Mick Hartley

Former Metropolitan Police officer Gill Evans at the JC, on how the Met failed the Jewish community. As long as there was no overt violence in the Free Palestine marches, the Met could pat themselves on the back and consider they’d done a good job. But the demonstrators saw this as a free pass to chant their antisemitic bile – and it got worse.

In October 2023, the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, attempted to set clear expectations for policing the pro-Palestinian demonstrations. In an open letter to police chiefs, she urged a proactive approach. Chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” she argued, should be understood as expressing a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world and “may amount to a racially aggravated section 5 public order offence”. Glorification of terrorism and harassment of communities, she insisted, should be confronted head on.

Her stance was politically inconvenient. It also cost her the job.

The failure to follow that advice has allowed the Overton window to shift, drip by drip, towards the normalisation of Jew-hatred. Eventually, the drips have become something far darker: the mark of Jewish blood.

Words lead to deeds. The normalisation of Jew-hatred leads inevitably to violence.

Meanwhile, the unthinkable became routine. Calls for people to die were chanted on British streets. Police stood by as speakers demanded the removal of the “cancerous Zionist entity” or crowds screamed “death to the IDF”. When Jewish protesters held a sign stating the obvious, that “Globalise the Intifada” is a call to murder Jews, police planned their arrest even as they were physically attacked.

British Jews have lived under constant pressure since. A continuous noise, always present. The Met’s recent declaration that “globalise the intifada” has crossed a threshold for enforcement is not a gift to the Jewish community. At best, it may slightly ease the burden created by months of normalised calls for the deaths of our families and friends. But let us be clear: this is not a sudden show of courage, Commissioner Mark Rowley has not suddenly grown a spine.

As the war in Gaza has ended and the demonstrations continue to disrupt London day after day, while Jewish bodies lie in the streets of Manchester and Bondi, the lesson has finally become unavoidable and Sir Mark Rowley has realised what Jews knew from the start. You cannot appease a hateful mob. Police leaders may believe their familiar objectives were met. In reality, they failed British Jews, even if they could not see it at the time.

Now, as that failure becomes impossible to deny, enforcement begins, not as justice, but as damage control.