Stand up to a bully and, most of the time, you realise what a coward he really is. How true this is of the ‘pro-Palestine’ activists, the biggest cry-bullies going.

On Wednesday, around 100 ‘anti-Zionist’ students from London’s most prestigious universities gathered at King’s College London on the Strand. Surrounded by police, they then began to march through central London, clogging up traffic and belching their usual tedious slogans. They had been asked by police on four separate occasions to hold the protest on a different date. But they insisted on 7 October, the third anniversary of Hamas’s mass murder of 1,200 mostly Jewish people in southern Israel in 2023.

And they were pretty happy with themselves as they called for the destruction of Israel on the third anniversary of the gravest crime against Jews since the Holocaust. Or at least they were until they reached Russell Square. Because here, they were confronted with a group of counter-protesters – most of them British Jews – who had finally had enough of their bigotry.

It was an illuminating spectacle. Just moments before, these activists had been promising to ‘smash the Zionist settler state’. ‘Resistance is glorious’, they bellowed, referring to Hamas’s killing and raping spree on 7 October. But then they met some actual ‘resistance’ in the form of Jews and non-Jews, who were there in solidarity. It then took less than 20 minutes for the anti-Zionists to clear off. They hadn’t even reached University College London – where the march was supposed to end – before giving up.

There wasn’t any physical violence – just some pretty choice words from supporters of Israel. And if there’s one thing pro-Palestine activists hate more than Jewish people – sorry, ‘Zionism’ – it’s opposition. The pro-Pal protesters seemed stunned that the police hadn’t intervened to remove these pesky Jews from the streets, as has sadly become standard practice on days when there are big demos. Aren’t they supposed to be kept in a pen, or hemmed into an urban crevice where no one can see or hear them? Not this time.

Two moments stood out. One counter-protester had spilled beyond the police cordon separating the Zionists from the anti-Zionists. ‘Turns you on, does it? Raping Jewish girls?’, he said to a young man draped in a Palestinian flag. The man immediately retreated to the safety of his activist posse. Of course, he was speechless.

A particularly passionate Israeli provided another highlight. He had brought his own megaphone. ‘Come here and debate an Arab Israeli, you cowards!’, he bellowed. Again, none of the anti-Zionists appeared eager to take up the challenge. How could they? His very existence exposes one of the key lies of the Palestine cult. If Israel really were an ‘apartheid’ state, as ignorant activists claim, then Arab Israelis would not enjoy the full citizenship rights that they currently do.

Like all cults, the Palestine one is getting more and more neurotic and paranoid. None of the student protesters wanted to speak to journalists. ‘Don’t speak to agitators’, they said. One member of the march said he refused to speak to someone from spiked because we are supposedly a ‘right wing’ publication. ‘No one here will talk to you’, another said to me. At one point, they tried to form a kind of phalanx by erecting umbrellas and covering their flanks with large banners, as though they were terrified of being photographed. Not one protester wanted to answer the question of why they insisted on marching on 7 October.

Their silence spoke volumes about the pro-Palestine mentality. These agitators pose as brave and edgy, and yet they crave the security and anonymity of a large crowd. What they will never do is give you a reasonable justification for their actions or allow any challenge from the other side.

It’s hard to view Wednesday’s march as anything other than a humiliation for the ‘anti-Zionists’. It wasn’t just how few of them there were – in fact, they were probably outnumbered by police and media. It isn’t even how timid and defensive they were, despite all of their apocalyptic wailing.

No, the real humiliation was that most of the public viewed them as a tedious nuisance. There was no spontaneous solidarity from Londoners trying to go about their business. Even hundreds of fellow students simply brushed past them on their way to class. Before the protesters ran into a counter-demonstration, they were met with nothing more than tired indifference.

We’re not out of the woods yet. Another ‘anti-Zionist’ march, organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, will take place in London on Saturday and is expected to draw large crowds. Yet if Londoners’ reaction to the student Hamasniks is anything to go by, patience is clearly wearing thin with these sad and sinister cry-bullies.