Gaza protest: How Starmer and the Met have joined forces to quash all dissent

Dozens of people were arrested on the weekend at a peaceful demonstration aiming to highlight British complicity in Israel's slaughter

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[First published by Middle East Eye]

The decision by the Metropolitan Police to interview “under caution” former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and leftwing MP John McDonnell for attending a peaceful protest in London against Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza is a decisive turning point.

It marks a new escalation by the British state in its campaign to repress dissent – and specifically the demonstrations against what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined a year ago was a “plausible” genocide in Gaza.

It marks, too, a new low in the mendacity of police, and senior government figures like Home secretary, who insinuated that protesters engaged in violent, illegal behaviour or posed a threat to Jews in London.

I was at the rally on Saturday, and I saw what happened with my own eyes. From what I observed, it appeared that police wilfully engineered a situation to entrap Corbyn and McDonnell, the march’s figureheads, and then cynically present them as lawbreakers. At the same time, it arrested dozens of protesters and has subsequently charged the main organisers with public order offences.

It is not true that protesters forcefully “broke through” a police cordon at the top of Whitehall, as the Met claimed, to enter Trafalgar Square and thereby breached police “conditions” and posed some kind of undefined threat to a synagogue more than a mile away and not on the march route.

And the media is being thoroughly irresponsible in allowing police to advance these falsehoods without serious challenge. Social media is full of videos showing that Corbyn and McDonnell were correct in saying that they were ushered through the cordon.

This week more than 40 leading lawyers and academics wrote to the Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, warning that the Met's actions were "a disproportionate, unwarranted and dangerous assault on the right to assembly and protest" and that a raft of anti-protest laws were being exploited to target "anti-war and pro-Palestine protests in particular".

In a statement, the Met maintains it acted “without fear or favour … motivated only by the need to ensure groups can exercise their right to peaceful protest, while also ensuring the wider community can go about their lives without serious disruption”.

Political goals

The Met’s false assertions aren’t random or purposeless; rather, they seek to advance specific political goals. They help the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer – which is deeply implicated in Israel’s genocide – smear the marchers as violent, antisemitic troublemakers. They create a pretext to shut down protests that have caused huge discomfort to Starmer.

What we are witnessing is a continuation of the British state’s war on the ethical left. It is using opposition to Israel – and now to genocide – as its yardstick for measuring political illegitimacy and deviancy.

Starmer’s first job as opposition leader was to purge the Labour Party of Corbyn and the grassroots movement he inspired – one that hoped to reverse 40 years of growing social injustice at home, and end Britain’s investment in colonial forever wars abroad, including its lock-step support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

Now Starmer’s job as prime minister is to rid the streets of those for whom Israel’s slaughter of children has served as a rallying point; those who understand that both our major political parties are complicit in genocide; and those despairing that we are no longer offered meaningful political choices on the biggest issues facing us.

For years when he was Labour leader, Corbyn and his supporters were fitted up as antisemites without a shred of evidence for the allegation, aside from his all-too-justified criticisms of Israel.

Now, the very same establishment is again fitting up him, as well as the cause he represents – this time for being proved so presciently right in his warnings that Israel was a rogue state.

There have been regular, peaceful marches through London since Israel began its indiscriminate slaughter of Gaza’s men, women and children in October 2023, following Hamas’s attack on Israel. But the longer the genocide has continued, the harder it has been for the British government to justify its active collusion.

Largely unmentioned by Britain’s pliant media, the UK has been supplying vital components to Israel that have allowed its fleet of F-35 jets to continue bombing Gaza and killing civilians. Britain has organised hundreds of flights that have shipped US and German munitions to Israel, including from a Royal Air Force base in Cyprus.

The UK has supplied Israel with intelligence gained from surveillance flights over Gaza, and it has provided diplomatic cover for Israel at international bodies such as the United Nations.

Starmer has been particularly embarrassed by the decision of the International Criminal Court, the ICJ’s sister court, last November to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity.

The Israeli government’s policy to starve the population of Gaza of food, water and power was publicly supported by Starmer from the outset.

Ignoring genocide

Like his predecessor, the British prime minister has been relying chiefly on the BBC – the state broadcaster and main news source for most Britons – to keep the public largely ignorant, both of the fact that a genocide is taking place in Gaza and of his complicity in it.

The BBC’s role has been to normalise genocide by recharacterising it as a “war” between Israel and Hamas. Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza, the mass slaughter of Palestinians, and the starvation of the entire population have been implicitly treated as a “counter-terrorism” operation.

The aim has been to gradually dissipate interest in the Gaza protests, shrinking the size of the demonstrations and leaving only a hard core of committed activists out on the streets.

Initially, the BBC kept the focus on the suffering of Israelis in the aftermath of the Hamas attack, and on the plight of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – even as tens of thousands of Palestinians in the enclave were killed and maimed, and its hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, mosques, churches and bakeries were levelled.

Then, as the genocide rolled on and selling it became harder, the BBC largely drew a veil over what was taking place. It minimised its reporting to the point where the horrors unfolding in Gaza were excluded from the main TV news for days or even weeks at a time.

