We at Friends of Al-Aqsa are deeply concerned by recent attacks on Palestine Action and condemn these latest attempts by the British state to clampdown on the Palestine solidarity movement.
British complicity in the Zionist settler colonialism dates back to the Balfour Declaration 107 years ago, when the UK state promised to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Successive governments have continued to support the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population, which has only accelerated in the past thirteen months since Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza.
Despite killing over 43,000 people in Gaza, 700 in the West Bank, and attacking Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran, the UK government remains staunchly behind Israel. The previous Conservative government and incumbent Labour Party have both ignored the unprecedented mobilisation by the Palestine solidarity movement, instead seeking to dismiss and undermine it. They have refused our demands to call for an end to the genocide, impose an arms embargo on Israel or to support international efforts to hold it accountable. Additionally, the UK continues to supply Israel with military equipment and provide it with the intelligence that it needs to sustain its genocidal violence in Palestine and Lebanon.
It is precisely because of our government’s continued complicity in Israel’s crimes that people are driven to direct action and the activities of groups such as Palestine Action become necessary. Over the past four years, they have been vital in raising awareness and attracting attention to how weapons and military equipment made in Britain are being used to murder people in Palestine and across the region. In the face of the state’s failure to act or to fulfil its obligations under international law, activists from Palestine Action have taken it upon themselves, often at great risk to their own freedom, to put pressure on these arms companies, as well as other businesses that support them. In doing so, they send a clear message that the British people will hold them to account even if our government does not.
Palestine Action’s tactics have been successful in isolating Israeli arms companies, such as Elbit Systems, and slowing down Israel’s war machine. It is precisely because of this that pro-Israeli groups and politicians are calling for them to be proscribed as a “terrorist organisation”. Friends of Al-Aqsa sees this as a means to relieve the growing pressure being placed on this government for its complicity in the ongoing genocide and an attempt to appease those that do not want to see Israel held to account for its crimes. We condemn this latest move as a blatant attack on our democratic right to protest and a manifestation of the increasingly authoritarian way in which the state is attempting to silence pro-Palestinian voices.
We at Friends of Al-Aqsa affirm that an attack on Palestine Action is an attack on the entirety of the Palestine solidarity movement and we stand by our comrades and their courageous efforts on the path to a liberated Palestine.
