It’s been more than eight months since I first sat in Parliament Square holding up that sign:
“I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
I did not anticipate then that I would be doing it again today, expecting my 4th arrest in support of the Defend Our Juries ‘Lift the Ban’ campaign.
And I certainly did not anticipate that I would be doing it again after three senior Judges sitting in the High Court in February found that the Government’s ban on Palestine Action had been unlawful. But the Government appealed (of course it did), meaning that its unlawful decision is “still the law”– according to the now terminally muddled Met Police. Meaning that all of us holding up signs will still be arrested today.
I hesitate to speak on behalf of all those wonderful people I will be sitting with today. But I think most would agree with me when I say this: although the law really matters, and we recognise we are bound by that law even in setting out systematically to break it, in good conscience, there is a higher set of moral principles at work here.
The ruinous mayhem unleashed upon the world by the USA and Israel (ever since Israel — seizing on Hamas’s utterly abhorrent attack on its people on October 7th, 2023 — commenced its genocidal assault on the people of Gaza) has pitched the entire world into a lawless, dystopian realm of evil that demands a moral response from all of us. Whatever the law – in all its grindingly laborious process – may eventually determine.
When I’m sitting there today, my thoughts will be primarily with the people of Gaza and the West Bank, with Palestine Action’s astonishingly courageous campaigners here in the UK, and, now, with the people of Lebanon and Iran.
They will also be with my father. Back in April 1945, as a senior officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps, he visited the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Northern Germany after it had been liberated by the British Army. They’d found 60,000 inmates (suffering dreadfully from typhus, typhoid, TB, dysentery and malnutrition), and 13,000 corpses. Of those survivors, a further 14,000 died over the next few months, beyond the reach of any medical care.
He wrote in his diary: “I would like to erase that memory completely, but I’m afraid it has remained permanently imprinted on my mind. It was surely the worst example of man’s inhumanity to man”.
Like so many of that generation, he never talked much about this. As someone who’d experienced a great deal throughout the war (including D-Day), he’d seen more than his fair share of the dead and wounded. But Bergen-Belsen was different. Beyond any frame of reference for him or his colleagues. Way, way beyond the inevitable horrors and cruelties of war.
So, what’s the connection? In Trafalgar Square today, there will be many children of survivors of that Holocaust. Their pain still runs deeper than most of us will ever understand.
But that pain has been accentuated to an almost unfathomable extent by having to deal with this shocking reality: the fact that the worst genocide perpetrated by one State on the people of another, since the Holocaust, will now, forever, be laid at the door of Israel — in its continuing endeavour to exterminate the people of Palestine.
“Never Again” was the simple but supremely powerful call that brought almost all nations together after the Second World War in their collective determination to ‘outlaw’ any attempt by any nation, anywhere, to emulate Nazi Germany ever again. As captured in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Before he became a politician, Keir Starmer was a human rights lawyer. He knows all this, from a legal perspective, better than the vast majority of us in Trafalgar Square would claim. As does Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, Richard Hermer (Attorney General), and other members of the cabinet.
Within a few months of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, it became clear that this was not just another ‘mowing the lawn’ (Israel’s term for collectively punishing the citizens of Gaza for having been so ill-advised to elect Hamas politicians in the election back in 2006). As it went on, month after month, they knew that this was a genocide in the making — and indeed International Court of Justice told them so in February 2024.
An extraordinary and utterly devastating thing for people of my generation to be witnessing, in real time, on their phones.
But nothing like as devastating as watching the inheritors of that “Never Again” rallying cry stand back, and let it all happen, all over again, at the hands of the utterly ruthless Zionist State of Israel.
The most fearful consequence of world leaders turning a blind eye to that genocide in Gaza was revealed on Tuesday when President Trump used the threat of genocide as a negotiating tactic in the war with Iran: “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.
Civilizational erasure: genocide written as large as it can get.
Every single one of us in Trafalgar Square today sincerely hopes that the High Court’s decision, (that the Government’s prescription of Palestine Action in July 2025 was indeed unlawful), will be upheld by the Appeal Court at the end of the month. But we all know that we’ve got a much bigger fight on our hands, that goes right to the heart of what it is to bear witness to our basic humanity in a world that has been so brutally torn asunder.
