Nothing makes sense any more - in solidarity with Palestine Action

Everything is out of proportion because it suits those who abuse power to keep it that way.

A protester is arrested at the Ministry of Defence on 25th June in London. Image CC Alisdare Hickson.

There’s already been so much written, angry, sad, or quite beautifully sharp, about the case of Palestine Action, after some of their activists sprayed paint on two RAF jets this week.

Now there’s hardly any time left to say anything, if Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribes Palestine Action on Monday. Jeremy Corbyn has said that Cooper’s proposal to ban them as a terrorist organisation is “as absurd as it is authoritarian”. Absurd until you learn Cooper has received £215,000 from the Israel lobby, according to Declassified UK, from official records.

I’d written a much longer piece about this, and about my friends at Palestine Action. There has always been solidarity between the climate and Palestine movements. There always will be.

But I deleted most of what I’d already written, which got lost down rabbit holes of the legal technicalities, of the authoritarian floodgates opening, and social catastrophe of putting Palestine Action in the same grouping as people such as Al Qa’ida (responsible for 9/11), the neo-Nazi National Action, or Boko Haram (who kill on average 11 people a day).

What I really want to say, while there’s still time, is this.

Nothing makes sense any more.

Makes no sense

What I mean is that nothing is proportional any more.

Proportionality is a concept under international law, especially the Geneva Conventions. It tries to describe proportional harm done to civilians by military attacks. But it’s not the technical, legal sense of proportionality I’m talking about.

Rather, I’m thinking about a more moral, felt, and lived experience of proportionality.

When we are collapsing things by intentionally destroying the climate and biosphere (by ‘we’ I mean the profiteers of capitalism), and when militarised states such as Israel and the U.S. purposefully enter into wars for resources that will benefit their elites as everything collapses around them, then proportionality cannot be allowed into the room, can it? That’s because almost every action in response is proportional to stopping the extermination of billions of humans, surely? So nothing makes sense any more.

If you’re intentionally profiteering from the collapse of our ecological, social and political systems, propping up a broken culture because it works for you, hoarding all the wealth to gold-leaf your bunker or planning for property investments along the Gaza coastline, then you cannot accept proportional responses to your genocidal greed.

So what you don’t do are things that make sense, such as uphold international law. Some argue it’s dying.

If you’re a British government, you don’t stop arms sales to Israel, even though the UN-backed International Criminal Court has already issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, together with a former Hamas commander, citing allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. What you do instead is meet with Israel-lobby organizations.

If you’re a far-right MP looking to gain power, what you don’t do is apply laws equally.

One thing you do instead is constantly throw shit at people until they don’t know which way is up, by flooding the zone with false equivalences. You make everything make no sense.

Which is what Reform’s Richard Tice has just done by calling for “Lucy’s law” – to free the British woman Lucy Connolly from prison, after she was found guilty of inciting racial hatred after the murder of three girls in Southport, and that led to the riots.

(At the same time, Tice is already wrongly denouncing PAL as a “newly proscribed group” jumping the gun and, most likely, committing his own illegal act, libel.)

Tice wants it to be possible for just 500 people to sign a petition to get a punishment handed down by the Crown Court to be reviewed. Connolly’s case has been appealed and she lost, so presumably he wants the next judgement to occur in parliament, where he hopes his mates could overturn it?

I wonder if he would be happy for that to be used in support of Palestine Action? I’m sure we could get 500 signatures. Or some Just Stop Oil activists, still banged up in jail for the ‘extreme’ crime of walking slowly in the road to bring attention to the deaths already being caused by the climate crisis (which Tice, by the way, denies is happening).

How does Tice feel morally comfortable with making a false equivalence between someone who is inciting violence with an intent to kill, and someone using means that are always non-violent towards persons to try and stop a genocide?

If you think Lucy Connolly didn’t intend for anyone to actually get killed, okay, so maybe there is a question about forgiveness here to think about, as Hannah Arendt might say. But she did advocate for killing people, and she did leave that post up for three and a half hours. If we have a law against incitement to violence, are we saying now that law is nonsense?

Then why is it okay for Lucy Connolly to disobey the law, in support of racial hatred, and not Palestine Action, on the right to life?

Advocating for the values behind the laws

Is this how it’s always worked? That ordinary people resist those who abuse power, but those in power have the ability to move the goalposts, so the dynamic of struggle is always asymmetrical? Have things ever made sense?

I don’t know. What I’m trying to do, here and elsewhere, is not get stuck in something I really don’t know enough about – the technical legalese of failures to act or Good Samaritan laws or the ICC rulings on genocide.

What I’m trying to do instead is bring to the foreground again and advocate for the values that are meant to be at the heart of those laws, and their upholding.

What we need to do is be talking about how the laws are intended to work – and, when they do work properly, why governments, politicians, militarised states, private military contractors, even Tech Bros, do everything they can to bend the laws to their advantage, ignore them, or just break them, rather than commit to the values in the laws in good faith.

If we have an International Criminal Court, and it has issued warrants, why does the British government still sell arms to Israel?

If we have a law against incitement to violence and Lucy Connolly was found guilty under it, why does Richard Tice want to undermine it?

The values in our laws matter

You could say I’m a hypocrite. I’ve written and campaigned against the new laws the Tories brought in – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, for example.

But I campaign against them exactly because they corrupt our values. That’s because the laws were part-written by a think tank (Policy Exchange) simply to make it impossible to use civil disobedience to challenge the government’s inaction on climate change, while Policy Exchange’s donors – including oil and gas companies – can continue raking in their profits.

