A vote to fly the Palestinian national colours at Belfast City Hall may have been blocked by a technical ruling, but protesters found their own novel method of honouring Palestine. With about a dozen helium-filled balloons and an attached red, white, green and black flag. Those marking the International Day for Solidarity with the People of Palestine managed to see the symbolic cloth flutter its way through the sky. Above the city centre’s main landmark.
The bureaucratic issue of the Belfast Palestine flag
Despite passing by a margin of 41 to 15 at a November 3 meeting, the vote to stand in solidarity with the besieged people of Palestine was overridden. The unionist politicians blocking the vote made use of the ‘call-in’ mechanism. This process was brought in during 2014 to act as an additional check on council decision making. It entitles councillors to request that a decision be reviewed if they believe proper procedure was not followed, or it may have a disproportionate effect on a particular community. It requires 15% of councillors to back the call-in request.
A valid call-in will lead to a decision being paused until it is reviewed. The matter must then be re-examined at the next council meeting. If a legal verdict rules the risk of negatively impacting a given community is genuine, the matter requires 80% of councillors to vote in favour for the decision to go through. The matter of the Palestine flag’s official pole-mounted — as opposed to helium-assisted — flying is currently on pause.
Loyalist Counter-Protest Falls Flat
The workaround by Palestine solidarity activists was part of a larger protest that saw well over 2,000 people. They made their way on to the streets of Belfast to call for an end to the genocide. A loyalist counter-protest was organised by the 1642 Boyne Bridge Defenders Historical Group.
Promotion for the latter assembly bizarrely included an image that seemed to encapsulate present day Gaza. Children are shown trudging through a dreary rain-soaked landscape populated with dilapidated tents. Yet the image repurposed for a pro-Israel demo shows mainly white children despondent alongside the message:
They have no future unless we stand together and fight!
Perhaps another manifestation of the phenomenon in which, somewhere in the subconscious of the reactionary mind there perhaps lurks a recognition of the harm they’re causing, alongside a fear of it being revisited on them.
Far-right influencers had also been pushing for a strong presence, saying:
Tomorrow we must fill Belfast city centre and stand together in defiance against this treasonous executive and city hall.They are the enemy within, they have shown time and time again that we the people of ulster [sic] are a second class choice to them.Our silence will be their consent to replace us with a 3rd world culture in an aim to exile our Christian ways of life.
The message continued:
Tomorrow we stand as one to make a clear statement to this government, “end the invasion and start deporting”.
It’s get them out or we the people will put you out , nunc pro tunc.
As it turned out, the use of apocalyptic racist rhetoric and bemusing deployment of Latin phraseology typically confined to dry court documents didn’t entice the desired numbers. Roughly 200 turned up. They endured a cocktail of loyalism, Zionism, racism, Islamophobia and Christian chauvinism. All of which are quite natural bedfellows. Loudspeaker chants focused on the religious part. The union and Israeli flags were brandished. One of them with the Israeli Genocide Forces logo alongside the words “I love Israel”.
Featured image via IPSC
This post was originally published on Canary.