THERE may now be a fragile ceasefire in place, but history will not be kind to those who helped facilitate or legitimise Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people – and the UK Government will be of no exception.
While the continued supply of arms to Israel by the UK Government is their most obvious and egregious complicity in the horrors inflicted on those in Palestine, the rot goes so much deeper, and the weaponisation of the conflict to crack down on civil liberties here in the UK should terrify and enrage us all.
The UK Government took an increasingly authoritarian turn under the previous Conservative rule.
Multiple acts of parliament were passed which severely threaten the right to protest – a human right protected by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as well as the UK’s own Human Rights Act.
These new acts provided police with new powers, particularly in England and Wales but with some impact on Scotland. These have been used primarily to clamp down on protesters demanding action on the climate emergency.
These powers have been used to issue extreme sentences for acts of peaceful protest.
They include the four and five-year jail sentences handed down to a number of Just Stop Oil activists last July for merely conspiring to carry out non-violent direct action in protest at the UK Government’s licensing of climate-destroying oil and gas projects.
That’s just six months fewer than the average sentence in England and Wales for sexual offences, and is more than double the average sentence for crimes involving violence against the person.
Whether you agree with Just Stop Oil’s tactics or not, this is clearly an obscene miscarriage of justice, and a substantial threat to the basic right to protest in the UK. If non-violent protest is punished with more than twice the severity of violent crime, what incentive is there to keep protests non-violent?
Nonetheless, the climate movement has continued to uphold principles of non-violence throughout, as has the Palestinian solidarity movement, which has displayed phenomenal levels of peace and integrity in the face of the most extreme violence.
WEEK after week, tens of thousands of people across the UK have consistently showed up to protests, rallies and marches to peacefully demonstrate our solidarity with the Palestinian people and to voice our opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide, and our government’s role in enabling it.
These protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful events, demonstrating the exceptional strength of feeling among the UK populace against our government’s adopted position of seemingly unconditional support for the violent Israeli state.
A Netpol report from May 2024 analysed data from London’s Metropolitan Police force between October 2023 and March 2024. It found 305 people had been arrested at protests and demonstrations during that period. At least 89 were from a single far-right demonstration and at least 136 resulted in the detained individual being released immediately with no further action.
The number arrested and facing any form of further action therefore represents a phenomenally small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of protest attendees during that period, not least when you then consider the context of a notoriously authoritarian police force newly empowered by anti-protest legislation.
The low number of arrests is demonstrative of the peaceful nature of the protests, but this doesn’t mean the protests aren’t still victim to bullish over-policing.
On Saturday, thousands attended a rally in London organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The rally was originally planned to march on the BBC’s headquarters at Broadcasting House but was prevented from doing so by the Met Police.
IT cited Broadcasting House’s proximity to a synagogue – a move condemned by the movement for dangerously and falsely implying that the marches, which consistently contain a large Jewish bloc, are in any way hostile to Jewish people.
The deliberate and dangerous conflation of opposition to the actions of the violent Israeli state with antisemitism has been a consistent tactic of the pro-Israel lobby throughout the past 15 months and beyond, and threatens to delegitimise the very real threat of antisemitism in Britain today.
Here, the conflation has been used by the police to prevent effective protest against the state broadcaster for their role in legitimising Israel’s actions.
Nonetheless, the rally went ahead and a number of attendees were, according to footage and accounts from multiple attendees, permitted to pass by the police lines to lay flowers at Trafalgar Square in memory of the more than 46,700 Palestinians massacred in the past 15 months.
The Met Police later kettled a group of these attendees and made a number of arrests, and claimed on social media that the group had “forced its way through the police line” – a claim swiftly and widely refuted by countless of those in attendance.
They included MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and Green Party of England and Wales deputy leader Zack Polanski. It was later reported on Sunday that both Corbyn and McDonnell would be interviewed under caution following the event.
For any member of the public, not least those elected to represent us including as a former leader of the opposition, to be investigated, intimidated or otherwise threatened by the police for attending a peaceful protest is nothing short of a direct attack on democratic freedoms.
The Palestinian solidarity movement can be deeply proud of its steadfastness in the face of horrendous smears from politicians and the mainstream media.
Nonetheless, the severe police response to peaceful protesting against extreme violence represents a terrifying confirmation that there is no extreme the British state won’t stoop to defend Zionism and imperialism – no matter the cost in human lives or civil liberties. The fragility of the current ceasefire cannot be overstated. Much of Gaza has been reduced to rubble, and Palestine remains under occupation.
Meanwhile, with Donald Trump waking up in the White House this morning for the first time in four years, and the far-right increasing their grip on countries around the world, including the UK, the cowardice of Keir Starmer and his government couldn’t be more dangerous.
