Those of us who believe in freedom of expression have felt mighty lonely this week. We have watched as, one by one, our fellow opponents of cancel culture have given into the temptations of censorship. Many on the right in particular appear to have fallen under the spell of suppression. Gone is their devotion to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ and in its stead comes a chilling cry for a literal police clampdown on speech they don’t like.

The target of these overnight converts to cancel culture? Saturday’s ‘March for Palestine’ in London. For the fourth weekend running, tens of thousands of people will gather in the capital to rage against Israel. Worse, this time their orgy of Israelophobia will take place on Armistice Day. Enough is enough, many are saying. The police must act.

The state can’t seem to make its mind up on whether this latest middle-class traipse against Israel should be prohibited. Home Secretary Suella Braverman seems keen on repression. These are ‘hate marches’, she says, and the public is sick of them. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley says there is insufficient intelligence that the march will give rise to ‘serious public disorder’ and therefore it should go ahead. Many of those who can normally be seen kicking up a stink about campus bullying, trigger warnings and other forms of leftish snowflake censorship have this time sided with the speech police. Ban it, they cry.

Every demo so far has involved nasty flashes of the world’s oldest hatred

I disagree. It is a grave moral error to invite the state to suppress ideas you don’t like. How quickly people forget the truth of Thomas Paine’s cry for liberty more than 200 years ago: ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression.’ That is the foremost task of the free-speech defender: to stand up for the speech rights of his enemies. To defend free expression even for ideas we loathe. This is how we demonstrate the true meaning of liberty – namely, that either everyone enjoys it or nobody does.

The freedom of protest is essential to the spiritual health of our democracy. It is the means through which the people register their scorn for certain laws or for the entire establishment. Virtually every right we enjoy – to publish, to vote, to have days off from work – is the gift of generations that took to the streets. From the vast 18th-century marches in defence of the rabble-rousing journalist John Wilkes to the million-person march against the Iraq War in 2003, the British people have been rudely intruding on the decision-making of their supposed betters for centuries, and long may it continue.

Let me be clear: I am not comparing today’s ceaseless shrill marches against Israel with those great gatherings for liberty. I have found the marches of the past four weeks to be sickening spectacles. It is unfathomable to me that in the wake of the worst act of racist slaughter against the Jews since the Holocaust, many of my fellow citizens took to the streets not to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people, but to call for the erasure of the world’s only Jewish nation.

It is extraordinary that this Saturday tens of thousands of people will attend a march whose organisers include those that have links, however distant, with Hamas. No more excuses: if you know that the march you’re attending has the approval of people connected in some fashion with Hamas, then you risk signalling indifference to anti-Semitism. You think you are making a virtuous display of your concern for Palestine, but it’s possible you are demonstrating that Hamas’s pogrom made barely a dent in your conscience.

I agree with Suella Braverman that these are ‘hate marches’. Or at least that they have provided cover for hate. Every demo so far has involved nasty flashes of the world’s oldest hatred. Attendees have cursed the Jews, celebrated anti-Jewish massacres and damned Zionists as Nazis.

‘Those people are a tiny minority’, march organisers might say. Stop it. If every march you hold awakens anti-Semites from their slumber, teases them on to the streets to make their vile cries, then you need to stop and rethink. It is morally unsustainable for the organisers breezily to wash their hands of the hate that lurks in sections of the crowd.

And yet here’s the thing. If we are serious about freedom of speech, we must defend it even for unpleasant speech. Even wicked speech. The man who gives the nod to the censure of his foes ‘establishes a precedent that will reach to himself’, said Paine. We fortify our own liberty by defending the liberty of our opponents.

I have no wish to downplay how threatening the marches feel for Jews. Indeed, everything you need to know about these weekly gatherings is that the anti-Semites of Hezbollah are happy about them while our very own Jewish citizens have said they found them distressing. So here’s my proposal: we don’t ask the state to ban Saturday’s march, but we do ask the organisers to call it off. We do not further empower the authorities to police public expression, but we do implore the marchers to stay home. Do the right thing: refuse to attend this gathering that will bring joy to Hamas and only further agony to British Jews.