Bernard Spiegal

Evil-doers abhor truth.  Therefore it must be smothered, distorted, silenced, concealed.  That is what thematically connects the British Government’s intention to proscribe Palestinian Action with the Israeli government’s decision to close access to Israeli state archives.

The Israeli state archives are the source material upon which Israel’s ‘new historians’ – for example Avi Shlaim and Illan Pappe – swept away Zionism’s founding myths of unimpeachable, self-regarding Jewish-Israeli virtue, highlighting instead a contrary, but truthful, account of Israel’s murderous aggression, its intent to ethnically cleanse the indigenous Palestinian population from its own land. As Avi Shlaim has said:

It’s a long journey, but what changed me was archival research. I was radicalised in the archives. I was indoctrinated at school in Israel, and even more so, when I served in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in the mid 1960s.

I believed that Israel was a small peace-loving country surrounded by hostile Arabs who wanted to throw us into the sea, meaning that we had no choice but to stand up and fight. I accepted this Zionist master narrative, until I became interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict as a historian. I spent a whole year going to the Israel state archives every day, looking at the records, records which told me a completely different story: that Israel was aggressive, that Israel was deliberately provoking fights with its neighbors [sic] and that Israel was not interested in peace.

He goes on to say:

That’s how I became radicalised – by calling out what I saw from Israel’s actual records as opposed to its propaganda. Netanyahu has now closed the reading room in Israeli state archives.

Palestine Action

And now the British Government intends to proscribe – i.e. to silence and make invisible – Palestine Action (PA).  PA says of itself:

Palestine Action is a direct action movement committed to ending global participation in Israel’s genocidal and apartheid regime. Using disruptive tactics, Palestine Action targets corporate enablers of the Israeli military-industrial complex and seeks to make it impossible for these companies to profit from the oppression of Palestinians.

What the British Government wants to conceal is its support, by word and deed, of the genocidal, apartheid Israeli state, along with the commercial companies that fuel the Israeli war machine, making a profit along the way.

But Caution! What has been said about Palestine Action in the paragraphs above may well be unpermitted speech once the proscription comes into force.

Under proscription, it is an offence, with potentially drastic penalties, to support any organisation thus sanctioned. It is not clear how far-reaching the interpretation of ‘support’ will be. But, for example, one could potentially be charged with ‘supporting’ PA by wearing a tee-shirt with the words Palestine Action on it. This is likely to be the only time an organisation committed to non-violence has been so treated, placing it alongside, for example, ISIS and Al Qa’ida.

There surely is some irony, bitter irony, in noting that government is exerting itself to proscribe an organisation committed to non-violence, at the same time as it actively supports Israel’s use of extreme violence against Palestinian civilians. Reuters news agency reports Palestinian health authorities saying Israel’s ground and air campaign in Gaza has killed more than 50,000 people, with nearly a third of the dead under 18.

Hamas

Hamas has a military wing, and a political wing. Some twenty years ago the British Government proscribed the military wing. Then, no doubt under pressure from the Israeli government and their well-placed, well-resourced Zionist supporting organisations here, in 2021 the British Government proscribed Hamas’s political wing. A move of the utmost folly.

On the positive side, Hamas has instructed UK lawyers to challenge the proscription of its political wing.  Riverway Law, which is leading the challenge, has submitted a 106-page application to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper that claims the decision to proscribe is ‘pursued [for] explicitly political objectives by a politically compromised Secretary of State’.

Yet, even the process of – legitimately – challenging the Home Secretary’s proscription is fraught with paradox and contradiction for:

‘The lawyers involved in the case stressed that Hamas did not pay them or the experts and lawyers who provided evidence for its submission, as it is illegal to receive funds from a group designated as a terrorist organisation.’  

If lawyers could not be found to work for free, or able to secure separate funding for the challenge, the case would not be heard. Thus, the possibility of overturning the ban would be stymied. Access to the justice system would have been effectively denied, blocking the path to due process. This itself surely represents a diminution of democratic space available for legitimate contestation with the state. (More on Hamas and its proscription can be found in my articles here and here.)

Much more could be said, needs to be said, about the purposeful shrinking of democratic space when Israel and Zionist interests are at stake. Thus, mainstream media, not least the BBC, appear to gag or dilute their own coverage of Israel’s genocidal actions, presenting it, where they do, blandly, as though reporting the weather forecast. Beyond the British State, there are organisations – Campaign Against Antisemitism, UK Lawyers for Israel, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and and the ardently pro-Zionist Chief Rabbi, to name but a few – whose primary purpose is to delegitimise the Palestinian cause. And these organisations and groupings have deep pockets, and influential friends. More of which, in a future article.