Mick Hartley

When the police want – as recently in the case of the planned UKIP march in the East End – they can ban demonstrations on the grounds of preventing serious disorder. They realised that a ruckus was likely with the local Muslims, and, no doubt wisely, told UKIP it wasn’t going to happen.

Contrast that with protests against Jews in the UK. Yesterday evening, for instance, the United Synagogue in St John’s Wood was holding a series of Israel-related events and the usual pro-Palestinian mob demonstrated loudly outside. The police claimed their hands were tied, and there was “no legal mechanism to ban the protest from taking place”.

Daniel Sugarman at Jewish News:

Instead, they designated a few nearby streets to be off limits – both to the protesters and those who had turned out to counter-protest. And when the ‘anti-Zionist’ protesters flagrantly breached the conditions the police had set out, the response from one officer was to acknowledge that breach, but to say that “we don’t want to antagonise the situation”. In the meantime, synagogue attendees were left to argue with police as to why they should be allowed to enter their own place of worship for services.

There’s one side they don’t want to antagonise – as we’ve seen over the past two years with the endless pro-Palestine marches where the only arrests were of the few counter-demonstrators, like the Iranian man with his “Hamas are terrorists” placard. Or the West Midland police and their banning of the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, which was really about not antagonising the Islamist-left alliance. They don’t want to antagonise that side because they’re capable of violence. They don’t care about antagonising peaceful groups, like Jews, because there isn’t a threat of violence.

British Jews have worked hard to build strong relationships with law enforcement. The vigilantism of the 43’ group and the 62’ group, Jewish ex-servicemen who, seeing the failure of law enforcement to act against antisemites, took the law into their own hands, has rightly long been eschewed. The simplest and easiest way to prevent even a trace of such a thought process from re-emerging is for the police to stop making the overwhelming majority of Jews question why they are receiving different treatment to other minority communities.

Much of the antagonism to Israel, surely, is the shock of seeing Jews defend themselves with violence. It’s not right. They’re meant to be victims.