Arrested for a placard
Twenty-one months of children dying on my screen, shot at, bombed, burned, maimed, starved, tortured, terrorised – no accident, this is Israeli politicians’ deliberately stated policy. Hospitals, schools, mosques, places of refuge, ambulances, doctors, journalists, aid workers, all targeted. Precision weapons used, near-daily British surveillance flights, collecting information for Israel. Britain and Israel are military allies. Partners in war crimes.
Are British politicians’ ears blocked and their eyes squeezed shut? No, they know which side they are on. Israeli politicians describing Palestinians as animals and expressing their desire to create hell for them, and still British MPs claim it is antisemitic to criticise Israel and is terrorism to take direct action against the companies and British military involved in the slaughter.
On 5 July I was arrested in Parliament Square under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act for holding a placard which allegedly expressed support for a direct-action organisation proscribed as terrorist less than 14 hours before. I was handcuffed and taken into police custody, my DNA and full hand and fingerprints taken, held for 10 hours, then released on bail with conditions:
- not to attend any planned, or unplanned protest, spontaneous or otherwise in support of Palestine Action (this is now a crime for anyone under British law)
- Not to enter City of Westminster Borough… (this includes Marylebone and Paddington Stations and is clearly intended to limit my human right to protest against the government).
I face up to six months in prison and/or a fine plus legal costs if charged with Section 13. Section 12, encouraging others to support a terrorist organisation, carries a prison sentence of up to 14 years.
The British state has made itself clear, it will criminalise people en masse to continue its complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The proscription of Palestine Action, far from silencing people, as it is aimed to do, may have the opposite effect and politicise a far wider section of the population into taking action to force the British state to break all ties to the fascist, racist, terrorist, expansionist state of Israel. After all, if you face prison for holding a placard, the repercussions for causing criminal damage cease to be so daunting.
We will not stop until Palestine is free!
Ida Fury
LONDON
‘Go Vocal’ peddles illusions of democracy
Whilst late-stage capitalism oppresses the working class further and further, people inevitably start to question the ‘democratic’ systems they are governed by. In an attempt to placate the working class, which is growing more disillusioned with parliamentary leaders and their imperialist policies, officials are turning to programmes under the guise of ‘participatory democracy’ in an attempt to hoodwink citizens into believing they have a say in how their countries are run. This initiative is being monopolised by a company called Go Vocal (previously CitizenLab) which is providing the digital platform for ‘participatory democracy programmes’ across the globe.
CitizenLab originated in Belgium in 2016, spreading to the Netherlands and France in 2017/18. The company has been quick to expand, reaching Britain, Denmark and Chile by 2019, and the US by 2020. In 2021/22 it was taken up in Norway, Sweden and Turkey.
The company now has clients across 500 local governments in 20 countries. Recently rebranded as GoVocal, the company’s mission statement is ‘to make democracy more inclusive, participatory and responsive through our community engagement platform.’
GoVocal currently provides the platform for 38 community engagement projects across England, three in Scotland and one in Wales. These are primarily in local government and healthcare. Spanning across 32 councils in Britain, these local government projects range from urban planning and climate policies to mobility and participatory budgeting.
In Newham the engagement platform provided by GoVocal was launched in 2018 and was branded by Newham Council as ‘People Powered Places.’ This participatory budgeting programme allows residents to nominate and choose projects to allocate funding, which comes from levies placed on new developments in the borough. Newham Councillor Charlene McLean has described the scheme as putting ‘Newham on the World map as a leader of participatory democracy’. Which is laughable, considering that less than 3% of Newham residents voted in the last cycle of consultations. In Cuba, the gold-standard for participatory democracy, the majority of the population contributes to any important economic decision making.
As Marxists ‘we must never weary in our proofs and explanations, in order to convince the [working class] that their hopes for a better life under capitalism are the outcome of fraud by others or are due to their own self-deception.’ These ‘participatory democracy’ schemes within local governments in Britain are only a cover for continued cuts to council budgets and our capitalist government that serves the ruling class alone.
Penelope Jacobs
FRFI SUPPORTER EAST LONDON
Response to ‘Good Jews, Bad Jews review’
Dear Comrades,
I am writing in response to the RCG’s review of my article “‘Good Jews’, ‘Bad Jews’ and Imperialist Lies”, which appeared in Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! number 306.
The reviewer attributes to me the view that many European Jews sided with Zionism because of, among other things, ‘the cumulative effect of years of anti-Semitic campaigns across Europe.’ I argued the exact opposite: the more the Jews were oppressed, the more they opposed Zionism. Acutely aware of this connection between the oppression of Jews and Jewish hostility towards Zionism, the imperialists took steps to end state sponsored anti-Semitism in the West.
