Whichever city i visit, I invariably come across a pro-Palestine street stall set up along the main shopping street on a Saturday afternoon. Last weekend I was in Liverpool – and when I spotted one, I did what I always do – stopped to have a quick chat.

This one was of particular interest. Being in Liverpool, this was not your usual gang of elderly white fools who, in their retirement boredom, had chosen to spread lies about Israel and Jews under the banner of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. I had recently had a chat with a group of those in Cambridge, only to find out they knew not the first thing about the country they were calling on everyone to dismantle.

The one in Liverpool was different. It was part of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) crowd, and so I was left facing a bunch of younger militant activists with extreme ideological views, who were also busy spreading lies about Israel. I wanted to see whether this group was any better informed.

I am glad I stopped to talk to them. I do not think I have ever been fed as much nonsense in my life.

The Uninformed Passer-By

They were a group of about six, and I approached one of the two women behind the table. She was young, and eager to educate me and add my name to her petitions.

In these situations I always play dumb. My role is to test and to find out just what they know, and which lies they are selling to the innocent members of the public who stop to talk to them.

Some have attacked me for this approach, thinking I should try to “educate” or argue with those on the stall. To me, that seems pointless. A five-minute shouting match with militant students may provide a brief internal “feel-good” factor, but in the real world, it makes no difference to anyone at all. This is my platform, and this is how I have my voice heard.

So I approached and began to ask questions, as if interested in learning more but totally uninformed.

This is how it unfolded:

The Usual Basics

My approach leads to a slow build as we go through the motions. The first few minutes were all about the news, and whether I had heard about the “genocide”. I displayed interest and began to ask her if she could tell me more about events.

“How did it start?” I ask.

“Well, you know the British created Israel,” she said, at which point I realised this exchange was going to be particularly bad.

The problem is not simply that she knows so little. People are allowed to go through life uninformed if they choose. The problem is that she has positioned herself as an educator. She stands on the street presenting herself as someone who knows the truth, when what she actually possesses is a completely distorted version of events constructed to promote an extreme ideology. When people stop to talk to her, she poisons them.

For those who don’t know:

I was told the UK created Israel. This is obviously not true. In fact, after being given the Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the commitment to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home, the British ultimately did much to thwart it. The international framework culminated in the UN vote to partition the land in November 1947. In reality, Israel came into existence when the British left, the Jews declared an independent state, and then successfully defended it against the Arab armies that invaded.

When I asked her what was there before the British took control of the region, she said “Palestine”. I asked her to explain, and she was adamant. According to this woman, prior to the Mandate, the land had been an independent Palestinian state. She seemed confused that I would even question it.

She was wrong again. There has never been an independent Palestinian state. Before the British Mandate, the land had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. The territory that later became Mandatory Palestine was administered through several Ottoman districts, connected administratively to centres including Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus. There was no sovereign Palestinian state for the British to invade or overthrow.

Then I was given the usual utopian story about how, before the “foreigners” arrived – more on that in a moment – everyone lived together in peace.

This is just more hogwash. Under the Ottoman Empire, Jews and Christians lived as religious minorities under Muslim rule. For much of Ottoman history non-Muslims occupied an explicitly subordinate position. They faced discriminatory taxation and legal restrictions. There were outbreaks of violence and persecution, and Jews were often dangerously vulnerable in a system built upon Islamic supremacy.

Yet it is on this pack of lies that these activists build their case.

Foreigners, and Israel in the Strait of Hormuz

And incredibly, it got even worse.

My attention turned to the people living there. I was told Israelis are just “foreigners” who arrived, sent by imperial powers that wanted influence in the region.

There is something particularly absurd about this inversion of history. The modern Middle East was shaped by successive imperial conquests. Arab-Muslim armies conquered the region in the seventh century. The Ottoman Empire that ruled it for centuries was itself an Islamic empire. British rule followed as part of the largest empire the world has ever seen.

Yet somehow, when a tiny and historically persecuted minority rebuilt its national home in its ancestral homeland, that became the great act of imperialism.

Turning the Jewish story of return and national liberation into a twisted narrative of foreign global power requires both an extraordinary rewriting of history and the recycling of some very old antisemitic tropes.

I pressed the issue.

“It is nothing to do with religion,” she said.

By this point I was toying with her. Islamic identity, supremacy and religious rhetoric have run through major strands of the Palestinian national movement from its earliest decades and remain central to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad today. She is certainly not alone in mistakenly reducing the entire conflict to an argument over land, but she was proving more clueless than most.

I pushed back lightly on the subject of a Jewish homeland.

And then came the killer blow.

As she reaffirmed that this was all about Western power rather than religion, she explained to me why Israel had been created where it was.

Israel, she told me, was built in the Strait of Hormuz because the West wanted control of it.

I had to check that I had heard her properly.

So I questioned it.

She doubled down.

This woman really believed that Israel was in the Strait of Hormuz:

At this point it became clear that she was mixing up the various fragments of TikTok geopolitics that had apparently built her education, so I played along for a while, asking her to explain more about Israel’s geopolitical position in the Strait of Hormuz.

Eventually she gave up.

Instead, she began pushing me towards the literature on the table.

That, she assured me, “would help answer my questions.”

Justifying October 7

I was presented with the latest copy of the Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! newspaper. Pointing to the headline, she began telling me about how the activist Sarah Cotte had been arrested simply for saying that “Palestinians had rights.”

These were just more lies. Cotte has been charged with terrorism offences over alleged support for Hamas. The “unconditional” solidarity was expressed at a public rally in London on October 9, just two days after the October 7 atrocities.

I wanted to push this further. She did not budge. According to her, simply supporting Palestine could “put you in jail”.

All that was left for me to do was ask about October 7.

“They have a right to resist,” she responded.

She then spent the next few minutes conflating Gaza with both real and imagined events in Judea and Samaria, droning on about occupation and the daily killing of children, all supposedly leaving these poor Gazans with no alternative.

“What option do they have?” she asked.

The reality crossed my mind. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, dismantling every settlement and dragging its own civilians out, Palestinians were presented with an opportunity to begin building towards statehood. Gazans had lots of options. Instead of peace and investment in the future, Hamas and other armed groups spent the following years building tunnels, accumulating rockets and preparing for war.

October 7 was not the only option at all. It was the one Hamas chose.

And then the absurdity of the conversation struck me.

Just two minutes earlier she had tried to convince me that simply supporting Palestinians was an arrestable crime. Yet here she was, standing perfectly freely in the middle of a major Liverpool shopping district, offering her own thinly veiled justification for the terrorist atrocities of October 7.

It was time to leave.

The problem here is a simple one. A false narrative is being spread openly on our streets – one that generates hatred, radicalises weak-minded and vulnerable people, and ultimately places British Jews at risk. And those spreading these lies have not even taken the time to learn the basics about the subject they speak about with such certainty.

They stand on British streets campaigning for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state while repeating a historical narrative they have never seriously examined. When confronted with the murder, rape and kidnapping of Israeli civilians, even that can be absorbed into the same ideological framework: they had no choice; they had a right to resist.

These are not harmless mistakes about distant history. This is political extremism being sold to passing members of the British public.

When will we stop pretending that someone standing on our streets spreading hatred, historical falsehoods and justifications for terrorist violence is merely an “activist”?

Why not call it what it is – hate preaching?

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