When neighbours who had met at pro-Palestine marches learnt that a charity in their east London borough was raising cash for the Israeli military, they organised quickly.
Their goal was to pressure the local Chabad Lubavitch Centre to withdraw its fundraiser for a reserve unit in northern Israel. Horrific details about Israel’s siege of Gaza had by then been emerging for months, with reports of tens of thousands of deaths and scenes of devastation in civilian areas.
“We’re young, old, men, women, Muslim, non-Muslim,” one told us. “We protested outside their offices and wrote to the Charity Commission and our MP en masse. We also climbed ladders to wave our flags in protest… We were disgusted that the genocide had made its way to our doorstep.”
