“By and large, it’s all been resolved,” said Ben Jamal, the director of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC), of his latest meeting with the Metropolitan police about the pro-Palestine march due to take place on Armistice Day in central London.
A “very long meeting” with officers on Wednesday morning had “focused on ironing out the final details of logistics”. There would be just one final discussion to confirm the precise finishing point of Saturday’s procession from Marble Arch to Nine Elms, close to the US embassy, he said.
“It was a pause in very necessary conversations,” said Jamal of Tuesday, a rather different sort of day when he and representatives of the other five groups organising the protests could not get a meeting with the Met, as the force went into a tailspin over calls for the march to be banned.
The Met police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, had only emerged after dark to say that he could see no grounds for a ban, adding: “The organisers have shown complete willingness to stay away from the Cenotaph and Whitehall and have no intention of disrupting the nation’s remembrance events”. After an emergency meeting between Rowley and Rishi Sunak on Wednesday, the prime minister confirmed that the march will go ahead, despite calls for him to overule the Met.
Jamal, 60, the son of a Palestinian Anglican vicar from west Jerusalem and an English mother who met in Nazareth, has been the director of the PSC for seven years.
In his role as the leading official in Europe’s largest Palestinian rights organisation, he has taken a main role in organising the marches that have brought hundreds of thousands of people on to London’s streets.
A former social worker at a domestic violence charity, he said he joined the PSC in recognition “that this is one of the fundamental issues of our time”.
“The military occupation and the enduring oppression of the Palestinian people, the PSC has recognised for a long time, but a consensus is spreading across civil society, recognising it as a system of apartheid,” he said.
The demand of those marching has been for a ceasefire in the war, which broke out after Hamas’s killing on 7 October of 1,400 people in Israel and seizure of about 240 hostages.
There will be many who disagree with Jamal and the five other groups coordinating on the protests: the Muslim Association of Britain, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Palestinian Forum in Britain, Stop the War and CND.
There have been “unacceptable” things said by some of those attending the protests and indeed written by members of the PSC (four individuals in Manchester have been suspended for describing Hamas gunmen as resistance fighters). But, as Rowley’s comments on Tuesday evening highlighted, Jamal has shepherded his organisation through some choppy waters.
Representatives of the six organisations are meeting almost daily online to plan. It was during one of those meetings two weeks ago that the organisers alighted on the fact that one of their Saturday marches would coincide with Armistice Day. A new route was proposed to the Met to avoid the Cenotaph.
There will no doubt be more troubles along the way. “We will need to call weekly demonstrations,” Jamal said, “at the very least until a ceasefire is called”.
• This article was amended on 9 November 2023. A typographical error meant that, on fourth mention, an earlier version referred to the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign as the “PCS”, rather than “PSC”.
