For 10 months, the ruling class has scrambled to contain the political crisis that has arisen from its unwavering support for Israel’s war of extermination against Gaza. Across Britain protests have been sustained throughout the genocide, taking a variety of forms. The bourgeois media has smeared Palestinian solidarity as anti-Semitic and demonised the Muslim community as ‘sectarian’ and ‘undemocratic’. Politicians (both Tory and Labour) have complained of ‘intimidating’ protests, while the police have vowed to stamp out ‘criminality’. The bureaucratic and opportunistic leadership of Palestinian solidarity in Britain, represented by groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and the Stop the War Coalition (StWC), has policed the movement from within, collaborating with the state and enforcing middle class respectability politics.
Britain is the oldest imperialist power in the world; its wealth comes from its shameless plunder and exploitation of oppressed nations. As a result, the British state has a long history of putting down any challenge to its imperialist rule. With the economic restructuring of capitalism in the early 1980s, these colonial methods of containing opposition were brought to the streets of Britain following the uprisings of 1980 and 1981 in numerous cities that were led by black youth.
Subversion and collaboration – policing the movement from within
In FRFI, we have written on how the British state uses both repression and subversion to contain opposition. Such methods are detailed in colonial enforcer Frank Kitson’s 1971 book, Low Intensity Operations – Subversion, Insurgency and Peace-keeping. In it, he details how ‘psychological operations’ are used to isolate ‘subversives’ from the people while building links with and strengthening support for the moderates who do not oppose the state but disagree on certain policies.
Today, moderates are represented mainly by the PSC and StWC. Marches organised by the PSC, often attracting hundreds of thousands of protesters, are negotiated with the police, with strict conditions imposed on the protests. Anyone who deviates from the permitted march route is threatened with arrest. When the current protests first started in October 2023, protesters would frequently remain in London long after the official march had finished and continue rallying; now, if they do not leave immediately after an agreed end time they can be forcefully dispersed or arrested. Such negotiations allow the police to ensure any disruption caused by any protesting is minimal, making protests far less effective and easy to ignore. On 12 December 2023, policing representatives told a Home Affairs Committee on the policing of protests that their relationship with the PSC is ‘good’ and that stewards managing crowds is ‘helpful’. Matt Twist, Temporary Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has said that he would like to see more collaboration between organisers, stewards and the police, and that stewards and organisers should report ‘concerns’ to officers.
The leadership of the Palestinian movement such as Ben Jamal (PSC director), Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey (former General Secretary for Unite the Union) have offered no defence for people arrested on protests, citing the low arrest rates as proof of how respectable their protests are. Local PSC branches have gone as far as to implicitly support arrests in the name of keeping protests respectable. On 2 March 2024 Luca Salice, co-chair of Camden PSC, stated to The Independent ‘There could be one or two extremists who come into the protests. I can’t say that is impossible and luckily we have the police here, who are working with us. They are helping us organise this protest and making sure they are safe. And whenever they see the odd person who may do something wrong, it is up to them to arrest them.’ So much for solidarity!
The results of this collaboration has been to tie the movement to the electoral ambitions of the Labour ‘left’ and independent candidates and the gradual demobilisation of protests. On 9 October, a large demonstration in solidarity with Palestine took place outside the Israeli embassy. When the police then banned demonstrations outside the Israeli embassy there was no challenge from the PSC despite its ability to mobilise hundreds of thousands of people. Since 9 October, only one protest outside the London Israeli embassy has taken place and it was as far away from the embassy as possible. For months, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has repeatedly urged supporters of Palestine worldwide to mobilise outside Israeli embassies. The call has been heeded in many countries such as Mexico, Portugal, Greece, and France. In Jordan, despite widespread police violence, protesters besieged the Israeli embassy for over a week, demanding their government severs ties with Israel. Meanwhile national protests in London went from being every week, to once every two weeks, to once every three weeks, and the intervals continue to increase.
Policing the ‘subversives’
Along with building links with and encouraging support for moderate elements in any opposition, Kitson’s handbook on ‘peacekeeping’ advocates smearing and repressing those deemed ‘subversive’ and ‘hardline’. In this, the law is ‘just another weapon in the government’s arsenal’ and ‘little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public’.
In Britain, with such an entrenched labour aristocracy and middle class that makes up the leadership of the Palestinian solidarity movement and with large sections of the mass of the working class effectively depoliticised, so-called subversives are low in number. Repressive methods are not needed in Britain to the extent they are in countries such as France, Germany, the US or Arab nations. In London, despite protests reaching hundreds of thousands, the Metropolitan Police’s ‘Operation Brocks’ only resulted in 305 arrests between October 2023 and March 2024 and 89 of these were far-right counter-protesters. State repression is therefore reserved for those who express anti-Zionism or support for the Palestinian resistance; those who take direct action, such as Palestine Action and Youth Demand; and anyone who breaks the boundaries negotiated by the PSC and the police.
