There is a multifaceted nature to our case. As there is to any battle between the truth and injustice, especially when they are waged within legal spheres. Political life always contains multitudes. We are acting within a world that we want to not be, or want it to be different. This creates tensions between what is and what could be. The present reality being as real as the desire for something else. The gap between them growing ever larger. Our task still remains: to strive to bring them closer, to eventually becoming one. Keep the possibilities of an otherwise present in all our actions, while not ignoring the conditions of the now. This is not an easy task. However, only by taking the gloom of the present as seriously as the hope that resistance brings can we begin to untangle our way out of a reality that only serves the interests of capital and Empire.
There is a contradiction inherent to political repression. In other words, the cell that surrounds my entire existence is as real as are the opportunities to turn repression on itself. The material effects of incarceration, surveillance or policing are too grave to be brushed over. Political repression must be taken seriously because the harm that it inflicts is serious. If we bury it under romanticised notions of the strong revolutionary whose political convictions can always keep them far above the prison or the police cell, we risk the spreading of silent fear through our communities. For no one can lift to that kind of absolute fearlessness. Similarly, discipline, in the hands of the individual, isn’t always enough to push the impacts of violence and repression away from our bodies, our minds, and from the realm of our collective imagination.
The Zionist occupying force has recently passed a law legalising the death penalty. The mandatory death sentence only applies to convictions passed by the military courts and thus affects solely Palestinian prisoners. The colonial judicial system codified apartheid and Genocide even deeper into its foundations. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. As horrific as the prospect of yet another method of ethnic cleansing is, the fact that the occupying power will now be able to enact court-sanctioned executions only further proves that Palestinians were never able to rely on the law as a force for justice. It has always been yet another tool, deployed to protect the coloniser and terrorise the indigenous population. This framing is not an invitation to give in to the oppressor’s escalatory tactics- on the contrary, it uncovers the range of strategies that are necessary to break the brutality of Zionism.
Repression, enacted through the law, can only be combatted by means that go far beyond the courts. While the degree of brutality is not comparable in the slightest, British law was also codified with specific class and racial interests in mind. Throughout the months in prison I have met many women who have been labelled as criminals because of poverty and daring to attempt to survive in a system that positions them outside of the mainstream understanding of productivity and therefore, makes them surplus to a capitalist system. They are the ones supposedly causing harm, while war criminals are rewarded with ever-increasing opportunities that war and imperialism offers to them. The law was never meant to serve those acting against the status quo, or those already disenfranchised. Therefore, we must reclaim our case from the legal sphere, which, however important, can never be our only battlefield.
Our ability to appropriate the state’s counter-insurgency operation is, in fact, evident today in this room. It is not a product of our naivety or blindness to the mind of the systems that we’re up against. The strength of our movement lies in our collective awareness of those systems, contradicted by our ability to use repression as a unifying force, an opportunity to charge back and expose the real crimes committed in this country and overseas. If repression was ever meant to pacify, it is doing the opposite. By deploying a full arsenal of their powers against a “threat to national security” in the form of two people on E-scooters and a couple litres of paint – the war machine appears everything but strong. They show us how little is needed to make a dent in the carefully orchestrated military operations and the weapons trade adjacent to them. Western imperialism relies on pacified domestic populations, on a disconnect between what happened here on British soil and the violence inflicted upon lands and populations whose extermination or control the West desires.
The injustice we are facing is not surprising, but it is wrong. It can only be combatted by continuing to move forward, by collective bravery and truth. So thank you all for fighting for us, fighting with us, and expanding the fight far beyond us. Free Palestine and Shut Down the Imperial War Machine.