LONDON: Palestine Action supporters say they will make the ban on the group “unenforceable” after it was proscribed as a terrorist organization by the UK government.
On Thursday, the group’s founder Huda Ammori, 31, encouraged over 200 people in a Zoom meeting to protest the move this weekend in London and elsewhere, The Times reported on Friday.
“My faith in people like you all is at an all-time high,” she said. “We’re a force to be reckoned with when we act together.
“The most effective route is through actions like the ones Defend Our Juries are leading the way on, in terms of making this ban unenforceable.”
Defend Our Juries is a group originally set up to convince juries not to convict climate activists engaged in disruptive behavior in the UK.
In the Zoom meeting attended by Ammori, a Defend Our Juries member encouraged people to be arrested, saying the police take “a soft approach” to conscientious protests.
“People will be thinking, ‘is that the end of it, has that repression worked to silence us?’ Imagine if it’s the opposite effect and there are double (the number) of us in Parliament Square on Saturday, and there are similar actions in Cardiff and Manchester,” the Defend Our Juries member said.
The call to protest comes a week after 29 demonstrators were arrested for supporting Palestine Action with placards in Westminster, including an elderly female Church of England priest.
“The Met (Police) commissioner has now got an excruciating dilemma. He was being hauled over the coals for wasting public money, for arresting an 83-year-old priest with a sign opposing genocide,” the Defend Our Juries member said.
“He’s either got to double down on that, leaving him looking like he’s not listening, or he’s got to leave it be, which is to admit the law is mad and unenforceable. He’s got no good option. As long as we turn up in numbers, we expose this.”
Palestine Action was outlawed on July 5 after members of the group broke into a Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton and vandalized military aircraft. Under the terms of the ban, support for the group could lead to a 14-year prison sentence.
Protesters, though, are using encrypted messaging platforms such as Signal to plan further demonstrations in other UK cities, The Times reported.
Ammori, of Palestinian-Iraqi heritage, has backed the protests to cause major disruption in the UK court system if hundreds of people are arrested under the Terrorism Act.
The first of these, in London, will be held in Parliament Square on Saturday at 1 p.m., and attendees were told via Zoom that they would be provided with placards, solicitors’ information and prepared statements to read to police if arrested.
A nine-page document was also issued with instructions to communicate via burner phones and on what to do when arrested, including to “go floppy” when manhandled by police to “add to the visual drama of the action” of “civil resistance.”
Another activist with over 100 arrests to their name told the Zoom call: “The worst thing we can do is to be scared. We have to become active … You will find it wonderful to do, important to do.
“If any of you have been getting depressed about issues recently, it’s a great antidote to depression.”
Ammori will appear before the High Court on July 21 after a judicial review of the ban on Palestine Action was called, with moves to prevent its proscription rejected by the Court of Appeal.
