GAZA: The demonstrations, by James Cusick
At 2.26pm, just as the flower department in the smart Wholefoods Market were wrapping a new bunch of expensive lilies, there was a different kind of delivery being made outside in Young Street, London. Perspex riot shields were handed out to officers as van after van of specialist riot police moved into Kensington High Street and towards the gates of the Israeli embassy. Kensington's usually large Saturday contribution to Britain spending its way out of the recession was on temporary hold. In place of shopping, police prepared for 50,000 demonstrators.
The march began at Hyde Park Corner, with celebrity speakers, including Annie Lennox, saying it was important that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza was highlighted and that "we can use our voices collectively".
Organised by the Stop the War Coalition, the protest was said by the organisers to be 200,000 strong. Scotland Yard's estimate was closer to 50,000. Placards made the point clear enough: the genocide, the massacre, the criminal siege, the war crimes by Israel in Gaza had to stop. Solidarity was with the Palestinians and the focus for the march was the gates of the Israeli embassy at Kensington Palace Gardens.
This is the protected private road into Kensington Palace, once home to Princess Diana. It is the the address of some of the world's wealthiest people. Yesterday it was effectively put under siege, though protected by thousand of police officers.
By 3pm the demonstrators had marched along the edge of Hyde Park and down Kensington Church Street. The only real trouble was a brief period when police on horses were pelted with shoes. Blood had been left on the street in the same place after scuffles last week. A senior police officer said they had come prepared this time. "They'll be throwing shoes at us. And if that's all there is, it'll be a quiet day."
At 3.10pm the first shoes were thrown at the gates of Kensington Palace Gardens. Along with shoes, came fire-crackers, wood. The debris piled up. Surveillance police filming the protest from the close-by balcony of the five-star Royal Garden Hotel were forced to retreat and resume filming in full protective head gear after their position was bombarded with eggs and shoes.
Almost crushed, and standing close to the barriers which tried to keep the route open to pedestrians, were three young schoolboys from London. They stood next to their Muslim father. But their focus was one police officer next to the barrier. For an hour and more they shouted, their young faces twisted in anger. They pointed, taunted, their fists closed. They wanted a response from the police officer. One tried to climb the barrier only to be pushed back.
At 3.40pm a photographer passed, blood pouring out of his nose. A protester with a huge Palestinian flag, his face wrapped in a scarf, climb the old lamp post at the gates. More fire crackers went off, the odd placard was burned, and the intensity of the protest increased.
Past the boutique five-star Baglioni hotel, a huge caravan unfolded to reveal a vast video screen with each speaker broadcasting to the rally. One leading Palestinian delivered the message that received the loudest cheer: "Today we are all Hamas." He promised there would be further demonstrations in London - with one change. "The next time we pass this embassy, it will no longer belong to Israel. It will the Palestinian embassy."
The demonstration ended in violence last night as protesters clashed with riot police in London. One police officer was knocked unconscious and two others receive facial injuries, a police spokesman said. An initially peaceful demonstration ended with a group of protesters facing mounted police, throwing missiles and smashing windows on Kensington High Street near the Israeli Embassy.
In Edinburgh, three officers were injured after being attacked by a group of 60 protesters from the 4000-strong march outside the US Consulate. In addition to around 300 shoes being hurled at the building, police reported being pelted with sticks, ski boots and paint.
Lothian and Borders Police said they were "extremely disappointed at the violent behaviour" but praised the conduct of the majority as "commendable".
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My son is a reservist in the Israeli army. He is a gentle person ... but he had to do his best to defend Israel
A Scottish mother's story, by John Bynorth
EVELYN goes to bed every night lying next to a framed photograph of her smiling son, Adam, proudly wearing the unmistakable bright green beret of the Israeli Defence Force.
The Glasgow mother, who has three other sons and a daughter, finds sleep almost impossible as the guilt kicks in over the lifestyle she enjoys while her 24-year-old Scottish-born-and-bred son waits to find out if he will be called up to the war in Gaza.
Adam is a reservist like hundreds of other young people who have completed their compulsory military service in Israel, where he moved to be closer to his Jewish faith in 2006.
Evelyn, 56, a local government clerical worker who doesn't wish to be fully identified in case she suffers ill feeling from the public, is proud of his desire to serve Israel.
Adam worked at a fruit-growing kibbutz near the Lebanon border before signing up for the army after leaving Glasgow in 2006. He is studying business at a college where he lives in an Israeli seaside resort.
Evelyn told the Sunday Herald: "Usually they do three years, but because Adam had already started his course, they said he could do two years of training, and he chose to become a combat soldier.
"Every young man once they complete military service are reservists and can be called up at any time until they are 45. All his friends are still serving which makes it quite hard for Adam.
"I am like all mothers, from whatever side. Nobody wants their children to go into war or become a soldier."
Evelyn denied that Adam left with the "specific purpose" of becoming an Israeli soldier, but once he realised it was his duty, he threw himself into his tasks and was last year closely involved in the arrest of a pro-Israeli terrorist who later confessed to training a suicide bomber to kill his fellow citizens.
