Rather incredibly, it is now a criminal offence to express support for this organisation. It’s been proscribed, and is therefore legally on a par with groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda. So, although prison would certainly be an interesting experience, I won’t express support for it here.
And actually I’m not sure I would support all their actions, even if it was legal to do so. I think direct action sometimes serves the purpose of making its practitioners feel heroic, while not really advancing their cause, and perhaps even sets the cause back at times by alienating people who might otherwise be sympathetic – but I have to admit that these reservations may often be a rationalisation of my own timidity and my ridiculous terror of being told off.
However, one thing I certainly do not support is the proscription of organisations that engage in non-violent direct action. Ordinary criminal law exists to prosecute people who trespass and damage property. There is absolutely no justification for placing people who do these things for what they believe are principled reasons, on a par with people who murder indiscriminately to get what they want.
Nearly 60,000 people, including many thousands of children, have been killed by the bombs, shells and bullets of the Israeli armed forces in the Gaza strip. Schools, hospitals and homes have been reduced to rubble, not only by bombs and shells, but also quite deliberately, by demolition machinery. Families have been forced to move back and forth through a landscape of destruction where they may be killed at any moment. A million children have had no school for two years, and all of them have been subjected to trauma that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. The Israeli authorities are now talking of herding much or all of the population of Gaza into a small enclosed area – that is to say, a concentration camp – which they will be prohibited to leave unless it is to go and live abroad. What’s going on completely dwarfs any attrocity that’s ever been committed by any terrorist group*.
And in this context our cloth-eared government decides to proscribe a group which uses illegal but non-lethal means to try to disrupt, and draw attention to, the ongoing supply of arms to those perpetrating the slaughter! I voted for this government. I don’t think I can vote for them again.
See also: Palestine
*There has always been a double standard. St Augustine nailed it when he wrote:
…an apt and true reply… was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor
(From The City of God).