As the barriers to Jewish advancement came down, a fundamental change occurred in the class composition of the Jewish people. Once largely working-class, Western Jews became overwhelmingly middle-class. This entailed more than just a rise in the living standards of Jewish people. The gap separating the upper stratum of wealthy Jews from the mass of Jewish people narrowed rapidly, to the point where the former, the driving force behind the Zionist project, became integrated into the ruling classes of the West, while many of the latter, now enjoying middle-class privileges, became ardent supporters of Zionism. The ending of the oppression of Jews thus went hand-in-hand with the formation of Israel, and hence also with the widespread abandonment of traditional Jewish internationalism. All this I explained in my article.
The existence of a politically influential and economically powerful group of pro-Zionist Jews in the West (the so-called ‘Jewish-diaspora’) is a major obstacle to pro-Palestinian solidarity work. The Anti-Apartheid movement abroad, for all the difficulties it encountered, never had to contend with the noxious presence of a white South African ‘diaspora’.
While it is correct to draw parallels between the Apartheid and Israeli states, we need to remember that the white supremacists were dependent on indigenous black labour for their survival. The Israeli regime has always aimed at expelling the Palestinians from their homeland. As a safeguard against possible labour shortages, it has created, with the full backing of the West, a capital-intensive economy, one which includes a relatively large and heavily subsidised high-technology sector. Needless to say, the majority of workers employed in this sector are Jewish, staunch supporters of Israel’s pro-state trade-unions, which have always been instrumental in the promotion of Zionism and the super-exploitation of Palestinian and other non-Jewish workers. The dovetailing of the interests of the Israeli Jewish working-class and the Israeli Jewish bourgeoisie has greatly facilitated the growth of what may be termed Zionist pseudo-socialism. The dependence of Apartheid South Africa on a vast supply of cheap black labour ultimately proved to be the regime’s Achilles’ Heel, an outcome which the Zionists have assiduously sought to avoid.
The combined onslaught of the ‘Jewish-diaspora’ and the genocidal Israeli state has made the Palestinian people’s struggles immensely difficult. This is all the more reason why progressive Jews must not only give unconditional support to the Palestinian cause but also denounce the pro-Zionist Jews as traitors to traditional Jewish internationalism.
Comradely,
David Cohen
Reviewer’s response:
My review did suppose that Comrade Cohen held the view that that ‘many European Jews sided with Zionism because of, among other things, ‘the cumulative effect of years of anti-Semitic campaigns across Europe.’ I referred to the cumulative effect of these campaigns (along with the efforts of British and US imperialism), because it seems to me undeniable that the Nazi state’s antisemitism directly stimulated a Jewish migration to Palestine after 1931 and immediately after 1945, further reinforced by post war antisemitic disturbances e.g. in Poland fanned by British imperialism.
Cohen explicitly refers to the division within the Jewish working class over the question of the Israeli state. He correctly states ‘Jewish workers who remained consistently internationalist were implacably opposed to Zionism, while those who sided with imperialism tended to support the Zionist call for the formation of a Jewish “homeland”. This division within the Jewish working class was a source of intense frustration to the British imperialists.’
I took this to allow for my brief reference to the Jews who fled to Palestine after 1931, until shortly after the end of the second world war. In 1918, there were indeed only around 56,000 Jews in Palestine. In 1922 Jews made up 11.1% (88,000) of the 750,000 population, 16.9% by 1931, but by 1939 they were 445,000 out of a total population of 1.5 million, so that Jews constituted 31.2% by 1947. Cohen specifically asks, ‘What happened after World War II?’ in his explanation of the changed support for the Israeli colonial project. As a reader, I assumed – evidently contrary to Cohen’s intention – that the fear driven interwar migration was an unspoken background against which Cohen laid his central argument, viz that the ending of state sponsored antisemitism in the West was designed to remove Jewish working-class hostility towards the state of Israel, and I consider my understanding of this earlier movement not inconsistent with his argument. I concur that before 1939 there was indeed a tremendous resistance to Zionism by working class Jews across Europe, however migration was forced in the face of fascist terror and this ugly fact cannot be denied.
Cohen’s further observations about any parallel made between the South African Apartheid system and Israeli state oppression are a further welcome contribution to this important discussion.
Paul Bullock
LONDON
Solidarity from Italy
Thank you for the new issue of FRFI 306. I am happy your comrades charged for their activity and speeches have received my solidarity through my previous letter.
It seems, every day more, that the ‘free world’, the western world, with its so-called champions and heroes, its ‘good moves’, is showing its real face: a monster in its actions, in its words, and so on. The people, especially the young people today, are the first to say ‘the emperor has no clothes!’ They are the vanguard of a popular feeling that will go on, I am sure, for a long time. Respect for them!
Stefano Scarabello
STRADA STATALE 31,
50/A SAN MICHELE
15122 – ALESSANDRIA
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 307, August/September 2025