This was made painfully clear during a demonstration on 28 May 2024. After the Rafah tent massacre, where an Israeli airstrike incinerated 45 people alive in their tents, the PSC called a demonstration at Parliament Square. The protest started at 6pm and the agreed end time was 8pm. 10,000 people attended the demonstration, clearly moved to action by such a barbaric massacre. 500 protesters, dissatisfied with going home after only two hours of protesting, stayed and occupied the streets. The police issued Section 35 of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime, and Policing Act to force them to disperse. When the protesters refused, police officers dressed in riot gear attacked, forcing their way into the crowd to arrest suspected ‘ringleaders’ of the breakaway protest. Despite this show of force, the crowd fought back, with one police officer being ‘seriously injured’ after being struck with a bottle thrown from the crowd. 40 people were arrested. Such an incident shows the price of deviating from the PSC’s respectable praxis.
The 80 page report In our millions published by police monitoring group Netpol on 30 March exposes a pattern of arbitrary, racist and violent policing driven by pressure from politicians, the mainstream media and Zionist groups opposed to any form of Palestinian solidarity. This violence is frequently focused towards young people, children, women, disabled people, and black and South Asian youths. In addition, police violence has been common at protests deemed disruptive (those at train stations, breakaway protests and protests at arms factories) and has frequently been combined with kettles and dispersal orders.
Attacks against so-called subversives continue. On 17 July, Youth Demand planned a protest at Victoria Embankment Gardens for the King’s Speech. Before the protest even started, 10 alleged organisers were arrested in a cafe for ‘conspiracy to cause public nuisance’. Protesters who made it to the protest location were kettled. Overall, at least 50 people were arrested.
Resistance as ‘terrorism’
Much has been done by the bourgeois media, politicians and organised Zionists to associate Palestinian solidarity with Islamist terrorism. The Terrorism Act 2000 allows the Home Secretary to proscribe any organisation they want to silence. Such a power is used to criminalise anti-imperialist organisations and their supporters. The military wing of Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was proscribed in 2001 and Hamas as a political party was proscribed in November 2021.
This effectively allows the police to criminalise those who take the principled political position of supporting the right of Palestinians to resist their oppressors through armed struggle. This is a right oppressed nations successfully fought to have enshrined in UN General Assembly resolutions 3314 and 37/43 in 1974 and 1982 respectively. Despite this, the PSC and other groups in the Palestinian solidarity leadership have gone to great lengths to condemn ‘violence on both sides’. In Newcastle, FRFI supporters have been censored by the PSC for talking about Palestinian resistance. More shockingly, the PSC withdrew its sponsorship from a fundraising event in Birmingham that well-known PFLP militant Leila Khaled was due to address. Such acts are a betrayal to the Palestinian people and reveals the political backwardness of moderates.
Under Operation Brocks, 15 people have been arrested for terrorism offences. Acting at the behest of Zionist Twitter mobs and the vicious UK Lawyers for Israel organisation, the Metropolitan Police raided the home of an FRFI supporter in January 2024 and arrested them, seizing their electronic devices. Several members of CPGB-ML were arrested for handing out flyers supporting the Palestinian resistance after posts inciting their arrest appearing on Zionist Twitter accounts; they also had electronic devices seized during home raids and were kept on bail until being told that no further action would be taken against them in June. The purpose of this is to gather intelligence on those considered to be ‘subversives’.
Such attacks on support for anti-imperialist resistance are not new. In the 1970s and 1980s the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 was used to censor and repress Irish solidarity and terrorise the Irish community. In 1980, two FRFI supporters in Glasgow were arrested under this legislation. It took a massive grassroots campaign in support of the comrades to get these charges dropped. Thousands of people were arrested under this racist legislation until it was replaced by the Terrorism Act.
Organise the resistance!
20 years of mainly respectable protests by the PSC have not ended Britain’s support for Israel. The only thing the movement has to show for its efforts is a few independent candidates unseating pro-Israel MPs in the 2024 election. Groups such as Palestine Action, which concentrate on direct action, have sprung up in direct response to the ineffectiveness of the PSC’s strategy of appealing to the so-called morality of the British ruling class. They have won impressive victories by shutting down arms factories; however, direct action alone cannot be a substitute for organising the mass of the working class and does not challenge opportunist control over the movement.
With the Labour Party now in power, the strategy of the leadership of the Palestinian movement is to effectively beg the government to end weapon sales to Israel – a very narrow demand that captures a very miniscule part of Britain’s support for Zionism. This is a reactionary fantasy that will lead the movement down a dead end. Imperialism is not a ‘policy choice’ of the ruling class; it is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Israel enjoys the unconditional support of the imperialist powers because it fulfils their economic, political and strategic objectives in the Middle East.
For the Palestine solidarity movement in Britain to advance, we must decisively break with the imperialist British parliament, all sections of the British ruling class and its collaborators within the movement. The movement must move beyond vague and moralistic demands for a ‘ceasefire now’ (something even prime minister Keir Starmer and US president Joe Biden have now expressed support for) to demanding all British support for Zionism ends – meaning full and comprehensive sanctions are placed on Israel. And the movement must give full and unconditional support to the Palestinian resistance in its fight against our common enemy – imperialism. These are the first steps to building a movement that can confront both the Zionist genocide and the racist British state.
Kotsai Sigauke
