Politics
MPs ‘accused Jewish community of lying’ over Palestine protest, says Antisemitism Policy Trust CEO
Danny Stone accused members including Jeremy Corbyn and Green co-leader Carla Denyer of minimising Jewish concerns.
March 26, 2025 17:31
Danny Stone accused members including Jeremy Corbyn and Green co-leader Carla Denyer of minimising Jewish concerns.
March 26, 2025 17:31MPs who backed a divisive parliamentary motion about planned pro-Palestine protests close to a synagogue had downplayed the concerns of the Jewish community, the head of the Antisemitism Policy Trust has said.
Giving testimony to the House of Commons’ Women and Equalities Committee’s inquiry on community cohesion last week, Danny Stone also said the leaders of pro-Palestinian marches had done little to clamp down on inflammatory and antisemitic language.
The Metropolitan Police restricted a protest planned by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign for 18 January from its planned route at the BBC’s Broadcasting House because of its proximity to Central Synagogue.
Ahead of the march, 45 MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer signed a motion that cast doubt on the police’s analysis of the threat to the Jewish community.
Early Day Motion 633 rejected “the Metropolitan Police’s claim the march could cause disruption to a nearby synagogue”, and claimed that “the Metropolitan Police themselves have acknowledged that there has not been a single incident of any threat to a synagogue attached to any of the previous marches for Palestine, and that thousands of Jewish people have been joining the protests, many of them part of an organised Jewish bloc”.
Stone said he interpreted the motion as an accusation of dishonesty against the Jewish community. “It said there has been no impact on synagogues and the Met Police is not being straight with you. I interpreted that as saying that the Jewish community is lying about this,” Stone told MPs on 19 March.
At the time, the Board of Deputies and Jewish Leadership Council issued a joint statement backing the police’s decision to direct the protest away from synagogues on Shabbat. Last year, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research published a survey showing two-thirds of British Jews intended to avoid city centres were pro-Palestine protests were taking place.
Stone also attacked the inflammatory language used by organisers of pro-Palestine marches.
“One of the leading figures in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign said to the crowd that the leadership groups in the Jewish community ‘do not want us to remember the children of Gaza.’
“To me, that speaks to an idea that Jews are evil and heartless, and it is demonstrably untrue. Rabbi Charley Baginsky, Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, the Chief Rabbi and Claudia Mendoza from the Jewish Leadership Council have all talked to the suffering of Palestinians,” he said.
Stone also said that the organisers of pro-Palestine marches had not done enough to stop the appearance of antisemitic slogans on them.
“I have not seen a direct challenge from the leadership of those groups to stop the antisemitic slogans, symbols and placards that have been occurring,” he said, suggesting simple measures that organisers could take such as “calling it out when you see it at a protest”.
MPs also heard from the Community Security Trust (CST)’s Director of External Relations Jonny Newton, who said that communal perception of the policing of pro-Palestine marches had improved since the start of the conflict in Gaza.
“The police themselves have stated they did not get it quite right, including the comms around them,” he said.
“When you look at the protests themselves, over the last 18 months there have been hundreds of arrests, from public order offences through to people demonstrating support for proscribed terror organisations, through to incitement to racial and religious hatred. There has certainly been police action there,” Newton added.
In contrast to the claims made by the MPs’ motion, he described a “negative community impact on local Jewish communities when previous demonstrations had occurred in the vicinity of synagogues”.
“We had heard from synagogues about ongoing issues around a decrease in attendance, services being changed or times being changed, and people saying they did not want to come into town to go to synagogue at that time. We felt the police were pretty strong and that pretty reasonable public order conditions were imposed.”
Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), who organised the protest on 18 January during which 77 people were arrested, was later charged with breaching police conditions. He pleaded not guilty to public order offences last month and is awaiting trial in July.
Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell were interviewed under police caution in the wake of the march in question.
Speaking about the wider impact on the Jewish community following October 7, Newton said that prior to Hamas’s atrocities in Israel, unlike other communities in Europe, British Jews had never really had to consider hiding their Jewish identity, but that “in the last 18 months it has been shaken. We have started to see those seeds of change, and that is ostensibly because of the reaction here in the UK to the events of 7 October and the ongoing war in the Middle East.”
He noted that in 2023, CST recorded its highest annual total of incidents, and the second highest in 2024.
“In Home Office and police stats … a member of the Jewish community is about 10 to 12 times more likely to be a victim of hatred based on their religious identity than the next ranked community,” he said.