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 U.S. 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.