Thirty-five Palestine Action supporters will be in court in the coming weeks, adding to the dozens of trials activists faced earlier this year.
This is part of a dramatic scaling up of state repression against Gaza protesters, journalists and direct action groups in a clear attempt to silence dissent.
Their ‘crime’ was to call out weapons manufacturers, like Elbit, Leonardo and Rafael, who are arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Britain’s complicity in it. As Pal Action say, #elbitisguilty.
Indeed the British state’s hand was clearly revealed last year, when a Freedom of Information request yielded a heavily redacted document, showing the Israeli Embassy had asked the attorney general Douglas Wilson to intervene in cases of protests against their arms companies.
Wilson assured them that the Police, Crime and Courts Act directed judges to disregard human rights—of the accused as well as the people they are defending—in cases involving ‘significant’ criminal damage. In short, property comes before lives.
The judiciary were reminded of the widespread support for the activists’ cause when a Bradford jury defied the judge and acquitted four activists, on the grounds of conscience, despite causing £500,000 of damages to arms company Teledyne. It is this link between committed activists and working people that the police are desperate to break.
That’s why arrests and police violence on Gaza demonstrations have steadily increased, for example the 17 protesters arrested and four pinned to the ground on the peaceful 5 October demo in London.
This is a strategy they have also used to isolate and intimidate the climate movement. The draconian sentencing of the Just Stop Oil Five— five years for Roger Hallam, four for the others— places the disruption of traffic on the same page as the attempted murder of asylum seekers during the racist riots. This is real two-tier justice!
But the real aim of these injustices is to criminalise protest and discourage anyone from joining in. That’s why the movement must defend the right to protest by demanding the dropping of all charges, the freeing of all political prisoners and the abolition of all repressive laws.
The fact that this clampdown is also aimed at independent journalism should ring alarm bells for anyone concerned about freedom of speech. In recent months and weeks police have raided the homes of campaigning journalists and authors Sarah Wilkinson, Tony Greenstein and Asa Winstanley, confiscating their electronic devices.
Likewise Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst and Craig Murray were detained at airports under the infamous Terrorism Act, though their only weapons are the pen and the camera. This echoes the murderous campaign by Israel to eliminate overwhelmingly Arab journalists in Gaza and southern Lebanon, claiming they are terrorists. The objective is the same: to stop the truth getting out.
Step up
This is a sign of the times. With austerity mark 2 planned to decimate vital services and public sector jobs and the world cascading into increasing conflict – over 50 wars currently raging – we can expect the British state to clamp down evermore on dissent.
Today it is the Gaza and climate change movements. Tomorrow it could be anti-fascist activists and trade unionists. But to resist this onslaught successfully we need to do three things.
First we keep marching, lobbying and disrupting. Only from now on, we do so with effective and equipped stewarding to defend us from police and far right provocations.
Secondly we direct our efforts to the most effective form of resistance, a workers’ boycott of all handling of weapons destined for Israel and mass political strike action.
Thirdly we unite the struggles over the destruction of our environment, the genocide of the Palestinians and the defence of workers’ living standards and vital services into an offensive against the system that produced this triple crisis, capitalism.
To achieve that we need a revolutionary party, not just to unify the movements, but to direct them towards their common solution, the overthrow of the state that protects British capitalism and the imperialist order.
