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Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched along Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade as George Galloway and Yvonne Ridley concluded a South African tour with calls to intensify boycott action and create awareness for the cause of Palestinian justice.
By ANWAR OMAR
An estimated 10 000 demonstrators walked the Sea Point promenade in Cape Town on Saturday afternoon, from the Sea Point lighthouse to the Mandela Glasses. The march capped a South African tour by British politician George Galloway and journalist Yvonne Ridley, billed as a worldwide anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian campaign. The Cape Town finale began on Friday with a talk after the Khutbah at al-Quds Mosque, followed by a sold-out gala dinner at Islamia Hall that evening.
Who are Galloway and Ridley?
Galloway, 72, is leader of the Workers Party of Britain and a former MP. He won the 2024 Rochdale by-election on the strength of public anger over Gaza. As of 2026, he is reported to be living in what is described as self-imposed exile in Russia.
Ridley is a British journalist and activist who converted to Islam after being held by the Taliban in 2001.
A three-part finale
On Friday afternoon, after the Khutbah, Galloway addressed more than 5 000 worshippers at al-Quds Mosque in Gatesville, one of the largest mosques in the Western Cape. Galloway told the congregants that the violence had moved from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem, “though wholesale killing still goes on in Gaza every day.”
He encouraged everyone to attend the march scheduled for the next day and said “if you are boycotting, boycott harder, if you are fundraising, raise more, if you are marching, march further, march faster, and if you are only talking, raise your voice louder!”
That evening, Islamia Hall hosted the Al-Ikhlaas Library’s Palestine fundraising banquet under the banner “The Silence Is Complicity.” The event sold out with more than 500 attendees.
The march followed on Saturday afternoon. The crowd began gathering at about 13:30, and the march set off promptly at 14:30. Police maintained a large presence along the promenade, but the demonstration, an emotional show of solidarity with the Palestinian people, passed off entirely peacefully.
The gala dinner
At the dinner, Galloway spoke at length about how he came to the Palestinian cause. He described a “revolutionary household”: an Irish mother who backed Irish freedom and a Scottish trade unionist father. “I grew up knowing which was our side in every conflict,” he said.
At 21, he said, Palestinians approached him and asked him to go to Beirut, where the PLO was then based. There he befriended Yasser Arafat, and he said he was at Arafat’s deathbed in Paris in 2004. He recalled being kicked by a police horse at a Vietnam War protest in London’s Grosvenor Square in 1968, at the age of 14. He spoke of the fall of Saigon and the end of apartheid as victories he had lived to see. “But I hope to hang on long enough to see the victory of the Palestinians,” he said.
Ridley told a different story of her own path to the cause, one that began with a refusal. As a girl of about 13, she said, a Palestinian woman asked her to sign a petition supporting Palestine. Ridley declined, citing the hijackings then in the news. “I said, why would I do that? These people are hijacking planes.”
The Palestinian woman asked whether she had ever wondered why. Ridley said no, and the woman sat her down and told her the story of Palestine: her family driven out of their town at gunpoint, their home lost, their possessions left behind. When Ridley said she still did not understand the terrorism, the woman replied that it was “because the world doesn’t listen, the world has ignored us, and we are still living as refugees when somebody else is living in our home.”
“I think I was 13 at the time, I was very naive,” she said, and she could not grasp how anyone could be removed from their home without notice. She began reading the history of Palestine and “became totally committed.”
No ceasefire
Ridley rejected the language of a ceasefire outright. “There isn’t a ceasefire going on in Gaza. Every day there is blood being spilled,” she said. She told the dinner that a journalist from Gaza had been targeted and killed the previous day, and that his young family, trying to mourn him, had been left with a mutilated body.
She also rejected the word “war.” “A war suggests that there are two sides, when in fact you’ve got one person with a stone and another person with a fighter jet,” she said. “It is a genocide.”
Galloway agreed. “Yvonne is correct, the slaughter continues,” he said, adding that the killing had spread from Gaza to the West Bank and Jerusalem. He dismissed the idea of a ceasefire as unrealistic where one side is occupied and the other the occupier. “The only ceasefire you could have would be surrender,” he said, “and the Palestinians will never surrender.”
He contrasted Palestine with apartheid South Africa, whose government, he said, needed Black South Africans as labour and consumers. Israel, in his view, wants Palestinians gone altogether. He summed up his position with the slogan: “There’ll be no ceasefire until there’s peace. And there’ll be no peace until there’s justice.”
Praise for South Africa’s ICJ case
Much of Galloway’s address was a tribute to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. “It is an enormous credit to your country that you brought this case,” he said. “Nobody else would have done that. Russia wouldn’t have done it. China wouldn’t have done it.” He singled out former minister Naledi Pandor for the dignity with which the case was prosecuted.
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He was candid about the limits of international law, which he called “lipstick on a pig,” and said the case would bring no direct legal consequences for Israel. Its value, he argued, lies in isolation: “A surgeon cannot operate on his own foot. Someone else has to operate on his foot.” The case, he said, helps push even Western governments toward acting.
To those who say South Africa has enough problems of its own, he told the story of Mary Manning, a Dublin shop worker who in the early 1980s refused to handle South African grapefruit on her union’s instructions and was dismissed. Ten colleagues walked out with her, and they stood on strike for two years and nine months. She had probably never met a South African, he said, “but she knew that it was wrong.” He told the Muslims in the room that backing the case was a duty, using the Arabic word wajib.
The anvil, the hammer, and the coal
Galloway described boycott, divestment and sanctions as “the anvil,” with Palestinian resistance as “the hammer.” He criticised Western states for still selling arms to Israel, training alongside its police, and keeping it in Eurovision and in the European football championships.
His most concrete appeal was aimed at Pretoria. He said about 3% of South Africa’s coal exports go to Israel, which he put at 27% of Israel’s coal imports, and urged the government to end the trade. “It will cost you nothing,” he said, offering to sell the same coal in Shanghai or Vietnam within days. “I hope they hear me. I hope they do it.”
Through Nelson Mandela’s glasses
On Saturday afternoon, the tour ended on the promenade. After the short walk from the lighthouse, Galloway told the crowd they could “see everything through Nelson Mandela’s glasses.” Gesturing across the water to Robben Island, he called it “the most infamous prison in the world, apart from Gaza, apart from occupied Palestine.”
“And by that light, and through these glasses, and with this example, Palestine will be free,” he said. He then led the crowd in the chant “Thawra, thawra, hatta al-nasr; thawra, thawra, hatta al-Quds” – “Revolution, revolution, until victory; revolution, revolution, until Jerusalem.”
