In London last week, a barefoot daredevil clad in black and bearing the Palestinian flag scaled the neo-Gothic edifice of The Elizabeth Tower, the iconic corner of Great Britain’s Parliament that houses the clock commonly known as Big Ben. Daniel Day—a name seemingly drawn from a superhero comic—has been charged with causing a public nuisance and trespassing on a public site, relatively minor-sounding charges given that the world held its breath as he defiantly flew a Palestinian flag a third of the way up the tower for 17 hours, seemingly bringing more attention to the Palestinian cause in much of the world’s media than the massive rallies that have been held week in, week out, through 526 days of ongoing, live-streamed genocide.
Big Ben has long been an icon of the British Empire. High above the murky waters of the Thames, it is the most familiar face of the once globe-spanning British colonial enterprise. It is not hard to imagine that beneath the seemingly serene and stately turning of its hands, the demands of empire poured out on a blood-red tide, down the river, to the sea—bearing bloodshed, dispossession, and genocide with it to all corners of the world. The pillaged resources and artifacts of those subdued lands returned to the halls of commerce and power with a sound like the slow rattle of gold, or chains. Beneath the great eye of the clock, behind the appearance of order and reserve, a mechanism as relentless and demanding as the dark, satanic mills that brought it into existence.
The Myth of the Stolen Clock
In the wake of the protest, a claim re-emerged that the Big Ben clock mechanism was originally stolen from Palestine by the British—a notion that suggests a certain poetic justice. It is, however, a claim that is easily disproven.
As Eli Gottlieb, Senior Visiting Scholar at George Washington University, argued in a 2021 article in The Conversation:
“Who would invent something so easy to refute? And why? The woman spoke with great conviction, but could she really believe what she was saying? And if this was a hoax, then who was perpetrating it on whom?”
Gottlieb, with exaggerated indignation, claims to be going “down the rabbit hole” as he presents the easily discoverable fact that the Big Ben clock was completed in 1859, while the clock that stood at Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate was not completed until 1908.
Having made this banal revelation, Gottlieb then launches into a performative intellectual exercise, citing a supposedly satirical Twitter/X Mossad accountthat unironically frames the claim as part of a broader Palestinian effort to erase Jewish heritage. Then, shifting into the language of cognitive psychology and misinformation, his area of expertise, in an attempt to lend credence to his assertions, he draws false equivalencies between a mistaken statement from a Palestinian elder and the conspiracy theories of QAnon.
Here’s what he concludes:
“What we had here was an oral tradition, of which she was, at best, a second- or third-hand bearer.
All of which means that unless the many corroborating sources cited in Wikipedia’s Big Ben entry are an elaborate hoax of QAnon proportions, her claim doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Big Ben was not stolen from Palestine and has no place on lists of controversial cultural artifacts like the Parthenon Marbles that former colonial powers are being asked to return to their countries of origin.”
At no point, of course, has any claim over the Big Ben turret clock been placed on lists of artifacts stolen by Britain, as he suggests. Gottlieb is using hyperbole, disingenuous arguments, false equivalencies and his posture as a liberal academic to mask his smear of the entire Palestinian people through the distorting lens of one incorrect fact. He is not debunking a real controversy—he is manufacturing one.
Here’s what he left out.
The Jaffa Gate Clock: A History of Erasure
The Jaffa Gate Clock Tower, constructed in 1908, featured a mechanism supplied by Dent & Co., the same London-based clockmaker that produced Big Ben’s mechanism. But that is where the similarities end—the Jaffa Gate clock was smaller, functionally distinct, and built decades later.
The tower, made from limestone quarried from Zedekiah’s Cave, stood 4 metres tall, with four clock faces marking both European and local time. Above it, a crescent-and-star finial crowned the structure, marking its Ottoman imperial heritage.
The British Mandate authorities, ever obsessed with aesthetic control over the historical narrative, deemed the clock an intrusion on the Old City walls and ordered its removal in 1922. In an act of imperial appropriation, the clock was reinstalled at Allenby Square, near the British Post Office and Town Hall.
But by 1934, this second installation was also demolished—ostensibly for traffic reasons.
That a clock that was created to celebrate the ruler of the Ottoman Empire was demolished and reinstalled in a British Square near the British Town Hall and British Post Office is indicative, but not conclusive.
What happened next, however, is far more telling.
The Disappearance of the Jaffa Gate Clock Mechanism
After its removal from Allenby Square, the clock’s mechanism was advertised for sale in The Palestine Post (May 21, 1935). No buyer emerged.
According to Mandate-era Hebrew news sources, summarised by historian Rafi Kfir, the unsold clock was quietly shipped to London:
“The clock was not bought, and in the end, it arrived in the cellars of the British Museum and there it disappeared.”
A 2019 study in Jerusalem Quarterly likewise found evidence that after the 1934 teardown, the clock was shipped to the UK—but its exact fate remains unknown. It appears that the British Museum never formally accessioned it, explaining its absence from museum records.
Whether left to decay in a basement, scrapped for parts, or simply forgotten, the Jaffa Gate clock was erased—just as its presence in Jerusalem was erased, just as the rising storm of Zionism attempted to erase Palestine itself.
The Truth in Traumatic Memory
Big Ben is not the Jaffa Gate clock.
That much is easily proven.
But what is just as certain is Britain’s historic responsibility—for ceding Palestine to the European Zionist movement, from Balfour to Nakba, from partition to occupation, from 1948 to 2025—for the dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and oppression of the Palestinian people, is irrefutable. As is their complicity in the ongoing genocide. Britiain’s crimes, Britiain’s betrayals, past and present, are thus irrevocably seared on the Palestinian consciousness, and on the consciousness of numerous other cultures ravaged, pillaged and decimated by European colonialism.
Gottlieb’s tawdry mischaracterisation of this experience is liberal academia at its worst.
Scholar of Holocaust testimonies, Lawrence Langer, in his book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, emphasizes that traumatic memory does not function like ordinary recall. He argues that rather than focusing on discrepancies in factual details, we must recognize that trauma fragments memory, and the deeper emotional and psychological truth of suffering must be prioritized over forensic precision. He writes:
“Survivors do not just remember their experiences; they relive them. And in that reliving, the past is not fixed but fluid, shaped by the enduring presence of suffering.”
For peoples subject to colonisation, displacement and extermination, historical memory, even if flawed, is shaped by necessity rather than precision, a necessity that both strengthens identity and resistance in the face of erasure, and in that resistance enables the reclamation of dignity.
In The Wretched of the Earth (1961) Frantz Fanon discusses the psychological and cultural distortions that arise from colonial trauma, arguing that even when collective memory is flawed or mythologized, it carries a deeper emotional and political truth about oppression. He writes:
“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it, in relative obscurity.”
And Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993), reminds us:
“For the native, the history of colonialism is not a matter of scholarly interest, it is a wound that never heals. To reclaim a past—even one that is an invention—is to assert dignity against those who deny it.”
Time’s Up
The Palestinian people are not asking for a clock.
They are asking for the hands of British complicity to still.
For the clock of genocide to stop.
For a time of safety, identity, dignity, home.
For a time of freedom.
For a time of justice.
For a time of peace.
For time—
time that was undeniably stolen from them.
March 16 2025
***