A growing number of BBC journalists have come forward as whistleblowers. They have cited severe top-down pressure at the corporation to slant reporting in Israel’s favour.

Even now, as the first stage of a shaky ceasefire was implemented on Sunday, the BBC’s focus once again reverted to the Israeli hostages, and the release of three to their families. Each has been humanised by the western media, their stories and photographs shared widely.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian women and children they have been “swapped” for are barely visible. They are referred to prejudicially as “prisoners”. But like thousands of other Palestinians held in Israeli “prisons”, many were seized from their homes in the middle of the night by armed soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation. Many have been held for lengthy periods without charge or trial.

Even as the exchanges were taking place, Israel was abducting more Palestinians, including children, to fill its “prisons”, which Israeli human rights groups describe as “torture camps”.

The iron fist

All of this was reason enough for protest organisers to select the BBC as the site for last weekend’s demonstration. The point was to protest its coverage and editorial complicity in Israel’s genocide.

The media’s biased reporting has given licence to the British government to back Israel’s genocide. And the same flawed coverage will give Israel licence to violate the ceasefire, as it is already doing, or to reimpose the inhuman, 16-year siege of Gaza that preceded the genocide and led to Hamas’ attack on 7 October 2023.

But as the demonstrations have shown no signs of abating, the Starmer government has grown more desperate. The BBC has failed to normalise the genocide, and British complicity has not been completely shrouded.

Starmer thus needed a new strategy for bringing to an end the rallies that have been embarrassing him. If the British public can’t be brainwashed into accepting genocide, then they will have to be scared off the streets. The velvet glove of the BBC has been swapped for the Met’s iron first.

Until Saturday, more than 20 protest marches had taken place in London without meaningful incident. Although hundreds of thousands of people regularly attended, arrests were lower than at the annual Glastonbury music festival.

The obviously peaceful nature of the marches, and the attendance by a large and visible bloc of Jews, including Holocaust survivors, had long infuriated the right and Israel’s lobbyists, who wanted them banned.

On Saturday, police decided to take the gloves off.

They arrested dozens of demonstrators, charged at least of two of the main organisers with public order offences, and called Corbyn and McDonnell in for interviews.

Demented narrative

The demented narrative that Starmer and the media have crafted over the past 15 months, and that the Met is now relying on to justify its repression, goes like this:

Israel was the victim of a massive, unprovoked antisemitic hate crime by Hamas on 7 October 2023 (even though Israel had besieged Gaza for the preceding 16 years and brutally occupied the enclave for more than seven decades). Hamas’s attack gave Israel the right to “defend itself” on any terms it thought necessary. Because Israel believed the entire population of Gaza was implicated in Hamas’s hate crime, it justifiably punished them all collectively through carpet bombing and an aid blockade.

With this preposterous, human rights-violating narrative serving as the unexamined origin story for Israel’s genocide, anyone protesting Israel’s destruction of Gaza could be characterised as sympathising with Hamas and its 7 October “hate crime”.

The previous government forged just such a narrative.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman termed as “hate marches” the protests against what the ICJ calls a “plausible” genocide. But the smear was so patently ludicrous that it never gained much traction beyond the Conservative Party, the Israel-worshipping far right, and the more unhinged parts of the billionaire-owned media.

It appears that the police have now cooked up some corroborative evidence to help the current Labour government. They appear to have set a trap to ensnare protesters, including Corbyn and McDonell, so they could be recast as violent lawbreakers and antisemites.

The Met did not respond to questions by the time of publication.

BBC no-go zone

Starmer’s government and London police have spent months preparing the right conditions to demonise protesters.

The Met’s subterfuge has worked only because the establishment media has served once again as a willing conduit for police disinformation about the march.

As Ben Jamal of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has explained, the Met approved a mass protest outside the BBC headquarters back in November. However, it requested the event be delayed to avoid causing disruption in the run-up to Christmas for London’s nearby commercial streets.

After reaching a compromise with police on timing, organisers announced that the rally outside the BBC would take place on 18 January. But as the date neared, police started furiously backtracking.

The pretext they settled on was that a local synagogue would be disturbed by the demonstration. The claim was made even though the synagogue was not near the march route, there have been no examples of a synagogue being threatened or any Jews being targeted in 15 months of similar protests, and the march is always attended by a large and highly visible bloc of Jews opposed to the Gaza genocide.

Objections to the march by the synagogue’s rabbi looked entirely political, and unrelated to security. But march organisers accommodated the rabbi’s professed concerns and the demands of police by reversing the march route. It would start in Whitehall and end at the BBC late in the afternoon, long after the synagogue’s Sabbath service was finished.

Police revealed their true hand at this point. They rejected the organisers’ compromise, even though the rabbi’s concerns had been addressed. Instead, the Met appear to have declared what amounts to a large and permanent no-go zone around the BBC – effectively banning any pro-Palestine demonstrations from taking place on a Saturday, the only day in the week when mass protests can realistically happen.

In other words, police – the state’s coercive arm – were threatening anyone critical of Israel’s genocide with arrest if they went near the BBC, the state’s propaganda arm.

