The six organisations coordinating the national Palestine demonstrations are concerned that despite numerous requests we have been refused a meeting with Sir Mark Rowley the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This is despite the fact that Rowley regularly meets with lobby groups who support Israel’s pro-genocide policies and are deeply hostile to our protests and our cause.
We have organised one of the biggest cycle of mass demonstrations in British history in which millions of people have participated.
As the police themselves have often said, they have been overwhelmingly peaceful. There are more arrests per person at Premier league football matches and the average Glastonbury festival than on our demonstrations.
Yet we have faced the most severe restrictions ever experienced on mass marches. This has included numerous bans and attempted bans, including most recently from the BBC, thousands of police mobilised from across the country, the arrest of numerous people for wearing tee-shirts or holding placards and police communications regularly implying that we are a threat to public order.
In particular the police are acting on the false presumption that the protests are a threat to the Jewish community. This is despite the fact there are thousands of Jewish people on our demonstrations and that the police themselves have failed to come up with a single instance of a Jewish person being threatened by anyone on our marches.
Admitting they are under pressure from the Board of Deputies of British Jews and other pro-Israel lobby groups, the police are taking the extraordinary position that we shouldn’t be allowed to march or assemble anywhere near a synagogue, apparently in anticipation of proposed new legislation.
The day after the recent ban on a previously agreed march to the BBC in January, Rowley was congratulated at a Board of Deputies meeting after he told them the law had been used to restrict the right to protest ‘more than we have ever done before’.
This argument is being used to try to exclude a movement calling for peace and the end of a genocide from large areas of central London, restricting the length of of our demonstrations and stopping us marching to and from important locations such as the BBC.
This is a serious and worrying attack on the freedom of assembly in this country. It is completely unacceptable in itself.
The overwhelming majority of people in this country support our calls for a permanent ceasefire in the Middle East. The fact that the Commissioner continues to avoid meeting us only confirms the sense of prejudiced, partisan and politicised policing in the capital.
We call on the Commissioner once again to meet us to discuss these crucial issues.