Community
Board of Deputies thanks Met chief for policing of pro-Palestinian protest at the weekend
Board president Phil Rosenberg told Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley the community owed the force ‘a huge amount of appreciation’
January 20, 2025 23:26
Board president Phil Rosenberg told Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley the community owed the force ‘a huge amount of appreciation’
January 20, 2025 23:26Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg has thanked the head of the Metropolitan Police for keeping the community safe during Saturday’s pro-Palestinian protest in London.
Demonstrators were forced to abandon plans to gather outside the BBC headquarters after police said the route would be too close to Central Synagogue on Shabbat and instead held a rally in Whitehall.
Rosenberg told Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who addressed and answered questions at the Board meeting on Sunday, that he was grateful for the police’s engagement with the Board, London Jewish Forum and CST.
“I think, working together, we have seen things improve on the specific issues that haven’t always gone right, particularly early on,” he said. “I think the biggest example of that perhaps was yesterday.
“We were deeply concerned that this march was going to take place next to a synagogue, disrupting their Sabbath services.
“And we are really grateful for the close and forensic work you and the Met did to allow freedom of expression and make sure that protest could go ahead, but to keep our community safe and stop the disruption to our normal communal life. And I think we owe you a huge amount of appreciation for that.”
Rowley explained that the police had limited powers to set conditions to marches but said they had been used “more than we have ever done before”.
Officers arrested 77 people during a Palestine Solidarity Campaign march on Saturday, where there was a coordinated effort to breach Public Order Act conditions and cause serious disruption to Londoners, said the Met.
Over the past 15 months, police had been “steering our way through a complicated set of law, trying to use it to balance the different rights”, he said.
Addressing criticisms of the weekend’s events by the Muslim Association of Britain - one of the rally organisers - and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, he said the comments “ignore the reality of the law”.
The MAB had condemned the restrictions on the protest route as “an outrageous assault on democracy”.
“That assumes that protest has no bounds and regardless of the effect on other people, you can protest any way you want,” the Commissioner said. “Clearly, that is not true.”
On the other hand, the CAA had reiterated its call for the marches to be banned.
“There is no power in law to ban these protests is the first point,” Rowley told deputies. “Secondly, we don’t authorise any protest. The law doesn’t give us that power.”
Acknowledging some frustration over the police’s reaction to the marches, he said, “I am sure that there will be some of what we have done over the last year that some of you in the room will think we got right and some of it, you will think we got wrong.”
He revealed that “almost never before” had the police made “terror-related” arrests at protests but they had made “many tens of those” over the past 15 months.
But while recognising that most deputies would find the chant “From the river to the sea” offensive and threatening, he said police had been advised that it was “not over the line” legally.
He also dealt with limitations in hate crime law, explaining that it was “perfectly lawful to stir up race or religious hatred in the UK as long as you avoid doing it in a way which is threatening or abusive”.
The intention behind conspiracy theories spread online, which increased antisemitism might be obvious, he explained, but generally they were “not illegal”.
In the past year or so, the Met had prosecuted over 300 crimes for antisemitism, he said.