On Friday 5^th September, the first protest against an Israeli restaurant in Notting Hill linked to the murderous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) took place. The GHF is a US-Israeli private company that has usurped the United Nations in the Gaza Strip and uses the pretence of aid sites to lure starving Palestinians to their deaths. The restaurant, Miznon (recently half-rebranded as Erev), has two London branches, with one in Soho and one sitting just off Portobello Road. The global Miznon chain is owned by two Israelis implicated in Israel’s genocidal war, including one who was spokesperson for the ‘humanitarian’ trap as recently as July.

Who owns Miznon/Erev?

The protest at Miznon/Erev did not target the restaurant because of the nationality of its owners, but because of the role of they have played in the Gaza genocide. Shahar Segal was Spokesperson for the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF), a private company created by the Israeli and United States governments.

If you’ve heard recently about Palestinians queuing for food being killed by Israel’s soldiers, it is the GHF that has been setting them up. Israel has reportedly killed over 1000 Palestinians at GHF sites so far. When he stepped down as GHF spokesperson in July, Segal expressed no remorse for what the organisation had done.

Miznon’s other owner, Eyal Shani has posted extremist Zionist propaganda online and provides 3,000+ meals a day to Israeli soldiers to enable their slaughter while offering no sustenance to the victims. He has said of his role: “I have never felt so proud to be an Israeli as I do in these moments.”

Read more about the restaurateurs here.

The Protest

A group of around twelve protestors armed with pots, pans and Palestine flags targeted the restaurant, chanting their opposition to genocide and distributing information on the role played by Miznon/Erev’s co-owners. Restaurant staff shut the windows and moved customers inside, while local people enquired about the connection between the restaurant and Palestine.

There was a mixed crowd spending their Friday evening at Miznon/Erev, enjoying the Mediterranean Street Food, which is a mix of European and traditional Arab dishes. One customer initially questioned the protest, saying she would be joining the mass march in London the following day, but thought it was unfair to target an Israeli restaurant and cause discomfort to diners. When she was apprised of the facts of co-owner Eyal Shani’s role in the GHF, she immediately recognised the importance of the protest.

But that righteous diner was in the minority, and the protestors were soon matched in number by Israelis taking exception to the presence of the noisy anti-genocide gathering. The most extreme reaction came from an Israeli woman who headed straight for the protesters and threw a punch at one.

Observations on Israelis’ Defensive Reasoning

Several Israelis came out with identical opening gambits, telling protesters, “you don’t belong here” – a perplexing statement to make in the middle of London to somebody you have never met, and it sounds even more ridiculous when the person can reply, “I’ve lived round here all my life.”

Another gambit of multiple counter-protesters was, “You have no idea what you’re talking about” – another strange statement when you’ve talking to a stranger, rendered meaningless when the person can respond with their extensive experience working for the Foreign Office and rattle off a list of visits to the Gaza Strip.

The Israelis were up for an argument, and their accusations will be familiar to people who have joined anti-genocide protests or watched online debates on the subject over the past two years: antisemitism; supporting proscribed organisations; “you are making me feel unsafe”…..

The diners were not coy about sharing their worldview: that Israelis only have a “sliver of land” in which to protect themselves, in contrast to the vast expanse of Arab land; democracies have to defeat non-democracies; the Israelis have been there for “thousands of years.”

An Israeli told a Palestinian protestor “you are the granddaughter of Haj Amin al-Husseni” (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who met with Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and who Benjamin Netanyahu likes to pretend was a key mastermind of the holocaust) and when the Palestinian finally lost her temper and called the abusive Israeli “a son of a whore”, the Israeli tried to have her arrested for it.

There was an air of conceit among the Israelis, an assurance that the protesters’ points could be easily dismissed. The Zionists’ defensive reasoning was based around two false assertions:

 – That the protestors had a disproportionate and unbalanced focus; these same protestors ignore other atrocities and abuses in other countries, although no evidence for this was offered;

– The protestors are ignorant of what is actually going on. If only they had a better understanding of reality, they would not be protesting against Israel.

This attitude was exemplified by one Israeli who admitted he had served in the Israeli Army when he stated that he had visited Gaza numerous times. Given the scale of the slaughter, the wanton killing of innocents, and the use of mercenaries by the GHF, it begs the question of whether someone possibly living/working in North Kensington has himself committed war crimes. 

A German-Israeli woman tried the old trope that the Palestinian resistance factions use women and children as shields, making innocent casualties of war inevitable. She ruled out the possibility of the slaughter being a genocide on the grounds that ‘genocide requires intention to commit genocide.’

Accusation = Confession?

They are entitled to their views, of course, but unless they wake up from their delusions soon, Israelis will find themselves in a world in which people want nothing to do with them, personally, commercially or politically.

Some protestors may be aghast at events in other countries, but what singles Israel out is that their conduct is directly supported by our own governments, whether in the UK, the US or Germany. With Israel, the west has considerable influence, hence the outrage and the steadfastness of the protest movement.

Whenever Israeli governments are put under pressure internationally, their instinctive reaction is that there must be something wrong with the message, that it’s a problem of understanding and perception, rather than acknowledging it might be the result of their actions. If this argument were made in good faith, the next question Israel might ask itself is why it has a policy of systematically killing Palestinian journalists in Gaza while excluding international journalists.

As for the use of human shields, the fact is that no evidence has been adduced internationally of instances where the Palestinian resistance might have done this, whilst there are multiple images where the Israeli Army has sent terrified Palestinian civilians into buildings to check for booby-traps and ambushes.

Israeli accusations might better be judged as confessions.

While the owners of the Miznon/Erev Notting Hill branch were presumably in Israel and New York, their patrons and staff were confronted with the (prima facie) crimes that Segal and Shani have enabled. The protestors were repeatedly told that Miznon is a “family restaurant” run by a “nice family” and that the owners have “nothing to do with Gaza” – but it is an undeniable fact that the owners have a lot to do with Gaza. There are thousands of innocent victims providing evidence of that.

 

Chris Somes-Charlton and Tom Charles