“Seeing thousands of men, women and children being slaughtered by the Israeli regime shocked people into coming and protesting and making their voice heard,” said 54-year-old attendee Paul Nelson.
He condemned the government proscribing a “peaceful, non-violent campaign” and called damaging property “a valid form of democratic right and free speech.”
Nelson added: “You are fundamentally attacking our democracy.”
Britain’s most senior police officer, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, said he was “shocked and frustrated” at the decision to hold a demo in support of “an organised extremist criminal group.”
“The right to protest is essential and we will always defend it, but actions in support of such a group go beyond what most would see as legitimate protest,” Rowley said in a statement.
But Labour peer and former director of civil liberties organization Liberty Shami Chakrabarti said the government might be going too far and argued most people wouldn’t see the group as a terrorist organization.
“To proscribe Palestine Action on the information that we have all seen … would be a new departure,” Chakrabarti told the BBC Monday.
While arguing people might be prosecuted or imprisoned for specific offenses, the Labour peer said it was “another thing altogether to proscribe a whole group, and that means anybody fairly vaguely associated with it, to ban them [as] terrorists.”