What is important is how our laws are made, how they are upheld and the values that underpin them. The values in our laws matter. And they should benefit the majority of people. They should protect our right to disobey. They should help us make sense of living in a complex world, not shapeshift to meet the needs of a tiny global elite.

Why civil disobedience?

We lack the space, or people, anyone anywhere, in our politics to have this debate about proportionality properly and respectfully.

That’s part of the reason why civil disobedience exists: it is an essential counterbalance to a political system that believes itself above or outside of its own laws.

It is civil to stand up and disobey.

If you believe those who rule over you in fact work for you; or if you believe they are breaking the law or planning to damage or destroy their people or nation; or if you believe they are helping others to criminally do the same… then you will use paint and hammers or other tools and act in ways that nobody gets hurt to try to resist your complicity with them and their actions. Government wages wars in OUR names; if it’s illegal to do so, what should we do? The weapons are OUR national business; if they are used to kill illegally, what should we do?

This is civilly disobedient behaviour. Both individuals and groups act in as large a number as they can do so as to act in a civil manner – that is, collectively in the civic space, out of conscience.

Civil disobedience is having its power taken from it

One problem is that civil disobedience is being attacked by politicians defending immoral positions, whether that be profiteering or climate destruction or war crimes. Scholar of civil disobedience Erica Chenoweth has shown that, despite an upsurge in the use of tried-and-tested tactics and strategies, the effectiveness of civil disobedience is going down.

That’s because people who are finding their business interests affected by progress have been doing their homework. Think tanks such as Policy Exchange, funded by anonymous dark money including oil money, write reports to lobby governments to outlaw public protest – and these reports become the basis of new laws.

And oil and gas and other vested interests have obnoxious political front men like John Woodcock to do their PR work for them (more on Woodcock later).

It didn’t used to be like this

When the Seeds of Hope Ploughshares women acted in 1996, the criminal landscape was very different. Their action to disarm planes that the British government was planning to sell to the Indonesian government to aid them in their genocide against the people of East Timor, resulted in an acquittal.

It was seen to be legitimate that they may take a small act to prevent illegal acts of war, including sacrificing their liberty, in order to prevent greater crime. The key here is that the criminal act or harm to life, or intention to commit a deadly crime, is far worse than somebody painting something or hammering an object. This is basic logic. This is recognising proportionality.

But in recent years the idea of a “public nuisance” has been escalated to a position whereby it can bring a sentence upon you higher than you would get if you were convicted for rape. That’s only because governments and businesses do not want to respond to legitimate disruptive protests by accountable individuals who accept the very high personal costs in order to prevent corporate and government crimes.

And because it is so absurd for a government to imprison people who are trying to prevent society from destroying itself, the legal response can only be an absurdity too.

Is offending the establishment now ‘terrorism’?

In the internet age, and with the disgusting state of the British newspapers, anybody would think that there’s no greater crime than to put some paint somewhere that offends a minority of people in the establishment. Or that property damage is somehow worse than killing children – well, to the propertied-class it looks as if it is, especially if those children are far away, or brown, or Muslim.

Similarly with the climate crisis, apparently it is as bad or equivalent to just be really fucking annoying as it is to obliterate life at the equator of the Earth. There seems to be no greater threat to the British way of life than to walk slowly in a group because you hold specific beliefs and concerns pertaining to your government enacting crimes. “Let the people at the equator die as long as I don’t get caught in traffic,” I can hear them cry.

The imbalance of the analysis of harm is out of control. Somehow, we can’t see the difference between some people feeling upset and a nation of people being erased? Don’t you think that’s quite fucked up?

Oil-shill Woodcock won’t go easily

We need to keep an eye on the sacked and disgraced John Woodcock (aka Lord Walney) who continues to push for weakening our liberty and democratic rights in his forthcoming amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill, going through the Lords.

His ‘criminal protest proscription’ amendment would have people such as your grandma, your NHS surgeon and experts such as climate scientists proscribed as ‘terrorists’ for simply walking slowly in the road with others. Because Woodcock knows it would make a mockery of existing law, he dreams up a ‘new category’ for organisations such as Just Stop Oil and Palestine Action. What mockery does that make of the values of fairness, dignity, liberty and humanity that should underpin our laws?

If Yvette Cooper does proscribe Palestine Action, what is to stop her from doing so for other direct action organisations, if Woodcock’s lobby-fed amendment gets the green light? It will make it easier for the government to treat people participating in democracy as ‘terrorists’.

That is: it will make your political life impossible.

Blocking you from the media, preventing fundraising, preventing any interaction with politicians. Ending the right to protest and take nonviolent civil disobedience.

You think it’s not coming for you. But it is.

Making sense of our lives

Knowing the difference between dissent and intent to harm or kill is critical in a democracy.

Of course, papers such as the Telegraph have long been arguing that our rights to protest should be thrown out, protesters thrown in prison, and the key thrown away. I wonder what they’d be saying if it was their children being purposefully executed by drones? But they don’t really care about proportionality. They never have.

What we need to do, collectively, is remind each other of what kind of society we want to live in, and not forget that we have the power to change laws, as citizens.

Let’s remember the Ploughshares women argued their actions were justified as a means of preventing British complicity in genocide and upholding international law. They won.

It’s our duty too, right now, today, to disobey both unjust laws, and our government’s failure to act to uphold international law. It’s our duty to challenge governments for their inaction on any genocidal intent, whether that be bombing and starving children or collapsing the climate.

Otherwise, what can ever make any sense?