BEN HARVEY: Herzog protesters are not ‘activists’, they are really just anarchists spoiling for a fight

Being near, let alone part of, a big, emotion-filled protest like the one we saw this week is exhilarating.

It’s primal. Humanity was marching with lit torches long before Sydneysiders conducted their confused witch hunt against Israeli president Isaac Herzog.

Protest marches and sit-ins have changed the course of history. They are intoxicating spectacles.

They’re also a little scary because it feels that at any moment they can descend into complete anarchy.

I have been an on-the-ground news reporter at protests in Australia and Europe.

Some became violent. One, a protest in London to oppose the Iraq War, was hair-raisingly so.

“When people join in great numbers with a common purpose, the group dynamics are almost impossible to manage,” former Australian Federal Police boss Mick Keelty wrote this week.

He’s right. The sheer weight of numbers means police are left holding the tail of a tiger.

The protests generally start the same — people milling about ahead of the planned deadline, usually in reasonably good spirits.

The noise naturally gets louder as the crowd grows.

The first chant is half-hearted, having been begun by a handful of organisers, but after a short while people catch on.

Chanting in unison brings everyone together. The sum suddenly feels far greater and more powerful than the individual human parts.

Then the drumming begins.

That’s a turning point. Our species has used drums to maintain courage and bolster morale for tens of thousands of years.

The last thing heard by hundreds of millions of soldiers before they died was the beat of a drummer boy.

The presence of police on horses takes things up a notch. A police dog straining at the leash? Up again.

Tactical officers in camouflage and carrying AR-15 assault rifles? That makes the protesters feel they’re in a military campaign.

Up until Bondi, police kept these weapons in a gun safe in a locked patrol vehicle, which was handy if you had an active shooter in the boot of your squad car but not so convenient if you were on foot and needed to run back to your vehicle, unlock it, open the boot, unlock the gun safe, get the rifle, run back to where your target is and then take aim.

So, police attending protests now look like infantrymen.

The protest builds to a crescendo when the crowd sees the first cordon of cops with riot shields and helmets.

The men and women in that thin blue line are trained to suppress their adrenaline. They are taught to control their breathing and keep their heart rates down.

But no amount of training can beat evolution, especially when a crowd of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of angry people, is creeping toward you.

Despite the best efforts of trainers at the academy, by the time the protest meets that fence of riot shields, the cops are very much in fight-or-flight mode.

The first thing thrown is usually something laying on the street. A bottle or a witches hat. I have seen an old umbrella trigger a protest turning into a riot.

The police usually don’t react to the first projectile. They’re doing everything they can not to escalate because commanders behind the front line know that once it’s on, it’s on.

The first physical scuffle usually occurs away from the main action, often after police see a protester trying to out-flank them.

It doesn’t matter how textbook a police take-down is; it’s ugly. It often looks like the cops are bashing someone who is unarmed and laying on the floor even though the officers are simply applying well-practised restraint holds that incapacitate the person without injuring them.

It’s still a violent act, especially if police can’t see the target’s hands.

The spectacle of armed police “bashing” an “innocent bystander” is usually the moment at which the thin veneer of civility peels away and some protesters become animals.

The ones who do often have no idea what the protest is about. They are professional anarchists. We saw them at work this week at Sydney’s Town Hall.

They weren’t there because they love Palestine. Most couldn’t identify Herzog in a police line-up or come close to pinpointing Gaza on a map.

They were there because they love to riot and a march in the name of geopolitical justice is a good foil for that. If it wasn’t Herzog it would be climate change. Or transgender activism.

The organisers of pro-Palestinian protests are shooting themselves in the foot by allowing their campaign to be hijacked by hooligans.

And they’re putting a bullet in their other foot by choosing the wrong moment to make their point.

I don’t know what the right moment is, but I know it’s not when Israel’s President is in Australia to pay respect to the victims of a national tragedy.