Police in the United Kingdom have made their first arrests since announcing their intent to crack down on people making public calls to “globalise the Intifada” after Australia’s Bondi Beach attack, speciously linking largely peaceful protests against Israel’s genocidal war with a deadly targeting of a Jewish festival.
London’s Metropolitan Police posted on X late on Wednesday that it had made four arrests at pro-Palestinian protests held outside the Ministry of Justice in Westminster, “all involving the alleged shouting or chanting of slogans involving calls for intifada”.
The arrests were made at a demonstration that had been called in support of eight imprisoned hunger strikers, whose lives are in peril. They were jailed over connections to the Palestine Action group, just hours after the Metropolitan (Met) and Greater Manchester Police (GMT) said they would be “more assertive” in policing pro-Palestine protests to counter alleged anti-Semitism.
UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips backed the Met’s action. “I cannot think of any interpretation other than that [it] is inciting people to violence, which has the terrible consequences,” she was cited as saying by The Times of London.
But Ben Jamal, from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, pointed out in a statement that the Arabic word “intifada” means “shaking off or uprising against injustice”.
In the Palestinian context, the word is understood to mean civil uprising against military occupation and illegal settlement expansion, with key historical instances in 1987-93 and 2000-05, drawing brutal responses from Israel that left thousands of people dead.
Jamal criticised the lack of consultation over the new police stance, saying on X that “forces across the political establishment” were using the “grotesque racist violence on Bondi beach” to delegitimise any protest against “open genocide”.
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