Action for Palestine Will Not Be Televised

Palestine Action has been proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK, just as the US-Israel, UK, and the West extend their systematic starvation of the Palestinian people. Politicians from across the liberal West wring their hands in public, whilst continuing to supply Israel weapons and offering Israel all the economic and political cover it requires – to help the settler colony exterminate Palestinians and force them into concentration camps.

With the proscription of Palestine Action, the costs of ‘not being silent’ have risen. There are two issues to raise here.

First, this high or additional cost is nothing new. The British State already leverages draconian bail conditions and solitary confinement against actionists via counter-terrorism laws, to intimidate others and repress anti-genocidal sentiment and acts. UK journalists reporting on US-Israeli imperialism have also been arrested under terrorism legislation; protestors in Australia have been subjected to grievous bodily harm by cops, and Palestinians are being murdered daily and methodically, including via Western humanitarianism.

Second and importantly, the focus on this proscription shifts the terrain from materially raising the costs of empire, into a liberal free speech debate.

Palestine Action’s wind-down meeting on Zoom bleakly illustrated the Western left’s commitment to this second front. In the meeting, a leading member thanked PA activists and its support network, as they detailed some of the group’s important victories over Euro-American-Israeli imperialism. But whilst they concluded that direct action should continue, they passed the mic to a representative from Defend Our Juries to establish the next stage of the struggle. The DOJ representative outlined a plan, whereby protestors would sit with “I support Palestine Action” signs until their presumable arrest by British police. This phenomenon has seen hundreds arrested over subsequent weekends. One British leftist journalist even willingly handed himself in to police. Alongside people gathering to march and block an occasional road to blow off steam (as a form of counterinsurgency perhaps), the material output of such moves is a more informed British State surveillance system – in addition to the further demobilization of and silencing around anti-imperialist action.

Revealing terrorism laws for what they are – tools of class and racial domination and suppression – and breaking them by their own logic is not unimportant. But this fight – for British citizens to be able to vocalize “I support Palestine Action!!” – has become the emphasis. At a time when Palestinians are being systematically starved, raped, and murdered, British citizens’ free speech has been centred rather than the UK’s material role in the genocide attacked.

Genocidal countries and companies, from Elbit to Caterpillar, from Barclays to Toll Holdings, will be delighted at this shift. Free speech debates don’t affect the production of missile parts or D9 bulldozers.

At this moment, we should be escalating as far as our capacity allows. This was somehow missed by Palestine Action in its sign-off. PA decided to contest the legal proscription, rather than adapt to the context and connect existing, recent, and allegedly 1000+ new recruits to each other. Nor did it emphasize more covert and diffuse direct action as the necessary present modality (sure, alongside a fight over terrorism legislation). Although de-proscribing PA would lessen sentences if caught and prosecuted ‘successfully’, it would not magically make direct action legal. We should not be predominantly fighting to save structurally racist British (colonial) law from itself, but to end the accelerating genocide.