Met backs down over attempt to delay London Palestine march start time

Anger at manoeuvres to please Israel lobby leads to rethink, but conditions still imposed

The Metropolitan Police has abandoned its attempt to delay, at short notice, the start time of Saturday’s anti-genocide march after widespread outrage at the assault on democracy – particularly as the excuse for the delay was to accommodate a pro-Israel rally organised by Israeli-founded group ‘Stop the Hate UK’.

The Met rescinded its order to move the start time to 2.30pm less than twenty-four hours before the march’s original start time – having imposed the order only days before the event and well after anti-racist activists had arranged coaches and other travel to attend a noon start.⁠
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A statement by the organisers said:

With less than 24 hours to go the police has dropped its attempt to frustrate our national march for Palestine.⁠ Following a week of argument and attempts to bully and intimidate the demonstration organisers, the police have now agreed that protestors will assemble from 12 noon at Regent Street St James as we had previously planned.

However, the amended conditions still ban the the march from starting before 1.30pm, claiming that this is to ‘mitigate concerns from communities, including in relation to a specific event which would have clashed with the intended route of the march’ and that the re-think resulted from a ‘last-minute decision to cancel one of the other pre-planned events’.

The ‘specific events’ of which one was cancelled were a pro-Israel demonstration by an Israeli-founded group called ‘Stop the Hate UK’ (STHUK), which was only arranged and announced this week, and an even later-organised plan to demonstrate at the Israeli embassy, supposedly to commemorate Israelis killed at the Nova music festival on 7 October, even though an ‘immense’ number of these is now freely admitted by Israeli media to have been murdered by their own military.

Itai Galmundy, co-founder of STHUK, is also linked to the pro-Israel ‘Enough is Enough 2024′) group. He spoke to far-right channel GB News, repeating long-debunked propaganda about the October Hamas raid, accusing the peaceful marches of representing ‘mob rule’, claiming he was threatened with death by a pro-Gaza marcher in front of a police officer and admitting that his group’s demo is specifically targeting the pro-Palestine march.

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