Metropolitan Police ban Palestine protest outside BBC

This is about smearing those who oppose genocide as hateful extremists - while cheerleaders for depravity style themselves as mainstream moderates

Protest against genocide, and you’re a hateful extremist. Support a genocidal onslaught, and you’re a mainstream moderate. This is the reality in which we live, at least according to our political and media elites. If our species has a future, history will remember the treatment of those who opposed mass extermination, deliberate starvation and the physical annihilation of an entire land. The judgement will be deservedly brutal.

This was brought into sharp relief by the decision of the Metropolitan Police to ban those protesting in solidarity with the Palestinian people from doing so outside the BBC on 18th January. Protest organisers chose the BBC as the assembling point for a reason. As my recent investigation for

Drop Site News

sought to underline, the BBC’s dire coverage of Israel’s genocide has been fiercely denounced even by its own journalists.

As a statement by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign explains, the Met agreed the route for the march nearly two months ago, allowing for it to be publicly announced at the end of November. And then, with a week’s notice, the Met declared they intend to block the agreed plans. The claimed reason? It could cause disruption to a synagogue near to the BBC, which isn’t even on the route of the protest. As PSC note:

“Moreover, as the Met Police have acknowledged, there has not been a single incident of any threat to a synagogue attached to any of the marches.”

As they further note, thousands of Jewish protesters have marched against Israel’s genocide since it began. Many of them proudly display their Jewishness - from wearing kippah to holding banners emphasising their identity. And, as PSC further note, “as the Met Police have acknowledged, there has not been a single incident of any threat to a synagogue attached to any of our marches.” The Met have banned protests on a Saturday in the vicinity of the BBC, on the grounds it’s the Jewish holy day. Saturdays are - for obvious reasons to do with the work and family patterns of most people - the day on which mass national protests take place. This thereby de facto bans pro-Palestine national protests outside the BBC.

A letter opposing the ban has been signed by several MPs - like Jeremy Corbyn, those who have been suspended from Labour such as John McDonnell and Zara Sultana, remaining left Labour MPs like Diane Abbott and Nadia Whittome, the Greens’ Carla Denyer and Zack Polanski, trade union leaders, academics, and cultural figures such as Juliet Stevenson and Mark Rylance. (I’ve signed it, too).

I interviewed the PSC’s director Ben Jamal about this democratic outrage:

Now, we know last month that the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis declared he was in discussions with the police about the protest. The problem with simply treating the Chief Rabbi as a communal representative - other than that he isn’t elected and only represents one branch of British Judaism - is he has extremely strong pro-Israel views, to say the least. He openly refuses to demarcate between Israel, a state, and the Jewish people, including in Britain. In January 2024, he called IDF soldiers “our heroic soldiers”, revealed his son Danny was serving in the IDF in Gaza and declared: “What Israel is doing is the most outstanding possible thing that a decent, responsible country can do for its citizens.”

The facts speak for themselves. Demonised by the likes of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman as “hate marches”, the Palestinian solidarity protests have an arrest rate lower than Glastonbury music festival. The disjuncture between the portrayal and the reality led to a bigoted conspiracy theory, with Braverman claiming it was because Islamists were in charge of Britain and the police were thereby under their thumb.

The truth is this. Hundreds of thousands have marched, overwhelmingly united by revulsion at mass slaughter and a desire for justice. Media outlets and pro-Israel organisations and individuals then play a game of trying to hunt down the most problematic placards they can find. These are the same people who have nothing to say about the incessant genocidal statements made by actual Israeli leaders, used to justify the genocidal onslaught these organisations and individuals support. A small number of racist placards and statements have been highlighted and they should be opposed (though there is a shameless attempt to portray entirely legitimate expressions of solidarity as belonging to that category, like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free). It would be surprising if, with hundreds of thousands of people on the streets for any cause or reason, there weren’t some racists who cynically attached themselves. The attempt to extrapolate, however, is shameless cynical dishonesty.

Indeed it should be noted that the police force making this decision in the name of community relations was found by an official government report to be institutionally racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. A rather bigger threat to community cohesion, truth be told, than protesters against genocide.

There’s also another point that Ben Jamal put to me. There is a deliberate conflation of discomfort and actual threats of harm here. He cites one gruesome example: a display of artwork by Palestinian children at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London was removed after UK Lawyers for Israel lodged a complaint, on the grounds it made Jewish patients feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised.” Let’s be clear: this is perverse.

This led me to recall an interview I did with Nara Milanich, a history professor at Columbia University, who is herself Jewish (you can see the whole video here). We were discussing the campus protests against the genocide in the US at the time, but her point applies here: the need to distinguish between feelings of deep discomfort, and threats of actual harm.

There is no evidence that the protests are a threat to Jewish safety in London, which would make no sense given how many Jewish protesters, including Holocaust survivors and their relatives, have taken part. There are those, regardless of their ethnicity or faith, who object to any solidarity with the Palestinian people, not least as they suffer genocide, and wish to drive it out of visible existence. (This was helpfully fleshed out by the Jewish Chronicle, which published an article by right-wing commentator Melanie Phillips headlined ‘If you support the Palestinian cause in any form, you’re facilitating Jew-hate’). That has meant deplatforming, menacing careers, sacking, intimidating - and indeed banning protests in several countries. In Germany, Jewish people have in fact been disproportionately targeted for speaking out against the genocide.

That’s what this is really about. It’s about turning the world upside down. Israel is committing one of the most obscene crimes of our age, with the direct facilitation of Western politicians and media outlets. That complicity can only be sustained through epic gaslighting: that it’s those who oppose butchering tens of thousands of innocent people who are the real dangerous extremists. Polling shows the British public - by massive margins - want Israel’s onslaught to end immediately, support a total arms embargo on Israel, believe Israel has committed war crimes and want Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested. The strategy to stop public opinion being acted on is to demonise and silence pressure to listen to it.