Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal charged after London protests

Ben Jamal, director of the UK office Palestine The Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has been charged with disorderly conduct following a large pro-Palestinian rally in London on Saturday in which 77 people were arrested.

The British capital’s Metropolitan Police have accused demonstrators of breaking through a police cordon in Trafalgar Square in central London on Saturday, a charge protest organizers have vehemently denied.

According to the organizers, the rally gathered more than 50,000 people. Jamal is due to appearance in court on February 21, with the PSC being one of the human rights groups that organized the march.

According to Met, Jamal, 61, was “charged with disorderly conduct, including inciting people to breach conditions”.

The police said that officers saw a “coordinated effort” to disrupt the conditions, which “prevented the protesters from gathering outside the synagogue, located close to Portland Place (where the BBC headquarters is located).

“This is despite the PSC agreeing to a static protest and multiple updates from the Met to protesters in the lead up to the march and on the day.”

Video frames At the Whitehall rally, Jamal is seen urging a delegation of speakers and organizers to walk through a police line and get permission from officers to lay flowers in memory of the children who died in Gaza outside the BBC headquarters.

He added that if the police block the delegation, they will lay flowers at the feet of law enforcement officers.

Filmed material appears to show a police line later allowed delegates, including Jamal, to pass through and into Trafalgar Square.

But after the delegates reached Trafalgar Square, the police stopped them from continuing.

The officers detained him there Chris Ninehamthe vice-chairman of the Stop the War coalition, who was the chief curator of the protest. Footage taken by Middle East Eye shows officers in uniform surrounding Nineham and placing him in the back of a police van.

“Unprofessional, unreasonable and unnecessary”

Attik Malik, who was a legal observer at the protest, told MEE that Nineham had been arrested while negotiations with the police continued.

“There was no need to arrest him in front of everyone,” he said. “It was unprofessional, unwarranted and unnecessary.”

Stop the War described the incident as an “outrageous attack on the Palestinian movement” and an “unacceptable attack on civil liberties”. Nineham was subsequently charged.

Jamal said on Monday after he was charged: “It seems clear that the political intention was to create scenes of mass unrest which could be used to justify the intervention of the Home Secretary to ban all future marches.

“Despite this attempt, there were no scenes of mass disorder. This happened thanks to the extraordinary and determined discipline of those who came to protest, even despite such a provocation.”

on sunday A campaign of solidarity with Palestine accused the Met of spreading “misleading information about events in Whitehall and Trafalgar Square”, insisting: “At no stage was there any organized breach of the conditions imposed by the police”.

Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell also rejected police claims that protesters had “breached” the border, insisting that police had allowed them to go as far as Trafalgar Square before dispersing.

“I spoke at a demonstration (sic) and was part of a column of speakers who aimed to go to the BBC to lay flowers in memory of the deaths of Palestinian children.

“We didn’t push through (sic), the police let us through and when we were stopped in Trafalgar Square we laid flowers and left,” McDonnell wrote on X.

Former Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn The delegation also included a deputy who currently sits in parliament as an independent. On X’s broadcast, he said that the march was “facilitated by the police.”

“We didn’t break through.”

In November last year, the Met approved the organizing coalition’s proposed march route from BBC headquarters to Whitehall.

But this reverse course following political pressure when police said in early January that the route was too close to two synagogues.

about-Israel groups, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvisdeputies and colleagues had reported called on Meteorologist Mark Rowley to order a rerouting of the protest.

Last week, police took the unusual step of announcing an alternative route for the march, starting in Russell Square, although the Met later backed out and agreed to a “static protest” in Whitehall.

The next day after the rally, on Sunday, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police named after Mark Rowley gave a speech at an event held by the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, in which he said that “the power to condition protests is quite limited – we have used conditions for protests more than ever before, in terms of time, restrictions, routes.”

More than 100,000 protesters gathered in central London for a pro-Palestinian march despite heavy weather police restrictions.

The demonstration took place on the eve of a cease-fire that is due to begin in Gaza on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/hWrOtYPKve

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) January 19, 2025

He added that the Met had introduced “tougher and stricter restrictions” on protest organizers and had also “considered penalties for threats to communities, particularly the business communities in central London and Jewish communities”.

Earlier that week, almost a thousand British Jews, including prominent legal and cultural figures as well as Holocaust survivors, signed an open letter calling on the Metropolis to lift the ban.

The letter condemned the “orchestrated attempt to portray the marches as a threat to synagogue-goers,” adding: “As Jews, we are shocked by this brazen attempt to interfere with hard-won political freedoms by posing a perceived threat to Jewish religious freedom. “

Ben Jamal told Middle East Eye last week: “There has been no threat to the synagogue that has come as a result of any of our marches… There has been no instance of anyone coming to the synagogue, protesting outside the synagogue, threatening the synagogue, preventing people from entering synagogue”.