There are currently 32 prisoners in England held for direct action related to Palestine. A further activist, who had been on remand for a year is currently free, having been released on temporary bail and refused to return to ‘be held as an Israeli prisoner of war in a British prison’. FRFI spoke to SEAN ‘SHIBBY’ MIDDLEBOROUGH.
You have broken free from the prison system. It’s a time-honoured tradition for prisoners of war that the first duty is to frustrate the enemy in this way.
Yeah, I think I definitely frustrated the enemy and do every time I give an interview. However, before I got remanded as one of the Filton 24, I hadn’t done a lot of study on political prisoners. I just didn’t want to go back to prison and knew I could do better things with my life than sit in B-Wing for years.
We should have political prisoners at the forefront of our minds because they are often the best of us – the tip of the spear — those that have resisted when the rest of us have just imagined it!
What’s more, the essential networks that come from supporting prisoners are critical infrastructure for a tight revolutionary battleground. Support for our prisoners and for those who escape capture is a blow to the state, not just because they don’t like to see escaped political prisoners celebrated, but also because those celebrations can educate the non-political public as to the oppressive, violent nature of the state against good, genuinely progressive forces outside of electoral politics.
You have always described yourself as a communist. How does this inform the process that has brought you to where you are now?
It’s a long time indeed since I first found an RCG stall in my city and was given a book on Che and Fidel. It was better than any movie or book I’d ever seen. It was real history. It was also a future I thought we all deserved and knew we could struggle for and win. That was my first introduction to socialism. From a very poor background, I was from that point on, a socialist.
Over time I studied similar revolutionaries and what they all had in common was a comprehensive understanding of the immortal science, historical materialism.
So, as a revolutionary communist, of course I would be willing to risk arrest and encourage others to seize and destroy the means of production, because the theory and practice worked.
Our struggle permanently shut down Israeli arms factories, forcing Britain to end contracts with Elbit Systems over security concerns. It isolated Elbit as partner firms cut ties to save themselves being targets of sabotage. It caused hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage to the imperialist war manufacturers and caused legitimate supply problems to the IDF.
We see a lot of discussion about ‘peaceful direct action’ etc, but you characterise this more in terms of guerilla warfare.
Palestine Action emerged out of a group of individuals who could not simply continue with futile demonstrations and petitions; they sought to end British complicity of Zionism by directly targeting the source — the Israeli arms industry.
Direct Action is a legitimate form of protest in Britain — from the suffragettes to the anti-fracking campaigners in England. Generally speaking, direct action has never been an anti-imperialist practice. After all, the suffragettes wanted to vote in a capitalist, imperialist empire rather than overthrow that empire, Just Stop Oil just wanted capitalism with less oil. But when you apply direct action towards the arms industry of Britain’s colonial puppet, the ethno-state of Israel to prevent and to end British complicity with an inter-generational genocide of Palestinians, you are not just asking for liberal reform. By truly standing for a Free Palestine, you must be anti-imperialist.
Liberals do take action, but that doesn’t mean the movement itself is liberal, it just means that when you frame anti-imperialism well enough and can provide real, material results for actionists’ efforts through effective strategy and practice, people will stand up out of a moral imperative. Palestine has been the front-line for our own country’s imperialist expansion objectives over the Middle East for too long. If you’re an internationalist, a communist, how can you not take effective action?
You are now using your relative ‘freedom’ to amplify the voices of the prisoners.
While I was in prison, I started a podcast so that others had a sense as to the material, social and political conditions of the Filton 24. This podcast was eventually banned and that frustrated me beyond belief!
Prison censorship was pretty extreme — I had friends and comrades banned from phone calls; emails and letters were never sent or received, including a Father’s Day card from my son.
I think people should realise that every time you have heard from a hunger striker, either by written word or spoken down a phone, they are at risk of being banned from writing/speaking to that person or having their phone blocked, so it’s really an uncomfortable risk being taken each time to get their thoughts to you.
That’s why when I got out, I wanted to talk to different journalists and platforms and provide information that counters the narrative of the ruling classes. One reason we were kept on remand is because the state feared the enormous support we’d get if we were on the outside, speaking about the Filton case.
I’m not in that position anymore, so I am using this to speak up for my co-defendants and comrades who stand for a Free Palestine.
