Leafleting campaign at Southampton game

Seagulls Against Apartheid carried out our first action – a leafleting campaign of the supporters’ queue at Brighton station – last Friday 29th November before the Albion hosted Southampton at the Amex. And all-in-all, it went really rather well.

To be quite honest, we were all rather apprehensive beforehand – and not sure how things would pan out. There were just four of us to start with and we set up the stall at about 5.15pm. A couple of coppers were outside the station but they were quite happy for us to go about our business. Then after a while another 6-8 volunteers from the local PSC and Stop the War joined us on the stall. People were happy to take our leaflets, with the odd negative response. A few of us even managed to leaflet inside the station, and I had a very nice friendly chat with a Southampton supporter who thought what we were doing was great. So, all well and good…

Then a guy turns up and starts getting in our faces with his mobile phone. We didn’t think much of it until about 20-30 minutes later when a bunch of Zionists turn up!

At the same time a large number of women had gathered for Reclaim The Night (you can see them in the video above) just beyond the three or four Zionists. One young woman, who I think might have been part of the Reclaim the Night group, came and confronted the Zios and afterwards had a chat with us. Turns out she was Jewish and firmly pro-Palestine and condemned the presence of our ‘Friends of Israel’ and their hateful campaign. Here she is talking to Geoff, founding member of Seagulls Against Apartheid.

Anyway – apart from creating a slightly edgy atmosphere, the Zionists actions were counter-productive, repelling most of the onlookers, and caused people to engage with us even more so than before. By the end of that weekend we had had an extra 40-50 sign-ups to the letter/petition, so not bad at all.

We will arrange another stall soon, and also plan to have a public meeting, probably early in the New Year. If you would like to find out more or want to get involved with our campaign – please join our mailing list.

Editor’s note: Apologies for my poor quality photos. Maybe I should have asked the Zionists to send me some of their pics?