Demonstrators block London’s Oxford Circus in latest mass protest against Israel; chief rabbi sounds alarm

The Metropolitan Police bar protesters from gathering outside the Israeli embassy in London, as another weekend of mass demonstrations against Israel gets underway in the British capital amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The police say a number of the demonstrators blocked traffic at Oxford Circus before being cleared by officers.

Officers are responding to a group of protestors who have sat down and blocked Oxford Circus.

This behaviour clearly impacts on London's ability to function normally and we are working quickly to reopen the road. pic.twitter.com/pQAO8yKCmi

— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) November 4, 2023

Writing in The Times of London on Friday, ahead of the rally, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis warned of “hateful extremism” at the protests and said that the lines between demonstrators and “those who support the brutal terrorism of Hamas” have become “badly blurred.”

In the wake of the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, in which 1,400 people were slaughtered, most of them civilians, Mirvis wrote: “The world feels different because at the very moment when it should be clearer than ever what is meant by Hamas’s ‘resistance’, ‘jihad’, ‘uprising’, or ‘intifada’, more and more people are now openly calling for these things in cities across Britain and the world. This is hateful extremism.”

At the protests, he lamented, “A minority have proudly displayed their extremism on their banners and in their chants, while the majority stand alongside them.”

And he cited a similar blurring of lines on university campuses and in sermons in a minority of mosques “inciting hatred and even violence against Jews, while the majority of prominent Muslim clerics are silent”.