PART 2
On Saturday, it would appear that there will be more than 1,000 people in Parliament Square, supporting the campaign by Defend Our Juries to get the Government’s ban on Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation lifted. Holding up a simple sign to that effect. Risking arrest under s13 of the Terrorism Act 2000, as I did back in August.
For the most part, people have been sympathetic/supportive in terms of my own arrest on August 9th. Weirdly, however, some have questioned why I chose to follow such a course of action ‘as an environmentalist!’.
This may not be the place to unpack that one in any detail, but for the avoidance of doubt, as a regular human being, as well as an environmentalist, shattered by the pain of watching a genocide unfold day by day in front of my eyes, there’s a basic logic to this which I touched on yesterday, with four simple propositions:
1. According to the 1948 Genocide Convention, nation states have a binding duty to prevent and punish genocide as laid out under Article II. This duty “includes taking measures to prevent genocide, even outside their own borders, and punishing perpetrators, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”.
There is no fudging this one.
2. The Israeli government, knowingly and strategically, is inflicting genocide on the Palestinian people in Gaza, as defined under the Geneva Convention.
More and more of us have come to understand the extent of the long-planned and ruthlessly executed genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people at the hands of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ultra-Zionist supporters — with the full support of the USA, and the total complicity of our government. The definition of genocide under Article II includes “the deliberate deprivation of resources indispensable for survival, such as food or medical services or systematic expulsion from homes, …… deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction”.
It is highly significant that in a vote taken of all its members by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, 86% of them agreed that what is happening in Gaza now meets the legal definition of genocide.
If you want to see one particularly devastating example of what this means in practice, please have a look at this powerful little film put together by Bystanders No More, “This is how you engineer a famine”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtwLFSdTleI
3. The UK Government is knowingly complicit in that genocide by continuing to provide arms to Israel, by failing to exercise its binding obligations under the Genocide Convention, and by failing to punish those responsible.
In an unguarded moment, in one of her many increasingly desperate attacks on Palestine Action, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, acknowledged that there is now no doubt that “crimes against humanity” are being perpetrated against the people of Palestine. Both she and our Foreign Secretary have endlessly expressed their “repugnance” at what the Israeli Defence Forces are doing in Gaza, but always without actually using the word “genocide”.
Over the course of the next few years, as the International Court of Justice finally comes to the now inevitable conclusion that Israel has indeed inflicted genocide on Palestinians in Gaza, these craven, despicable politicians will take refuge in the fact that what we all see for ourselves, day by unbearable day, had not then been formally legally, defined as a genocide.
I think more and more people are beginning to understand that this is what persuaded the Home Secretary to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Hoping to silence them. Hoping to put an end to their campaigns against Elbit and other arms companies directly supporting the genocide in Gaza through the weapons they sell. As still licensed by the UK government.
4. Finally, we all have an absolute moral obligation to hold our government to account and to act in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
And I hope that everybody will decide for themselves exactly what the best way of doing that might be, which I’ll be saying a bit more about tomorrow.
Jonathon Porritt
4 September 2025
