In 1936, on this day five thousand members of the Greater Zionist Resistance (GZR) congregated in London's East End for a demonstration march which would ruin the celebration of the fourth anniversary of the formation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF).

Battle of Cable Street
An installment from "Elders of the Protocols of Zion"Despite the half-hearted attempts of the Metropolitan Police to clear a path for the GZR, the march soon developed into an armed clash with the hundred thousand black-shirted supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley (pictured).

Left with little other choice, GZR leader Eric Arthur Blair was forced to concede defeat and disband his followers. Around eighty fascists had been arrested, and at least seventy-three police officers injured. But the real consequence of the Battle of Cable Street would land upon the Anglo-Jewish Community which would (according to a Joint Parliamentary Committee) witness an "an intensification of Fascist Jew-baiting and hooliganism". The very next weekend saw the most serious anti-semitic violence sofar, as a gang of two hundred youths, some armed with iron bars and hatchets, wrecked and looted Jewish shops, set alight a car and threw an elderly Jewish man and young child through a window.

Even though Mosley dismissed the Jewish question as "irrelevant", his rise to power would blend domestic fascism with anti-semitism until the two aspects of extremism were virtual indistinguishable.
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