British pro-Israel organization Stop the Hate announced it will not be attending the upcoming Palestine Solidarity Campaign march on 29 November due to mass restrictions on and arrests of Jewish activists.
This will mark the first time it has not been present at a PSC march since its founding.
In a statement on Wednesday evening, Stop the Hate accused the Metropolitan Police of weaponizing its presence to restrict the rights of Jewish Londoners.
"In recent months, Jewish counter-protesters have been forced into an isolated, barricaded zone, the so-called 'Jewpen' surrounded by an ever-expanding sterile area," the organization said, adding that this violates Article 11 of the rights to freedom of assembly.
Stop The Hate claimed the Met is using its presence as a pretext to arrest unaffiliated Jewish activists, and thus suppress all Jewish opposition.
Met police slammed for leniency on anti-Israel protesters
"This is part of a wider pattern of two-tier policing. The metropolitan police have banned elements of a farmers' demonstration and prohibited a UKIP march entirely, yet refused to enforce conditions on anti-Israel protesters outside a synagogue in St John's Wood. Meanwhile, PSC marches, despite consistent hate speech and disorder, receive extraordinary leniency."
"Jewish Londoners must be allowed to stand against antisemitism without being kettled, sidelined or silenced," it added.
Discussions around the policing of pro-Palestine protests came to a head earlier this week when anti-Israel activists held a demonstration outside a London synagogue on Sunday night to protest a World Zionist Organization Aliyah Day, asserting that the event was facilitating the genocide of Palestinians and colonization of their land.
“We don’t want no two states, Palestine ‘48,” masked activists chanted as seen in videos posted on social media by Labour Against Antisemitism director Alex Hearn. “From the river to the sea, Zionism is f**king treif (unkosher).”
A counter-protest was organized by Stop The Hate.
“There is no legal mechanism to ban the protest from taking place; however, we have used Public Order Act conditions to prevent disorder and disruption,” the Met announced on Sunday.
The United Synagogue said that the event concluded safely, but synagogue president Saul Taylor said in a statement that “It cannot be that in modern Britain it is seen as acceptable to protest outside a place of worship and beam hateful messages where Jews come together to pray and to attend community events.”
Michael Starr contributed to this report.