Local Date
5 October 2024Local Time
12:01Location
Hackney Downs, LondonCountry or Territory
United KingdomName
Sasha EngelmannSatellite
NOAA-18Radio Callsign
Archive ID
Today is October 5th, and a national protest for Palestine solidarity in London is underway, slowly moving from Russell Square to Downing Street. Many posters and banners point to the fact that the genocide in Palestine has been going on for one year. There are photographs of victims, messages to Netanyahu and Kier Starmer, and demands for reckoning. Chilling, however, are attempts in the wider media to memorialise this moment in ways that justify Israel's ongoing agression Gaza and Lebanon. Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian today: "What is the line between... memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity? And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its pummeling of Gaza continues unabated?" In light of this, the protest feels like more than a public demonstration- it is also a collective remembering, a coherence of what we remember.