The campaign group Led By Donkeys has received £27,000 in compensation after a giant banner it displayed in Parliament Square saying “Yes It’s A Genocide” was seized by Greater London Authority officials and destroyed.
Representatives of the GLA arrived on the scene in central London and confiscated the 40-metre by 40-metre banner after it was unfurled on 4 December 2024, just over a year after Israel began its assault on Gaza after the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas.
Led By Donkeys said its 19-month campaign to get it returned was initially met with refusals before the GLA told the collective that it had been given to the environmental services company Veolia, which had destroyed it.
After legal letters were sent on behalf of Led By Donkeys demanding that either the GLA or Veolia cover the banner’s cost, Veolia has agreed to pay £27,216.
Ben Stewart, a co-founder of Led By Donkeys, said: “The Parliament Square banner was in collaboration with one of the world’s leading genocide scholars, but still the authorities threw process out the window and simply seized and destroyed our property. Pursuing compensation was never about the money, it was about defending space to protest Israel’s war crimes.
“Palestine protests are treated differently in Britain to all other forms of activism. Direct action is regarded as terrorism and words on a placard are rendered illegal. Over the years we’ve delivered banners, put up billboards and done guerilla projections across the country, but the only time our equipment has been seized and destroyed was when it related to Palestine.”
The banner was videoed from the air and a film created that was posted on social media featuring a voiceover from the renowned Israeli scholar Prof Amos Goldberg, a historian of the Holocaust, who said: “This is exactly what a genocide looks like.”
In September last year, the UN independent international commission of inquiry concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza and that Israeli officials, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, incited these acts.
Last month, the commission of inquiry said Israel continued to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children in Gaza. Israel has persistently denied allegations of genocide. Its foreign ministry called last year’s report by the commission “distorted and false” and Israel’s mission in Geneva rejected last month’s findings as a “libellous sham”.
A significant body of research by legal and rights experts has concluded that Israel is committing what is considered the most serious international crime, including analyses by UN investigators, rights bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and genocide scholars worldwide.
In February, the European Legal Support Center, along with the research group Forensic Architecture, launched the “index of repression”, which records instances of Palestinian solidarity being “silenced, criminalised and sanctioned” in Britain. They said more than 900 instances had occurred in the last six years.
A spokesperson for the GLA said: “A banner seized by GLA heritage wardens following an unauthorised protest in December was unfortunately damaged during storage and subsequently disposed of by our contractors.”
A Veolia spokesperson said: “We were asked by our client to collect the banner and store it temporarily at one of our local depots. Regrettably, after around 12 weeks, the banner’s condition deteriorated and became a health and safety hazard for our operations and the depot had to dispose of it. We have reimbursed Led By Donkeys for the full cost of the banner, due to the unintentional damage caused.”
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