Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos will this Friday (21 March) be questioned under caution by Metropolitan police officers over his alleged role in the 18 January Palestine solidarity protest.
In what can only be described as an Orwellian situation, Kapos (87) will be cross-examined at 2.30pm at Charing Cross police station about what the Met are claiming was a breach of their conditions, which are aimed at limiting the right to protest against genocide in Gaza.
That a Holocaust survivor is being pursued by the police in this way underlines the unjustifiable extremes to which the police are prepared to go to restrict the right to public protest and silence the Palestine solidarity movement.
A protest outside the police station in Stephen’s defence will take place from 2pm.
The conditions were imposed on the protest as a result of political pressure from supporters of Israel’s pro-genocide policies – the British Board of Jewish Deputies in particular – as part of their campaign to portray the Palestine protests as anti-semitic.
Kapos, who as a young child survived the Holocaust in Budapest, is among a number of activists sent police letters calling them in for questioning by the Met. All those who received the letters were simply carrying flowers to lay down in commemoration of the tens of thousands of civilians, the majority of them women and children, slaughtered by Israel since October 2023.
Hundreds of Jewish people, many of them survivors and descendents of the Holocaust, join the pro-Palestine demonstrations to speak out about the Gaza genocide. To accuse them of anti-semitism is grotesque.
The force has also banned the movement from marching anywhere in the vicinity of a synagogue on a Saturday, even though they are unable to cite a single example of anyone attending a synagogue being intimidated or attacked by someone on a Palestine demonstration.
The movement is demanding that the Met halt any prosecutions or proceedings against Stephen Kapos and all those involved in 18 January’s entirely peaceful protest, that it respects the right to protest and that it stops doing the bidding of organisations who support Israel’s actions in Gaza and want to drive us off the streets.