London police chief criticised for claiming pro-Palestine marches deliberately routed past a synagogue

A coalition of advocacy groups has demanded that Mark Rowley, the head of the Metropolitan Police (Met Police), retract his claim that the organisers of pro-Palestine marches in London have repeatedly intended to route protests past a synagogue.

The groups include the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Friends of Al-Aqsa, the Stop the War Coalition, and the Britain Palestine Forum. They reacted to recent comments by Rowley in The Times.

In the interview, Rowley said: “Their initial proposal of the route, their march, involved going past a synagogue. Every time we prevented that, we set conditions. That it was in the minds of the organisers, I think it sends a message … that feels antisemitic. It may be a fair or unfair inference, but it’s the message it sends.”

The advocacy groups argued that Rowley’s statement was “incomprehensible and defamatory.” They called on him to “swiftly and publicly retract” his remarks and his “false accusation of antisemitism.”

The coalition said that for the upcoming Nakba Day protest (16 May), they wrote to authorities last December with a proposed route from the Embankment to Whitehall, which passes no synagogue. They noted that they had used this route twice before.

They stated: “After three months of silence, we were finally informed by your officers that that route was rejected on the grounds that a far-right Tommy Robinson protest – a real hate march – would, bafflingly, be given the whole of political central London, and we would have to march elsewhere.”

A second proposal was to march from the Israeli Embassy in west London to Trafalgar Square, also with no synagogue along the way. This too was rejected, and a shorter route was “arbitrarily imposed.”

“The fact is that we have never requested to ‘go past’ a synagogue on any of our marches. We have no interest in doing so. Police recordings of our meetings with you will confirm this,” the coalition said.

A Met Police spokesperson said Rowley’s comments were not specific only to the upcoming May protests. The spokesperson said the commissioner “was reflecting on the wider period of protest since October 2023,” during which approximately 30 major marches were organised by these groups.

The spokesperson said half of those involved starting or finishing near, or passing by, a synagogue. They added that in 20 cases, routes were altered “to protect Jewish communities and sensitive premises from disruption and/or intimidation.”

A Met Police spokesperson stated that the persistent focus near synagogues, in Rowley’s view, could “send a message to the Jewish community that feels antisemitic.”

The pro-Palestine groups called Rowley’s comments “utterly unacceptable from a senior official” and said that “his false claims and accusations … can only heighten tensions in the current situation.”

Last week, the groups also criticised efforts by politicians and media to smear the protests, as well as proposals to ban them. A 45-year-old Somali-born British citizen was arrested on Wednesday afternoon after stabbing two Jewish men, aged 34 and 76, in Golders Green, a northwest London neighbourhood with a large Jewish population, and an earlier stabbing of a Muslim man in south London.

Politicians, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have used the Golders Green attacks to condemn pro-Palestine marches and call for restrictions. In an interview with the BBC’s Today programme on Saturday, Starmer said the language used on the marches needed to be controlled and suggested there could be grounds to ban marches outright.