Pro-Palestine marches could be temporarily banned from taking place after a string of recent antisemitic attacks, which culminated in the stabbing of two Jews in Golders Green on Wednesday.
Laurence Taylor, the Met’s assistant commissioner and the head of Counter Terror Police, said the force was reviewing whether upcoming pro-Palestine marches would go ahead after the UK’s terrorism threat level was raised to “serious”.
When asked by reporters about the potential to ban the marches, Taylor said: “At this stage, that is part of the work that police will be reviewing.”
He added: “As part of our review into the change in the threat level, police will be reviewing all events across the country.
“My teams will be working with forces to ensure that we have appropriate protective security measures in place, that the appropriate mitigations are put in place, and we will be engaged with communities who will be affected by large events, as well as those involved in the events, so that we can keep them safe as they can be.”
Calls to ban the protests were made on Wednesday evening by community members and politicians gathered in Golders Green after the stabbing attack, which left Shloime Rand, 34 and Moshe Shine, 76, hospitalised.
Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, suggested in interviews that ministers should consider a “moratorium” on the protests.
“It pains me to say this,” he began, “but I think we may have reached a point where we need to have a moratorium on the sorts of marches that have been happening.
“It’s clearly impossible at the moment for any of these pro-Palestine marches not to incubate within them some sort of antisemitic or demonising language.”
Hall continued: “Let’s just think about it, you’ve got an attack on Brits that is happening day in, day out. You might have thought that if that was happening, you might put a pause on the sort of language which we don’t know, but it seems to me, and I’ve said this before, paints a target on the backs of Jews when they are so demonised.”
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has also commented on the prospective banning of upcoming marches, saying: “These are conversations I will be having with the police over the coming days. We have already been discussing the particular pressures that are coming. We scan the horizon, what that means for policing and resourcing.”
A Whitehall source reportedly told the Telegraph that the Golders Green attack “brings a conversation about banning back on the table but whether it goes in that direction, there are a lot of conversations to be had before a decision is arrived at".
A pro-Palestine protest has already taken place since the Golders Green stabbing, the JC understands. Advertised after the attack took place, it was scheduled to start in Westminster one hour before a planned demonstration by Campaign Against Antisemitism in response to the attack.
Authorities are understood to have blocked demonstrators from the original route, but fliers seen by the JC suggest that it was relocated to Holland Park.
An upcoming march, part-organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), is still being advertised for tomorrow in Lewisham.
On the event’s website, it reads: “Join us... for a march to put Palestine on the ballot in the local elections,” before going on to accuse Israel of genocide.
And the PSC has also organised a large march for Nakba Day, which commemorates the mass displacement of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli War shortly after Israeli independence in 1948.
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