She added: "This man had caused the death of Israeli citizens and trained and motivated a suicide bomber. I asked if he felt hatred. He replied I don't feel hatred, just immense relief that we caught him.' "He was also involved in searching homes for arms on the West Bank. He found arms in the homes of so-called "ordinary citizens". He also manned border check-points, searching Palestinians who were coming in and out of Israel to work.
"Sometimes I phoned him while he was doing that and it was the strangest feeling as I could hear him asking people to open bags which could be carrying bombs.
"I felt very frightened at the sort of things he was involved in, but that's what goes on there. We don't realise it because we live very sheltered lives in Scotland."
Evelyn said that many people in the UK don't understand the situation; BBC coverage of the conflict was "biased" against Israel and that anti-war protestors, including George Galloway and Annie Lennox, should first understand that Israel's existence has been threatened by years of attacks from Hamas and other pro-Palestinian militia aimed at innocent people.
She asked: "Is it really any different from the Gaza invasion when Hamas targets innocent people, including women and children?"
She added: "Adam is a gentle person. He is not capable of feeling hatred. He had to do his best to defend Israel.
"I keep reassuring myself that Israel wouldn't exist if it wasn't for all the parents like myself, who allowed their kids to go there, because it has been fighting for survival since it was born 60 years ago."
But Evelyn reflected: "The bottom line is that my heart bleeds for people on both sides. I am very optimistic a solution will be found and that in time, goodness will prevail, and a ceasefire will be achieved."
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US insists Israel must always have the edge
America's policy, by Trevor Royle
WASHINGTON'S support for Israel goes back to the first minutes of the new state when it came into being on May 15, 1948. However, until the 1970s, the backing was muted and sporadic. During the war which followed Israel's declaration of statehood, the US refused to sell arms to the Israelis and if anything there was a leaning towards Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria.
One of the main recipients was the nationalist leader of Egypt, Colonel Abdel Nasser, who received thousands of dollars in aid, siphoned through the CIA. When Israel joined Britain and France in a secret plot to seize the Suez Canal and unseat Nasser in 1956, the US was outraged and demanded an end to the planning.
But shortly after the Suez debacle, Nasser signed an arms deal with the Soviet Union for the provision of modern weaponry, including missiles and jet fighters. This was at the height of the Cold War, and any country which entered the Soviet camp became Washington's enemy.
This gave the Israelis their opportunity, and in 1966 they convinced the US of their pro-western credentials by capturing a Soviet-built Iraqi Mig-21 aircraft and delivering it to the US Air Force.
A year later, Israel defeated three Arab armies during the Six Days War. It was noted in the US that the defeated armies had been equipped largely with Soviet weaponry.
Payback came in October 1973 when Israel was involved in a fresh outbreak of fighting with her neighbours, the Yom Kippur War. When the Soviet Union began an airlift to provide Egypt and Syria with aircraft and weapons, the US responded in kind - President Richard Nixon authorised the despatch of 560 supply flights to Israel, all carrying huge amounts of modern weaponry. The relationship between Washington and Jerusalem was cemented.
In the years since, successive US administrations have insisted Israel must have a "qualitative edge" in military terms over its Arab neighbours.
Also, within the UN Security Council, the US became a committed opponent of any moves to censure Israel.
Last week the US abstained on the resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A veto would have isolated the US in world opinion, but an abstention says: stop the shooting - but not until you think the time is right.
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End terror of war for children now
By Kate Smith, director of the centre of conflict, media and nationalism
Of all the victims of Israel's assault on Gazan Palestinians, the suffering of the children is the most barbarous. This includes devastating violence, such as the use of chemical weapons like white phosphorous, which sticks to and burns the skin down to the bone.
The prolonged terror of indiscriminate bombing and the trauma of carnage will live with these children all their days.
The lack of intervention caused by the paralysis of the international community is manifest in the unheeded terrified screams of these abandoned children.
With children as "collateral damage", what has happened to the UN convention on the Rights of the Child?
We have seen the like of this before. Iraq. The white phosphorous, the international inertia, the wanton terrorisation and massacre of children. All for a war we were told was necessary.
When, in Iraq, the coalition nations excepted themselves from the laws of war, they enabled every other nation to do so in the future. This hour of darkness we must claim as ours.
Now the conditions are laid down so that the theatre of war becomes the playground of war: bomb the school, mortar the children's bedroom, hit the UN refugee centre and shoot the humanitarian workers. Fire the white phosphorous into the air of the most densely populated tract of land in the world and shrug at the inevitable consequences to civilians.
Like cluster bombs, the use of white phosphorous, for any purpose, needs to be outlawed. Its use as a illuminant flare is a smokescreen for its use as an incendiary device, a chemical weapon of devastating cruelty.
It is not counted under the chemical weapons convention in its normal use but it falls into the category of chemical weapons if it is used against civilians. Israel used white phosphorous in its war against Lebanon in 2006. US troops used white phosphorous as a weapon in their offensive in the Iraqi city of Falluja in 2004.
For the sake of all of the children in the Middle East, in the absence of peace, there needs to be a new charter for children in conflict.
Thousands of miles away in America, where the power to act lies, the word change has taken on a new meaning in the last 12 months. Global change is needed now - we must be as parents to the children of Gaza and Israel. Let their laughter be our goal.
