The Metropolitan police have once again backed off on plans to clamp down on the Palestine movement.
As many will know, they tried to place draconian conditions without explanation on Saturday’s demonstration to end the genocide in Gaza. Their bizarre, last-minute demands would have meant essentially kettling people at the assembly time for two and a half hours.
The Palestine movement opposed them with the support of MPs, trade unionists and others. This defiance forced the police to back down at the eleventh hour.
These farcical events mark a new low in what has been a hostile, prejudiced and obstructive policing approach ever since the assault on Gaza began. We have now organised 18 mass national demonstrations which have been by the police’s own admission almost entirely peaceful.
Despite politicians and parts of the media dubbing them as “hate marches” and claiming they threatened disorder, there have been three times less arrests on our marches per capita than at a regular Glastonbury festival, and many less than at an average Premier League football match. Almost all the arrests that have taken place have been for wearing t-shirts, holding placards or singing slogans that the police judge to be illegal. And yet we have from the very beginning of this historic cycle of protests been treated as a threat to order and a threat to ‘communities’.
We have informed the police of our plans for every one of these marches. And yet every single one of them has had control orders imposed, normally without prior notice and always at the last minute. No other comparable set of demonstrations has been treated in this way.
What is more, every single time our initial plans have been blocked by the police. The reasons given have varied from potential impact on Christmas shopping, potential impact on Easter shopping, impact on the business community in general and disruption to the Langham Hotel outside the BBC for which the Met seem to have a very special concern. Last but by no means least our ceasefire marches are, we are told, a threat to the Jewish community. This despite the fact that thousands of Jewish people have participated in every single demonstration.
Under very public pressure from Suella Braverman and Rishi Sunak the police threatened to ban us altogether on November 11 last year because they felt it was inappropriate to be calling for peace on Armistice Day. Apparently unbidden they tried to bar us from Whitehall on 3 February this year and from Hyde Park on 27 April. In relation to this week’s demonstration the police initially told us we couldn’t march to the Israeli Embassy. In all cases the police had to back down under huge public pressure.
No other group that organises demonstrations in this way has faced this level of systematic obstruction. Indeed, senior police officers were just two weeks ago rightly praising the action of the thousands who took to the streets around the country against racist thugs.
It is quite extraordinary that in a country which claims to be proud of its tradition of free speech and the right of protest the police and government have been so hostile to people marching against a genocide of all things.
This special treatment is clearly political. The police’s last resort is always to say that our demonstrations are a threat to the Jewish community. This is nonsense. It is nonsense because large numbers of the Jewish community attend our demonstrations. It is nonsense too because there is not one single instance that the police or anyone else can cite of any bystander being threatened or harassed on our demonstrations whether Jewish or not.
The only people to whom we pose a threat are those in the small minority of British society – mostly in government and the establishment – who insist on continuing to support Israel in the midst of its genocide. It is these people that the police are protecting when they try and move against our demonstrations. The vast majority in British society support our demands. What we have shown again this week is that because we have that support, when we stand up to the police and refuse to be intimidated, they simply cannot hold the line.