I’m proud to say I was one of the 522 citizens arrested and charged under s.13 of the Terrorism Act on Saturday 9th August.
I was there to support Defend our Juries in its demand that the proscription of the non-violent protest group Palestine Action should be lifted. Our alleged crime is that we were directly supporting Palestine Action by holding up a sign in Parliament Square calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the reversal of Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s absurd (and almost certainly illegal) decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation.
Like everyone else arrested on Saturday, I’d come to the conclusion that I had no choice but to hold up that sign. The heart-wrenching pain of watching Israel’s defence forces inflicting collective punishment on the people of Gaza had become literally unbearable. Over the last year, I’ve been to a couple of Palestine Solidarity marches. I’ve blogged and spoken out. I’ve held signs outside the Old Bailey in support of the Filton 18 (now 25) – held on remand in prison since August 2024 for their non-violent protests against the most notorious of many defence establishments working with Israel here in the UK – all the time assuming that Western Governments would intervene to bring an end to that indescribable suffering. To bring an end to Netanyahu’s genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and (increasingly) on the West Bank.
In fact, exactly the opposite has happened. Instead of pursuing the perpetrators of these outrages against international law, the Labour Government has chosen to clamp down on those protesting against the outrages through peaceful direct action. The Home Secretary’s principal purpose in seeking to proscribe Palestine Action is to silence protest. She knows (through what’s left of her once progressive, libertarian ideals) that there is no way Palestine Action can be compared with Islamic State or Boko Haram under the Terrorism Act.
And that will surely be confirmed through the ongoing appeal by Palestine Action against its proscription in the High Court.
So, I profoundly hope, in due course, that the charges against myself and all those already charged for similar offences, as well as those who choose to follow the same course of action between now and the eventual lifting of the ban on Palestine Action, will be deemed unlawful.
My final comment: I got to this point almost entirely through working with 26 of Just Stop Oil’s wonderful young climate campaigners over the last 18 months. Their overwhelming feeling is that the genocide in Gaza today has to be campaigned against (as part of their ongoing campaign against the Government’s continuing support of fossil fuels) because it shows more clearly than anything else what the genocidal impacts of climate breakdown will be in the second half of this century.
And it disturbs them (and me) that so many mainstream environmentalists entirely fail to see that connection.
All of which is covered in some detail in ‘Love, Anger & Betrayal’, which you can purchase here. All proceeds go to support the work of radical climate campaigning.
