll be back to write some more #HackneyDivest #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/vOsKkaaIKw
— Heather Mendick (@helensclegel) May 10, 2024
Hackney Council says its hands are tied over its pension fund’s investment in “business activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.
The fund has passive investments worth £1.9m in “companies conducting business activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, pensions committee chair Cllr Kam Adams (Labour party) has said previously.
However, the fund does not “directly own any stocks or shares in individual companies”, Cllr Adams told the Citizen following a protest on 7 February.
“All of the fund’s equity investments are held indirectly; the Hackney Pension Fund owns units in externally managed pooled investment funds which in turn own the underlying investments,” he reiterated.
The only way to divest from the stocks listed would be to dispose of the investment fund and find an “alternative solution which would guarantee exclusion of those companies”, he said.
Photograph: Hackney Citizen
The organisation that runs exchanges between Hackney and Haifa has defended the relationship.
Last month, Martin Sugarman, chair of Hackney Anglo Israel Friendship Association (HAIFA), told the Citizen that the agreement has evolved over the years.
He said that the focus now is on “work and skills, rather than holiday junkets which most twinning in the UK used to do or still does”.
HAIFA has run an exchange programme between Homerton Hospital and the Rambam Healthcare Campus in Haifa since 1995.
The programme has been on hold since Covid, and the pause has continued amid the ongoing violence.
Sugarman has said no financial assistance is given to HAIFA by Hackney Council, and that the council has “never actually participated except to give strong moral support to the twinning and to host well-attended welcome receptions for guests from Haifa, and bon voyage teas for our groups going to Israel”.
It would be a great idea if the Town Hall garden was not allowed to become a tip of tents and racist signs that threaten and intimidate and insult Jews and Zionists of all ethnicities and kinds, instead of a pleasant community garden for all to enjoy. Many now avoid it like the plague. The Council owe all of us a deep apology for permitting this to happen since day one of the unsightly appearance of this slum. If they were Travellers they would have been moved on by the police; unequal treatment no?
What a fool J Anthony is – but typical of PSC Woke racists and Hamas rapist supporters, homophobic, misogynists – twists my words. As a former Senior Teacher in Hackney and Tower Hamlets secondary schools for many years, I taught Traveller children and met their parents many times. I have no problem with Travellers and support them, but I state a fact – if Travellers had been located on the Town Hall lawns, they would have been evicted ; so why are the Council discriminating in favour of anti-Jewish racist, PSC Hamas supporting Jew haters and allowing their threatening camp? You are not an anti-Semite by any chance, are you?
What have you got against travellers, would you avoid them like the plague? You are blind to your own racism.
Are you aware that this encampment was started by a Jewish woman? There is no anti semitism involved or accepted there.
Anti Zionism. – as Keir Starmer has himself said – is just anti-Semitic – and that is what the tentifada and PSC stand for – destruction of Israel, bit by bit, and a 2nd Holocaust; anti Israel Jews are a fringe group with no connection to the mainstream Jewish community and our millions of non-Jewish supporters. They, like the PSC, are deluded into believing the lies of the PLO, who really say privately in their Arab language forums and mosques and schools and colleges, 'We will have 2 states and when we are ready we will attack Israel again until we have an Arab state from river to sea'.
The Arabs stole our land and Jerusalem (built by King David in 1000 BCE approx) in their colonialist , racist , settler invasion of 690 AD and ethnically cleansed the Jews and occupied it . Now we are back and Zionism remains our national liberation movement , the oldest and most long lasting in world history.
Response plesae on a post card
Why would travellers be evicted if they were protesting at the abuse of human rights, they were also murdered in the holocaust, it’s a pity you don’t take a leaf out of their book and use your suffering to make sure others don’t suffer so instead of coming out with that God’s chosen people claptrap. If God did choose to favour a particular group do you think he would have picked a group lead by a fraud and murderer like Netanyahu?
They are not "anti jewish" they are "anti zionist" a lot of jews including orthodox jews detest zionism, are they anti jewish? Wherever your arguments are touched they are false.