Palestine Solidarity Campaign director charged over Saturday’s demonstration
JVL Introduction
Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal has been charged with breaching conditions imposed by the police on Saturday’s mass protest in Whitehall. We express our solidarity with Ben and his comrades and publish his statement below.
It makes clear, as many social media posts have shown, that there is no truth in the allegation that he, along with Chris Nineham of Stop the War who has also been charged, forced their way through a police line. On the contrary, it was police who pounced on Nineham to arrest him without cause.
Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski, one of many Jewish participants in Saturday’s demonstration and one of the speakers at the Whitehall rally, is among those challenging the police version of events. He states, as also asserted in Jewish Voice for Labour’s statement, that there is no evidence for the reason given for imposing restrictions on the march in the first place – risk to the safety of Jews worshipping at a synagogue. Jewish Bloc demonstrators, including Holocaust survivors and descendants, were blocked by a police line as they walked along Whitehall and then allowed to continue. But later they were forced to disperse with threats of arrest.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has praised the Met Police for their operations on Saturday. One wonders how closely she monitored policing of the protest which was provocative and aggressive to an unprecedented degree.
NWI
This article was originally published by Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Mon 20 Jan 2025. Read the original here.
Personal Statement From PSC Director Ben Jamal
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Well said. The Police just seem to now operate on instructions from certain politicians. This has to be challenged and stopped!
Solidarity to Ben, Chris et al.
100% solidarity with Ben Jamal and all of those arrested by the Metropolitan Police for standing up for the oppressed and massacred people of Palestine. 100% shame on the Met’s and the Starmer government’s use of Israel’s appalling policy of ‘Administrative Detention’ (used in the Occupied Territories of Palestine as a tool of harassment and terrorism) here on the streets of London.
The truth must come out and justice must prevail in a democracy
What is happening to our country?where is the integrity,the transparency,the truth must always be vocalised and never suppressed.
This is only the latest example of the police acting as an instrument of state when required to do so by an overbearing government. In my own lifetime there were the 1968 Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in which I was a participant and experienced police provocation first-hand; the miners’ strike of the mid-80s where the police were drawn from all over the country to act as a militia; the poll-tax demonstration in Trafalgar Square when the police blocked off the whole square and then sent horses in, thus making a riot inevitable; the anti-Iraq War protests, when the Blair government sanctioned the kettling of a peaceful demo in central London, forbidding people from dispersing for several hours. There is nothing new in this except for one notable feature. Then, the demonstrations were fully reported by the BBC, so that everyone was resasonably informed of what was happening. But now, as the BBC’s website response to this demonstration showed, which it knows full well was in great part directed at the BBC itself, it has no intention of reporting with any kind of objectivity, focussing almost all its attention on the arrest of its old enemies, Corbyn and McDonell. Never has an establishment conspiracy to silence, for entirely selfish and ideological reasons. opposition to what they must know, cannot avoid knowing, is a genocide, been more blatant and more obvious than it is today, just as a blatant and obvious fascist walks into the Oval Office. Disgust is the only reasonable response to all of this.
This is going to far now They know perfectly well these Marches are peacefull
When I seen last week that the Police wanted the march to find another way to go because they had complaints I had an idea then the lies were being ready to be rolled out Solidarity to Ben and Chris and everyone who took part
I’ve supported STWC ever since the first meeting launched with Tony Benn and George Galloway amongst others and still do. It was preposterous to arrest Jamal and Nineham and to harass Corbyn (again). Government hypocrisy and duplicity are in shocking evidence. However having said all that, I think this could have been better phrased, or maybe just punctuated differently: ‘…until Palestinians in exile are free to return to their homes and on every inch of their historic homeland, from the river to the sea, are finally able to live in freedom with justice’ because although I might agree with its basic sentiment, it seems to leave Zionists and other Israel supporters with a stick to beat Palestinian supporters with. A Right-of-Return ‘to their homes … every inch … historic homeland … river to sea’: yes it would certainly be justice, albeit too long denied, but what does it sound like to (Jewish) Israelis? To Zionists of any and no faith?
Possibly I’m projecting from what’s left of my own youthful Zionism, something I’ve now left so far behind that a part of me, and it was a totally overwhelming feeling watching the genocide unfold, can’t help feeling that Israel must be completely reconstructed and politically restructured. It won’t be a Jewish state, but then was it ever? It certainly isn’t now. I think Ben Jamal has convinced me.
My heartfelt support – from afar (in New Zealand)
If there is a fund for your legal costs I shall be happy to make a donation.
How else can I help? Praying that this madness will soon come to an end!
A perversion of natural justice. Political interference in the protest at genocide obviously came from the worse than useless mock-Labour government.
All of this behaviour – I have to agree with Bassem Yousef. It’s a massive Bro Code. They all know what to do. To be “in”, and get what they want. Opportunistic, degenerate, massively corrupt. It’s the behaviour of people who know that the whole situation is circling the drain, so they just want to grab what they can while they can. If they didn’t do this, they’d be “out”. If they flag themselves up as being truly “in”, they advance themselves, for what it’s worth.