The British establishment is gearing up for further bans and restrictions on the Palestine movement. Shabbir Lakha refutes the latest lies

Once again, the government, police, media and Zionist organisations are cynically exploiting a violent attack on Jewish people to clamp down on Palestine protests.

On Wednesday, two Jewish people were stabbed in Golders Green. Essa Suleiman, the alleged perpetrator, has now been charged with attempted murder, not terror-related offences as was initially presented. That Suleiman also stabbed a third victim, a Muslim man in south London earlier the same day, was for some reason withheld until he was charged on Friday.

Within hours of the stabbings in Golders Green, Keir Starmer had chaired a COBRA meeting and the government’s ’terrorism tsar’, Jonathan Hall KC, called for a ‘moratorium on Palestine marches’, saying it was ‘impossible for them to not incubate antisemitism’.

By Thursday, the Metropolitan Police said it was reviewing whether the 16 May demonstration commemorating the continuing Nakba against the Palestinian people can go ahead and was not ruling out forcing it to be a static protest.

On what grounds?

So what is the basis for making such a firm link between antisemitic attacks and the Palestine marches? Have the organisers of the demonstrations called for violence against Jewish people or implied that Britain’s Jewish population is responsible for the genocidal crimes of the Israeli state? Have there been any hate crimes against Jewish people attributable to Palestine demonstrations? Jewish people must surely be unwelcome on the marches?

No. By the police’s own admission, no act of aggression against a Jewish person or synagogue can be attributable to any of the 34 national demonstrations across two and a half years. Every march features a Jewish bloc of thousands of Jewish people, including a prominent group of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and Jewish speakers address every demonstration. None of the organisers have ever been plausibly accused of antisemitic hate speech.

‘Plausibly’ because according to Israel’s defenders, calling Israel’s actions a genocide is antisemitic. Saying Palestinians should be able to live freely with the same rights as Jewish people between the river and the sea is antisemitic. Calling for boycotts of companies associated with war crimes against Palestinians – including arms companies – is apparently targeting Jewish businesses. Saying that there should be global resistance to a system of imperialism that is responsible for mass slaughter is ‘calling for terrorism against Jews’, according to Keir Starmer.

This is now a repeated pattern of using appalling acts of violence against Jewish people to silence legitimate, peaceful and wholly justified opposition to Israel’s genocide and our government’s continuing material support for it. And thereby setting extremely dangerous precedents and restricting our general, fundamental right to protest.

The phrase ‘globalise the intifada’ was criminalised – without any sort of democratic approval – following the Bondi beach massacre in Sydney. Starmer has called for anyone using the phrase to be prosecuted, and Met Commissioner Mark Rowley says that as well as the new laws Parliament is introducing to increase police powers, police should be ‘pushing the boundaries of existing laws’.

It is not the Palestine movement that is guilty of conflating the crimes of the Israeli state with Jewish people – that is being done by politicians, the media and the police by branding criticism of Israel antisemitism. The openly pro-Israel Community Security Trust, regularly cited by the police and journalists, record ‘Free Palestine’ graffiti as antisemitic incidents.

Political policing

The Metropolitan police has made the political nature of its policing and double standards clear for everyone to see. Mark Rowley published a letter to Zack Polanski – the only Jewish leader of a national party – to criticise him for retweeting a comment questioning whether it was acceptable for police officers kicking the Golders Green assailant multiple times in the head and stamping on his neck after he had already been tasered and was lying motionless on the ground.

A week before the local elections, this should rightly be seen as a political intervention. This comes alongside the arbitrary restrictions and political commentary made by the Met on every Palestine demonstration. It comes alongside the decision to continue arresting people indicating support for Palestine Action despite a judicial review finding the proscription of the group unlawful.

Most obviously, there is a stark contrast with the treatment of Islamophobia. No such appeal to ‘lower the temperature at a time of rising tensions’ has been made to Reform leader Nigel Farage or Tory leader Kemi Badenoch for their blatant anti-Muslim statements.

The response was not even close when an Iranian protester was stabbed on Whitehall recently, or when any of over thirty mosques have been attacked in the last year, or when a Muslim woman was deliberately run over by a car in South East London recently. There were no COBRA meetings, No 10 press conferences or front page stories.

More egregiously, the Met Police has given Tommy Robinson the political centre of London – from Russell Square to Parliament Square – for his next march on 16 May. This is despite those marches actually featuring violent attacks on Muslims, ethnic minorities and even police officers. This is despite organisers and speakers openly calling for violence against Muslims and their supporters seen performing Nazi salutes. Mainstream news channels are not running straps asking if that protest should be banned. The Met police isn’t reviewing whether the march should go ahead.

Islamophobia and authoritarianism

Instead, the state’s response will reinforce Islamophobia. Metropolitan police officers in the area have been given the power to stop and search without reasonable suspicion. This will inevitably mean racial profiling. The justification for using excessive force on the grounds of ‘split-second decisions’ is the kind of policing that led to the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes and subsequent cover-up.

Additionally, because Suleiman had previously been referred to Prevent and the ‘terror threat level’ has been raised to ‘severe’, both government and police are reviewing (read ‘looking to expand’) Prevent, already proven to be inherently Islamophobic. Mark Rowley is using this moment to unsubtly demand more police funding and greater police powers.

This is an incredibly dangerous slide to authoritarianism, and one which comes with trivialising antisemitism and stoking Islamophobia. The move to potentially restrict the Nakba demonstration on 16 May and ban future marches and slogans is an unjustifiable attack on our civil liberties.

Our response has to be to make the 16 May demonstration massive, to show that our opposition to genocide will not be hampered by these baseless smears and to defend our right to protest. As the Stop the War Coalition said in its statement, ‘In a democracy, we have the right to peaceful protest and we will continue to exercise it. We will be marching on 16 May for the Nakba.’