The BBC might be funded by taxpayers. Its licence fee might be compulsory. But the British public apparently now has no right to protest against the disinformation they are compelled to pay for.

Sleight of hand

By the time Saturday’s march arrived, all the pieces were in place for the Met’s sleight of hand.

Police had at the last minute insisted on what they termed a “static” rally in Whitehall. Organisers had said they would try to march as far as they were allowed by police; when their path was blocked, they would lay flowers on the road in memory of the slaughtered children of Gaza, and in protest at the silencing of their demonstration against the BBC.

At the end of the speeches, the march formed at the top of Whitehall, led by Corbyn, McDonnell and Jamal. I stood nearby. Police had cordoned off the road – but then, as I saw for myself and video footage confirms, the police line separated and the marchers were released into Trafalgar Square.

As the demonstrators soon found, all routes out of Trafalgar Square had been blocked off by police. The square was effectively a giant “kettle” – a police tactic used to enclose protesters so they cannot easily leave a public space. They can then be selectively arrested.

As Corbyn and McDonnell reached the northwest corner of Trafalgar Square, they were greeted by another police cordon. This time, police refused to budge.

When the march’s chief steward, Chris Nineham, requested that the delegation be allowed to proceed further, he was rushed by a squad of police officers and violently dragged off.

Jamal urged everyone to sit down to avoid further attacks by police. The flowers were laid, and the march dispersed. Nonetheless, police massed in large numbers in Trafalgar Square and arrested dozens of demonstrators.

At all times, despite the impression created by the Met and Yvette Cooper, the marchers were at least a mile from the BBC and the synagogue.

Notably, on the day before the rally, more than 1,000 Jews, including leading cultural figures, lawyers and academics, called on the police to overturn the ban on marching to the BBC, stating: "As Jews we are shocked at this brazen attempt to interfere with hard-won political freedoms by conjuring up an imaginary threat to Jewish freedom of worship."

Flimsiest of pretexts

The BBC and the rest of the media have gleefully reported on Corbyn and McDonnell being called for police interviews. They have been equally enthusiastic in giving the impression of a connection between that investigation and a statement from Commander Adam Slonecki, who led the policing operation, that the march represented “a serious escalation in criminality”.

Notably, the media has largely avoided mentioning the context, or the BBC’s conflict of interest: that protesters were seeking to expose the corporation’s complicity in the Gaza genocide, and that police were acting to shield it – and Starmer’s government – from accountability.

The Met is framing the march’s leaders and figureheads as criminals. This should be understood for what it is: police meddling deeply in political matters on behalf of the government, and eroding fundamental democratic rights to assemble and peacefully protest.

Nineham, a veteran founder of Stop the War and one of the march organisers, was charged this week under the Public Order Act. As part of his bail conditions, he has been banned from participating in future anti-genocide rallies.

Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, has been similarly charged. There is a real danger that police will level the same charges against Corbyn and McDonnell.

The transparent aim here – one that benefits Starmer’s government, as well as Israel – is to silence dissent against the genocide and British collusion in it.

Police have built a mendacious case that the home secretary can exploit to outlaw the protests. She shows signs of being ready to grasp this, the flimsiest of pretexts that she is being offered.

But even in the event the marches aren’t banned, the damage is already done. The unwarranted and violent arrests of demonstrators, and the smearing of organisers, will have a predictable effect. It will dissuade all but the hardiest activists from turning out to protest against British complicity in the slaughter in Gaza, the biggest crime of our age.

Some will credulously swallow the police disinformation. Others will believe police are gunning to criminalise participation in the demonstrations. Either way, the marches will have been successfully stigmatised.

Stoking disorder

Recall that the Met has form. In 2023, an official inquiry found the force to be institutionally racist, misogynistic, homophobic and corrupt. Its author concluded that the Met could “no longer presume that it has the permission of the people of London to police them”.

The idea that it is dispassionately maintaining order between those protesting Israel’s genocide and those so attached to a foreign country that they find such protests offensive is laughable.

The head of the Met, Mark Rowley, celebrated the fact that he had placed unprecedented restrictions on Saturday’s rally in an address the following day. He said: “We’ve used conditions on the protests more than we ever have done before in terms of times, constraints, routes.”

Where did he make these comments? At an event held by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which has been vocal in supporting Israel through 15 months of genocide and objected strenuously to arms sales restrictions by the Starmer government, even though it has allowed more than 90 percent of British weapons to continue flowing to Israel.

Rowley, meanwhile, ignored an appeal from more than 1,000 British Jews, including prominent cultural and legal figures, urging him to allow the BBC protest on Saturday to go ahead.

The truth is that Rowley and the Met are not the ones upholding public order. They are the ones threatening it.

They have declared war on one of the most cherished and fundamental rights in a democracy. They have criminalised peaceful, lawful protest. And they have openly politicised their policing role.

Millions of Britons are learning that their opposition to the UK’s active support for the slaughter of children in Gaza not only counts for nothing, because the government refuses to listen, but that police also consider their protests, however peaceful, as criminal behaviour.

Police – and Starmer’s government hiding behind them – are further tearing apart Britain’s fragile social fabric. They are stoking disorder. And we will all pay a heavy price.

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