During the golden Summer of 2025, above the Maramia café on Portobello Road, flew one, then two, then three Palestinian flags. The flags immediately became part of North Kensington’s cityscape, easily recognisable emblems of resistance to genocide, and for the owners, a family from Gaza, an act of defiance against those seeking to erase them from the map. But to the Zionist movement, even these symbols of Palestinian life were intolerable.

Complementing the colour, art and embrace of rich cultural diversity during Carnival, the Palestinian national flags on Portobello attracted thousands of well-wishers, tourists, photographers, and some predictable hate from Zionist activists – a standard experience for Palestinians who refuse to comply with the extinction order.

Hate Campaign 

The flags flew throughout Carnival but the local authority, Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC) issued Maramia’s landlord with notice to take them down following an investigation. We asked RBKC’s Director of Planning & Place, Amanda Reid, for clarity over the demand that Maramia take the flags down. Reid provided us with a breakdown of the legal requirements around flag-flying in Britain (see below) and told us the council had received “over 1000 emails requesting that they be removed.”

To put this into perspective, a major 12-week public consultation on Portobello Road’s future infrastructure attracted 452 responses. A full-day community engagement by the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission can just about engage 50 residents. The blitzing of RBKC’s Planning inboxes with requests for the removal of the Palestinian flag from public sight was characteristic of the orchestrated, direct ways Zionist campaigners take action. No expression of Palestinian life or rights is tolerated, whether it is on Portobello Road, or a TV presenter using his social media to amplify international law.

Presuming the objections to the flags did not centre around planning permission or other legalities, we asked Amanda Reid whether there was any pattern in the content of the 1000+ emails asking RBKC to have the flags removed from sight. She replied that the emails were “all…received by the Council in a concentrated period of time,” explaining that “the emails were similar, with some mild variance, giving an indication of the use of copy and paste, rather than AI or smart digital technology…based on the pattern and a singular and common typographical error, this is our best estimate of likely reasoning.”

Despite RBKC being cognizant that the 1000+ complaints were an orchestrated campaign of hate against an expression of Palestinian identity, Reid cited the volume of complaints as one of the factors behind RBKC instructing Maramia to remove their flags. We asked the Director of Planning how much of a role the Zionist emails had played in RBKC’s decision, but she did not answer our question.

After initially being forthcoming in her responses, Reid also did not answer several other questions: what the substance of the 1000+ complaints received was; whether the cafe’s owner was free to fly his flags from his private residential property, and whether Maramia can hoist their flags again, now that Britain has officially recognised a Palestinian state.

Landlord

It is possible that the Zionists’ campaign also targeted Maramia’s landlord, who claimed to the cafe’s management that a second demand letter had been received, but were unable to produce anything other than the same RBKC email again. In that letter, RBKC warns the building’s owners they could face a fine and entry on the Local Land Charges records

Last month outside the local Israeli-owned restaurant Miznon, anti-genocide protestors from Ladbroke Grove were told “You don’t belong here” by several Israelis who confronted them. This territorial attitude of Israelis will be familiar to people who have travelled to places like Thailand where Israeli soldiers can be found taking a break from their colonising. Also Cyprus where some Israelis are seeking to establish another Zionist base should the coming war with Iran prove challenging. Wherever Zionism is tolerated and encouraged to wield disproportionate power, its adherents justify this with surly superiority, towards the Palestinians, but also towards the rest of us. RBKC’s track record during two years of genocidal slaughter has been to tolerate and encourage Zionism, allowing it to distort our politics, undermine cohesion and diminish our freedoms. 

Maramia’s owners told us they will apply for planning permission to fly their flags. Will the Zionists target them again?

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RBKC’s Flag Removal Order

Citing the Town & Country Planning Act 1990 (sections 172 and 224) and Town & Country Planning Regulations 2007, RBKC informed Maramia that their flags were not compliant. RBKC’s Director of Planning & Place, Amanda Reid told Urban Dandy that the café did not have “advertising consent” or planning permission for the flexible flagpoles, and the Palestinian flag itself did not fall within “any of the categories of deemed consent for flag flying” because, at that point, Palestine was not recognised as a state by the British government.

In response to the council’s request, the café’s owner moved the flags from the roof into his private residential property upstairs, where he flew them from his window. But this provoked another letter from the landlord, informing him that the council had demanded he remove the flags again. The Maramia team received the same RBKC letter – dated 20^th August- three times. RBKC told us that they only wrote one letter to Maramia.

A member of staff at Maramia told us that a council officer had visited the café to inform them that the issue was that the British government does not yet recognise Palestine as a state, claiming that only after official recognition by the state would Maramia be able to apply for planning permission to fly their flags.

According to the member of staff, RBKC’s Director of Planning also said there is “too much conflict” around this issue. “Conflict” being a euphemism in this case for genocide, the systematic eradication of one people by another.

While the regulations around flags aren’t easy to follow the explanations offered by RBKC’s Officer regarding the flagpoles and the (then) unrecognised status of Palestine seem to be based on adherence to the law, although this is not made clear in RBKC’s letter to Maramia.

Some elements of this story are even less clear. If the issue is that Maramia is a commercial enterprise, then the legal problems with flying the flag were presumably reduced and possibly squashed when the business owner moved the flags to his private property….

by Tom Charles

Photos in order of appearance by Sara Soliman Riaño, JC, TC.