MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE
January 5th: ‘back to work day’ for a lot of people. Back to ‘normal’.
I woke up this ‘back to normal’ morning (as I do on most mornings) thinking about the four Palestine Action campaigners still on hunger strike: Heba Muraisi – Day 64; Teuta Hoxha – Day 58; Kamran Ahmed – Day 57; and Lewie Chiaramello – Day 43.
All drawing nearer to death every single day.
And yet, even now, no serious coverage in the mainstream media. Nothing on the BBC. There has been no official D Notice imposed by the Government prohibiting coverage of the hunger strikes. Just an unofficial D Notice imposed by the Government, prohibiting coverage to protect the Government from scrutiny of its incontrovertible complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
In a number of interviews, our Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, has claimed that his personal approach to this genocide is rooted in “deep moral values”. In “following my conscience”.
It’s hard to explain to my friends how sick at heart this makes me feel. Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha, Kamran Ahmed and Lewie Chiaramello are all beautiful spirits, doing what their conscience tells them is necessary to respond proportionately to the genocide in Gaza. As is every single one of the Elbit 24.
One can only hope that someone in David Lammy’s team will have shared these words with him from Heba Muraisi’s statement when she started her hunger strike 64 days ago:
“Today, I join my comrades and begin my hunger strike. I want to make it abundantly clear that this is not about dying, because, unlike the enemy, I love life, and my love for life, for people, is the reason why I have already been incarcerated for 349 days.
And now, from behind these steel walls and senses, I will continue the fight and to resist. This is for the mothers who can’t bury their children, for the fathers who had to bury all theirs. For the children who have no family left and are too young to understand why. And for my family – who I don’t even know have made it out of Rafah”.
What’s happening right now is not ‘normal’. It’s off the scale of morally unconscionable abnormality. So how should we all, one way or another, recognise and respond to that abnormality in 2026?
5th January 2026
