When I was a kid my parents made me and my brother go to shul (synagogue) every Saturday morning, even though they didn’t go themselves. It was only some time after my Barmitzvah that I plucked up the courage to say how boring I found those hours – and to my surprise, they agreed that I didn't have to go.
Now in 2026, suddenly synagogues are not just places for religious observance and community bonding. They have become a card to play in the battle over how much freedom of speech and assembly there will be in this country. Clause 165 of the Crime and Policing Bill , now about to return to the House of Commons for its final stages, gives police the power to prohibit demonstrations in the vicinity of places of worship. In context this clearly means ‘in the vicinity of any synagogue’. And ‘vicinity’ is a usefully elastic word.
A bit over a year ago, representatives from the minister of a Central London synagogue persuaded the police to renege on a route they had previously agreed on for the January 2025 National March for Palestine. Had it not been banned, the march would have passed the BBC , allowing a protest against the corporation’s biased coverage of the Gaza genocide to take place. Yet that synagogue was several hundred yards from both the BBC and the march route. And no threat or risk to synagogues or worshippers has been reported in any of the close to 40 National Marches for Palestine that have taken place in London.
Even without this new proposed power the police have used sections 12 and 14 of the Public Order Act 1986 to restrict the durations, routes and locations of every one of these national marches . Should this ‘vicinity clause’ pass into law, the police will have an additional explicit and broad authority to impose such bans.
The sheer strength, persistence and energy of the protests against Israel’s war on the Palestinians and against the British government’s complicity is without modern precedent. Shamefully, the Government’s response has not been to reconsider its policies but to use the law and the police to hobble the protests.
The most draconian of the bill’s proposals is its ‘cumulative disruption’ clause 165. This requires a senior officer, in deciding whether a protest action should be allowed or prevented, to take account of ‘relevant cumulative disruption’. So, for example, a demonstration at a symbolic location against the Israeli and US assault on Iran could be banned on the grounds that a number of other protests on quite unrelated issues had taken place there.
This provides the police with the power, doubtless sensitive to the Home Secretary's priorities, to be selective about which protests make the cut.
After months of debate in the House of Lords, the bill is now returning to the House of Commons to be debated tomorrow, Tuesday 14 April. Andy McDonald MP has tabled a motion to oppose the ‘cumulative disruption’ clause, which has cross-party support, and MPs are encouraged to add their name to it, to speak in support of it, and to push it to a vote.
The Palestine Coalition have also called a demonstration outside Parliament tomorrow evening to coincide with a potential vote on the proposal. The cumulative disruption clause, like the place of worship vicinity clause, is deeply political. Both stem from the government’s determination to overcome the extraordinary solidarity expressed by so many people of different religions or none and of diverse ethnicities in utter condemnation of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing.
To someone like myself who identifies as Jewish, the claim that this rewriting and diminution of everyone’s rights of free assembly and protest is taking place ‘to protect Jews’ is an added outrage. If our civil liberties are dismantled, Jews will be the losers as much as anyone else.
Consider the Jewish commitment to the National Marches for Palestine, which this legislation hopes to neuter. I have taken part in many of these marches as a member of the Jewish Bloc. There have always been hundreds of us, and sometimes into four figures – a living, walking refutation of the claim that repressing these marches is necessary for the safety of Jews.
The government, and also the police, are responsive only to supposedly ‘official’ Jewish bodies, all of which are heart and soul for Israel, whatever its offences. But none of them (not the Board of Deputies of British Jews, not the Community Security Trust, not the Jewish Leadership Council) has a basis of representation from the three hundred thousand or so Jews who live in the United Kingdom. Jews are as diverse as any other subset of the British population.
Jews, like all UK citizens, have a stake in our civil liberties. And we are not one-dimensional. I am a Jew who participates in the National Marches for Palestine. But I am also a Jew who was first arrested in 1962, in a protest against the US resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. My second arrest ten years later was for blocking in the coach carrying the British Lions team to the airport to play against white-only teams in South Africa. My third arrest last September was at a protest against the proscription of Palestine Action.
I would like to think I am in one of the strands of Jewish tradition, the one that abhors injustice and does what it can to oppose it. As Marek Edelman, the Warsaw ghetto leader, said: “To be a Jew means being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors.”
The proscription of Palestine Action is in line with the further criminalisation of dissent, which this draconian bill represents. Expressions of solidarity with Palestine are the current target. But the powers it contains make our right to mobilise against injustice of any kind conditional on what the government of the day finds convenient to permit. Jonathan Rosenhead is an Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. A member of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Voice for Liberation he is also Vice-Chair of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine. He was the oldest person arrested at the Defend our Juries protest on April 11th against the proscription of Palestine Action. Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@alaraby.co.uk Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.