'Is it any wonder Jews here are afraid?' Northern Ireland Friends of Israel leader reacts to council meeting 'Nazi' protest

The gathering of Derry City and Strabane District Council saw perhaps 50-plus protestors, some masked, descend upon the meeting.

Some unfurled a banner which read “Expel the Israeli Ambassador” – except where every ‘S’ had been replaced with the stylized lightning-style runes of the Nazi SS.

The banner has been displayed before at Palestine protests in the city, and is intended to imply that the conduct of Israel and Nazi Germany are similar.

Amid the hubbub, a member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign – Catherine Hutton – was allowed to address the council meeting, and began by distancing herself from the group which brought the banner, saying “we do not agree with anti-semitic symbols”.

UUP Alderman Derek Hussey, present at the meeting, called the banner “absolutely disgraceful given the history of the Jewish people”.

Independent dissident republican councillor Gary Donnelly defended the banner, saying that republicans had long used the phrase “SS RUC” and that it is not anti-semitic.

Mr Jaffe, whose group says it exists to “strengthen understanding and friendship between the peoples of Northern Ireland and Israel” told News Letter “it is deeply ironic” that some of those who liken Israel to the Nazis “fail to roundly condemn the murder, rape, and abduction of 1,400 Israelis in a day, as happened on October 7”.

"I acknowledge that the representative of the local branch of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity campaign called out the SS insignia on the banner as being antisemitic,” Mr Jaffe added.

"Indeed it beggars belief that anyone would defend the display of Nazi imagery during a council meeting, particularly by a mob, some of whom were masked, and who intimidated councillors and officials.

“Is it any wonder that the Jewish community across the UK and Ireland, and around the world, are fearful where exactly this demonisation of Israel is heading?

"And I firmly believe many in the wider community share our concerns.”

Mr Jaffe said people had been trying for some time to demonstrate that Hamas was inherently anti-Jewish, “but we couldn't convince the rest of the world”.

Now he said it should be obvious that "Hamas wants every Jewish man, woman and child dead”.

• HAMAS CHARTER AND GLOBAL POPULATIONS

Hamas was formed in the late 1980s and its charter set out an extreme Islamist interpretation of Jewish-Muslim relations.

It sets out a desire to re-conquer Israel itself by exclusively armed means (“so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement”).

It also casts itself as “the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism... [and] the fight with the warmongering Jews”.

There are a mere 439 Jews in Northern Ireland according to the last census in 2021.

In Israel, there are about seven million Jewish people.

There are very roughly three million Palestinians in the West Bank, another two million in Gaza, and another two million inside Israel, plus perhaps three million or so spread across Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon – about 10 million in total.

According to a 2023 study by the Jewish People Policy Institute (as reported by the Jewish Chronicle), there are now 14.2 million Jews worldwide, plus another 2.3 million “partially Jewish” people.

When combined into 16.5 million, that means the global Jewish population in 2023 has finally rebounded to the same level it was at before the Holocaust, according to the Chronicle.

• WHAT WAS THE SS?

'SS' stands for Schutzstaffel, which began as a Nazi street-fighting outfit in the 1920s.

It grew to become one of the most fanatical arms of the party's machine, playing a decisive role in both the aggression against Germany's neighbours and the Jewish Holocaust.

Under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler, the SS was the backbone of Einsatzgruppen squads which shot Jewish civilians and buried them in mass graves, and later oversaw the gassing of Jews in camps, killing about six million in total.

The SS also played a pivotal role in exterminating gentile populations in areas under Nazi occupation.

In Belarus alone – just one little part of the Eastern Front, which extended from Poland to the River Volga – the SS aided in the burning of over 650 villages (according to the official website of the Republic of Belarus), with the occupation leading to the death of over one-quarter of the entire Belorussian civilian population (according to the University of Southamption's history department).