Palestine Solidarity Campaign director Ben Jamal charged after London protest

Ben Jamal, director of the UK-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), has been charged with public order offences after a major pro-Palestine rally in London on Saturday that saw 77 people arrested.
The British capital's Metropolitan Police accused demonstrators of breaking through a police cordon in central London's Trafalgar Square on Saturday, which the protest's organisers strongly deny.
The rally drew over 50,000 people, according to estimates by the organisers. Jamal is due to appear in court on 21 February, with PSC being one of the advocacy groups that organised the march.
According to the Met, Jamal, 61, was "charged with public order offences, including inciting people to fail to comply with conditions."
The police force said officers saw a "coordinated effort" to breach conditions that "prevented protesters forming up in the vicinity of a synagogue located a short distance from Portland Place [where the BBC headquarters are].
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"This is despite the PSC agreeing to a static protest and numerous updates from the Met to protestors prior to the march and on the day."
Video footage from the rally at Whitehall shows Jamal calling for a delegation of speakers and organisers to walk to the police line and seek permission from officers to lay flowers commemorating dead children in Gaza outside the BBC headquarters.
He added that if the police blocked the delegation, they would instead lay the flowers at the feet of the police.
Footage appears to show the police line later allowing delegates - including Jamal - to walk through and towards Trafalgar Square.
But after the delegates reached Trafalgar Square, the police stopped them from proceeding further.
There officers arrested Chris Nineham, vice-chair of the Stop the War Coalition, who served as the protest's chief steward. Footage taken by Middle East Eye showed police officers in riot gear surrounding Nineham and bundling him into the back of a police van.
'Unprofessional, unwarranted and unnecessary'
Attiq Malik, who served as a legal observer at the protest, told MEE that Nineham was arrested while discussions with the police were still ongoing.
"There was no necessity to arrest him at that point, in front of everybody," he said. "It was unprofessional, unwarranted and unnecessary."
Stop the War described the incident as an "outrageous assault on the Palestine movement" and an "unacceptable assault on civil liberties". Nineham has since been charged.
Jamal said on Monday after facing charges against him: "It seems clear that the political intention was to create scenes of mass disorder which could be used to justify the Home Secretary intervening to ban all future marches.
"Despite this attempt, there were not scenes of mass disorder. This was due to the extraordinary and determined discipline of those who came to protest, even in the face of such provocation."
On Sunday, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign accused the Met of promoting a "misleading narrative about the events in Whitehall and Trafalgar Square", insisting: "At no stage was there any organised breach of the conditions imposed by the police."
Former Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell likewise pushed back on police claims that protesters had "forced through" a cordon, insisting officers had allowed them to go as far as Trafalgar Square before dispersing.
“I spoke at demo [sic] and was part of a procession of speakers aiming to go to BBC to lay flowers commemorating the death of Palestinian children.
“We did not force our way thru [sic], the police allowed us to go thru and when stopped in Trafalgar Square, we laid our flowers down and dispersed,” McDonnell wrote on X.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn MP, who now sits in parliament as an independent, was also part of the delegation. He said on X that the march was "facilitated by the police".
"We did not force our way through."
Last November, the Met approved the organising coalition's proposed march route from the BBC's headquarters to Whitehall.
But it reversed course after political pressure, with police saying in early January that the route was too close to two synagogues.
Pro-Israel groups, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, MPs and peers had reportedly urged Met Commissioner Mark Rowley to order the protest to be rerouted.
Last week the police took the unusual step of announcing an alternative route for the march, beginning at Russell Square, though the Met later backed down and agreed to a "static protest" at Whitehall.
The day after the rally, on Sunday, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley gave a speech at an event held by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in which he said that "the powers to condition protests are quite limited - we’ve used conditions on the protests more than we ever have done before in terms of times, constraints, routes."
Over 100,000 protesters gathered in Central London for a pro-Palestine march despite stringent restrictions by the Met Police.
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) January 19, 2025
The demonstration took place ahead of a ceasefire set to begin in Gaza on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/hWrOtYPKve
He added that the Met had introduced "sharper and stronger restrictions" on the protest's organisers, and had "taken account of the punitive disruption on communities, particularly on the business communities in central London and on Jewish communities."
Earlier that week nearly a thousand British Jews, including prominent legal and cultural figures and Holocaust survivors, had signed an open letter urging the Met to reverse its ban.
The letter decried "an orchestrated attempt to portray the marches as a threat to those attending synagogues", adding: "As Jews we are shocked at this brazen attempt to interfere with hard-won political freedoms by conjuring up an imaginary threat to Jewish freedom of worship."
Ben Jamal told Middle East Eye last week: "There was no evidence of a single threat to a synagogue emerging from any of our marches... Not one single incident of anyone going to a synagogue, protesting outside a synagogue, threatening a synagogue, stopping people going into a synagogue."
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