The January 18 rally against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has received far more attention from the media than most of the more than 2,600 marches and protests that have taken place in the UK since October 7 2023 — and for all the wrong reasons.
For the most part, readers of mainstream media would hardly register even the largest protests week by week, except for the comments of opponents of the pro-Palestine movement aimed at demonising them as an expression of “hate.” But the latest National March for Gaza — which became a “static rally” after police restricted its movement because of complaints from pro-Israel groups — saw extensive media coverage after the Metropolitan Police claimed that those attending the rally on Whitehall “forced” their way through police lines and into Trafalgar Square then refused to disperse, and arrested dozens including some with violence, and charged at least 10 people so far.
I was at the front of that rally as it moved along Whitehall — and the Met’s claims about the conduct of those present are a wholesale falsehood, as an abundance of video evidence has since made clear.
Like all the anti-genocide marches in London and around the country before it, the January 18 protest was orderly, peaceful and maintained its discipline even as the police ultimately escalated their action with the violent arrest of chief steward Chris Nineham.
There was never any question of, or need for, the demonstrators to “force” their way through the police lines. On the contrary, police officers parted and waved us through after Jeremy Corbyn and the organisers indicated we wanted to lay wreaths in memory of children killed in Gaza.
Video evidence shows commanders telling their officers to make room and telling the marchers to “filter” in order to pass through the gaps — but that after the wreaths were laid, police lines closed and would not allow the crowd to disperse as it wished, effectively “kettling” the demonstration and leaving it no way out.
Despite the facts and the clear evidence supporting them, the Met has charged at least 10 people, including Nineham and Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal, with offences under the Public Order Act relating to supposed encroachment of the rally on “conditioned” — off-limits — areas.
It seems reasonable, indeed unavoidable, to infer from the facts and the way that they have been misrepresented, that the policing of the protest was always intended to create an opportunity for the media to demonise, and the state to criminalise, the peaceful pro-Palestine protest movement that has galvanised support for the Palestinian people and their cause and has woken up many people in Britain to the occupation, apartheid and genocide that Israel has inflicted on the people of Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
And to do so, the state has exceeded its legal powers and ignored its obligations.
Dr Daniella Lock, law lecturer at King’s College London, pointed out last weekend that the right to protest is enshrined in law as an “essential for democracy to survive” as part of our freedoms of expression and assembly.
States are not permitted to limit protest because they dislike the political content or aims of those protesting. States can only interfere with those rights if it is absolutely and demonstrably necessary for public safety and security — and must limit that intervention to the minimum required to protect the public good. That was clearly not the case on January 18. There was no threat, no disorder, no impingement on the safety of others.
British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla, who was also at the front of the march as it moved through police lines, has said that he saw in the police’s tactics “the ghost of how we are policed in Egypt. I have been subject to police brutality in this country, but last Saturday was the first time I have tasted the shadow of what may be an authoritarianism to come… you arrive to police making their presence intimidatingly clear… you walk knowing that the police intend to confront you.”
I believe Abdalla is correct that what we are seeing now in the policing of Gaza is a manifestation of an authoritarianism that Keir Starmer intends to inflict on our country, not only because of what appears to be his commitment to Israel’s continued repression of the Palestinians, but certainly in large part driven by it.
In recent weeks we have seen Israel repeatedly breach its ceasefire in Lebanon, bombing and killing Lebanese civilians as they tried to return home; we have seen Israel seize large areas of Syrian territory as the Assad government fell; and we have seen Benjamin Netanyahu agree and then promptly and repeatedly breach the ceasefire in Gaza, including the intentional firing of occupation forces on civilians as they try to return to the north, and the use of snipers around the Strip who have killed, among others, a two-year-old child who died after being shot in the head.
Starmer has mentioned none of these things, let alone condemned them. In his statement welcoming the beginning of the implementation of the ceasefire, he mentioned only the Israeli captives released and those who “remain in captivity under Hamas.” Not a single word about the thousands of Palestinians held hostage by Israel under so-called “administrative detention,” nor of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed and maimed, or the millions forcibly displaced and now returning to flattened, uninhabitable neighbourhoods without adequate shelter, heat, food or even clean water.
As prime minister, Starmer appears determined to maintain his own personal silence on the suffering of the Palestinian people and the crimes Israel perpetrates on them. He seems equally set on widening the cloak of silence and invisibility surrounding those crimes to envelop the eyes and ears of the British people as a whole.
To do that, his government has for months been engaged in a war of harassment and criminalisation against pro-Palestine activists and against journalists who cover honestly the horrors of the genocide in Gaza and the lies Israel has told to try to mask and justify it. Journalists such as Richard Medhurst have been seized at airports and their computers and phones seized under anti-terror laws; others, like Sarah Wilkinson and Asa Winstanley, have had their homes invaded by anti-terror police and their devices seized — a gross misuse of legislation intended to stop imminent acts of terror and a blatant violation of journalistic obligations to protect sources and confidentiality. Medhurst and Jewish writer and activist Tony Greenstein have been charged and others have been kept in limbo waiting to find out whether they will be prosecuted.
But the weekly marches and protests are, for most ordinary British people, the most visible exposure of Israel’s criminality, the most visible manifestation of solidarity with oppressed Palestinians against genocide, land-theft and apartheid. If Starmer’s government wants the British public to forget what has been done and continues to be done against the Palestinian people, he needs to smear those protests as violent and hateful and he is likely to look to ban them outright. The events of January 18 and subsequently seem a clear indication that he plans exactly that.