APPROXIMATELY 77 arrests were made by the police in a concerted attack by the British state and the Labour government on the 100,000-strong rally in Whitehall in central London last Saturday in support of Palestine and against Israeli genocide.
These 77 protesters were arrested on suspicion of breaching the stringent and repressive conditions imposed by the police.
Nine have been charged under the Public Order Act with breaching these protest conditions and 48 remained in custody for 24 hours, while the Director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign has been charged over offences including inciting people to fail to comply with conditions imposed by the police.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell were interviewed ‘under caution’ by the Metropolitan police on Sunday afternoon, with accusations that they had led a group of demonstrators to ‘break through’ the police lines blocking protesters from entering Trafalgar Square.
Both Corbyn and McDonnell issued statements refuting the police version of events, insisting that police had ‘facilitated’ a group of protesters to move into Trafalgar Square to lay wreaths in memory of the thousands of Palestinian children murdered by the genocidal Israeli regime.
Corbyn wrote: ‘I was part of a delegation of speakers, who wished to peacefully carry and lay flowers in memory of children in Gaza who had been killed.’ He added: ‘This was facilitated by the police. We did not force our way through.’
McDonnell supported this, writing on social media: ‘We did not force our way through, the police allowed us to go through & when we stopped in Trafalgar Square we laid our flowers down and dispersed.’
Yesterday, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which along with five other pro-Palestinian groups called the demonstration, released a video supporting the accounts by Corbyn and other witnesses. This video shows marchers being directed by the police to filter down to a narrow column and then waved through by officers.
The PSC said they were ‘confronted with extremely heavy-handed and aggressive policing’ and that with less than 24 hours’ notice, police imposed ‘complex restrictions’ that resulted in people being ‘arrested without warning, on flimsy pretexts including simply for inadvertently standing in this central area at the wrong time.’
What is clear is that the police, backed by the Labour government, are determined to crack down and criminalise even peaceful protest in support of Palestine.
More people were arrested on Saturday than at all the previous pro-Palestinian marches, all of which have proceeded peacefully. Significantly, this crackdown took place on the very eve of the ceasefire agreement and prisoner exchange agreed between Israel and Palestinian groups on Sunday.
This agreement represents a massive victory for Hamas and the Palestinian people who have inflicted a huge defeat on the Israeli occupation force despite all the support lavished on the Zionist regime by the US and its UK ally.
Clearly, mass demonstrations in support of Palestine were permissible for the British state when they were confident of Israel destroying Palestinian resistance, but now that Israel is undeniably losing the war the police have been mobilised to criminalise and smash all support for Palestine.
No longer able to dismiss the Palestinians as a ‘lost cause’ and to claim that mass support for their struggle will decline and disappear over time, the Labour government is now scared that workers and youth will be emboldened by the defeat inflicted on Israel to go forward and organise to bring down the Labour government of Keir Starmer and end all complicity in Zionist genocide.
They are right to be scared, as the great mass of workers and young people will demand not just that all charges arising out of Saturday’s deliberate police attack on peaceful demonstrators be dropped, but that all those complicit in Israeli genocide be brought account as war criminals.
The working class and youth must immediately take action to force the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Labour government and go forward to a workers’ government that will immediately recognise the independent state of Palestine and give it all the material support required for the victory of the Palestinian revolution.
Only the WRP and Young Socialists fight for this revolutionary programme – join today.