Who do the police protect?

The function of the police, one might have thought, was to protect the weak against the overbearing and the bullying. Unfortunately, a by-product of the Gaza crisis has been to suggest that, at least on the streets of London, a bit of carefully targeted thuggery against your political opponents can pay useful dividends.

For some days now, the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) has been raising awareness of the plight of abducted Israelis in Gaza by driving display vans around iconic parts of London. These vans are fitted with electronic billboards on the sides and back containing the names of children taken by Hamas from Israel a couple of weeks ago, and still holed up (assuming they are alive) in the Gaza Strip.

On Wednesday, pro-Palestinian protesters encountered one of these vehicles in Parliament Square. They stood menacingly in front of it, shouting anti-Israel invective.