Palestine Action is a test of faith
Protest is a duty not a crime, writes George Pitcher
It comes to a pretty pass when a Labour government deploys legislation to imprison left-wing journalists. But that is precisely what has happened now that the activist group Palestine Action has been proscribed by home secretary Yvette Cooper as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act. As many friends and colleagues have pointed out, we now have to be very careful – were I to write the simple words “I support Palestine Action” I would, strictly under the law, risk up to 14 years in jail.
For all their breast-beating, libertarian howls for free speech, this is less of a threat for Conservative voices, which generally (though not exclusively) support the state of Israel and all that it does. For those who would customarily support Labour against these Conservatives, it’s a real and present danger to their freedom.
The columnist Owen Jones, who has been nothing if not courageous in his support for Palestine, has written that Cooper recently “joined other female Labour MPs in a photoshoot celebrating the suffragettes, who planted bombs, burned down private homes and smashed up art galleries. They then voted to classify a movement which positions itself as opposing violence against people as a terrorist organisation.”
Scriptwriter and novelist Ronan Bennett, himself a victim of repressive terrorist legislation during the Irish Troubles, wastes no time on prime minister Keir Starmer, “who can see red paint sprayed on warplanes and government buildings, but apparently not the blood gushing from tens of thousands of Palestinians.” (Full disclosure: Bennett is a friend and neighbour of my daughter in Spain and by extension, therefore, of mine).
Retired priest arrested
What we all have in common is the observation that last week we could support Palestine Action in principle, but this week we would be committing a criminal offence in doing so. Consequently, an 83-year-old retired priest, Rev’d Sue Parfitt, was arrested for sitting in a garden chair holding a cardboard placard in support of Palestine Action.
(“Lord”) Toby Young’s Free Speech Union remains strangely silent on this, Young himself preferring to pen a piece about how he was unusually sober at the Spectator summer party because he’s on weight-loss drug Mounjaro. Lightweight, certainly.
To be clear, Palestine Action faces criminal-damage charges after spraying red paint over military planes in what they say is a protest against Britain’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We’ll see how those charges pan out.
Proportionate response to spray-painting?
But it’s far from prejudicial to observe that Palestine Action’s demonstration has led to its proscription in law alongside terrorist organisations such as Hamas, ISIS and al-Qeada, with their hideous histories of mass murder. We may wonder whether that is a proportionate response to some spray-painting.
Being a fellow priest in the same Anglican tradition, it’s Ms Parfitt who catches my attention. We used to be good – and welcome – at peaceful and peaceable anti-war demonstrations. I’m thinking of the late Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, on the ban-the-bomb Aldermaston marches in the early Sixties and more recent episcopal opposition to the war in Iraq.
Standing up for peace and opposing repression kind of goes with our territory. Or so it should. It’s right there in the Christian foundational story, which is a peaceful, though radical, insurgency into the political powerhouse of Jerusalem. If you like, the troublesome Jesus movement became a proscribed organisation at that moment, though it would be similarly a stretch to call it terrorist.
Between oppressors and oppressed
As a consequence, we’re obliged to stand (or sit) between oppressors and the oppressed. I firmly believe that’s what Rev’d Parfitt was doing in Parliament Square. It’s to show spiritual solidarity with the weak against the strong. It is emphatically not to show solidarity with Hamas against Israel, far less the Jewish people as some kind of whole, which would undoubtedly be a crime of antisemitism.
We must be extremely careful about being a vehicle for the latter. Or unconsciously to displace it with hideous historical comparisons. But it is legitimate to say that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians of Gaza is Roman in its scale of cruelty and violence. It deploys terror to subjugate a civilian population.
Still, small voice of calm
The still, small Christian voice of calm that has spoken down the centuries must oppose that. So long as it is so doing, it is doing its job. This is not to claim Palestine Action for the Christ. To call the Nazarene a Palestinian would be a piece of sophistry and anachronism attached to geographical coincidence. But it is to say we stand with the displaced and oppressed of that region.
When an itinerant Galilean, bedraggled and chained, stood before local Roman governor Pontius Pilate, he spoke this truth to power. We’ll do well to remember this when our own political panjandrums tell us which subjected peoples we can defend and which we can’t, because we’re suddenly breaking the law.
Pilate, in the form of our legislators today, asks us once again what is truth. We’d better be ready with an answer.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
Hello George
Not very surprisingly, this has been the subject of much discussion within my friendship circle and the aspect that's not always focussed on is captured in this little 'story'
Benjamin was walking along the street from his home to the synagogue for the Saturday morning Shabbat service and wondering what he should say to those gathered there. He was pondering the Parshah portion of scripture and the Haftorah reading from the prophets appointed for the day which spoke about God’s love for Israel and how he should love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and our neighbour as ourselves.
How should he, an Englishman and a British citizen of so many generations since the return from exile in 1656 after 400 years of expulsion since 1290, explain to his Christian friends his understanding of the way in which scripture speaks of Jerusalem and of Israel as the people chosen by God. He thought especially of psalms 103 and 105 and 136 speaking of God’s love for and faithfulness for his people Israel and how that was his understanding of zionism
He wondered how his Christian friends who shared what they called the Old Testament, understood his love for Israel and his community’s commitment to its wellbeing and at present to its survival and not just as the place of safety for Jews down the centuries through the European pogroms, the Holocaust and latterly the commitment by Iran and its proxies to its destruction, but as a people beloved by the God they shared
As he walked on, he noticed the antisemitic graffiti on the wall of a building which reminded him of the way in which his community’s graves had been desecrated only the week before. He wondered about the ways in which his community seemed to be held responsible for the policies of the Israeli government. How could he hold together his identities as a Jew, a zionist and committed by scripture to the wellbeing of Israel. And what did it mean to think of himself as a zionist – as someone who loved the Zion of scripture as well as being the ultimate place of safety for Jews
Why, he wondered, had the western world moved so quickly from encouraging its young people to share with Israeli kibbutizm in their endeavours to build a new world to siding with those who wished to destroy it. He knew a bit about Iran and its nuclear ambitions, its support for Hizbollah, Hamas and so many other organisations committed to the destruction of Israel; he knew of the Iranian provision of Shaheed drones to Russia to kill people in Ukraine and wondered why the West paid so much more attention to Israel’s enemies in their fight for the destruction of Israel than to Ukraine’s survival against Russia and the more than a million deaths that war had caused. He wondered whether what seemed like an excessive interest in Israel somehow reflected the age old Christian history of antijudiasm
He reflected on the deaths of innocent children, women and men in Gaza and how appalling it was that such things should happen in his lifetime. He lamented bitterly the death and destruction and knew that it grieved the heart of Gd. He reflected on the responsibilities of Israel’s government and on those who had ordered the killing of young people and old on 7th October in order to prevent a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East; and how 1000 Israeli soldiers had been killed since then in trying to prevent Hamas, hidden in the midst of innocent Palestinians, from repeating what they had sworn to do.
He remembered Eli Weisel’s experience in Auschwitz after the inmates had condemned God for their suffering and then had turned to pray. He remembered Job and thought, yes, that’s what we must do