83-year-old Anglican priest, Rev Sue Parfitt, was arrested for holding up a sign in support of Palestine Action, recently proscribed as a terrorist group. Peaceful protestors are standing between the oppressors and the oppressed, says George Pitcher. But it’s an uncomfortable place to be
It comes to a pretty pass when a Labour government deploys legislation to imprison left-wing journalists. But that is precisely what has happened now that the activist group Palestine Action has been proscribed by home secretary Yvette Cooper under the Terrorism Act.
As many friends and colleagues have pointed out, we now have to be very careful – were I to write the simple words: “I support Palestine Action” I would, under the law, risk up to 14 years in jail.
For all their breast-beating, libertarian howls for free speech, this is less of a threat for Conservative voices, which generally (though not exclusively) support the state of Israel and all that it does. For those who would customarily support Labour against these Conservatives, it’s a real and present danger to their freedom.
Silent or silenced?
The columnist Owen Jones, who has been nothing if not courageous in his support for Palestine, has written that Cooper recently “joined other female Labour MPs in a photoshoot celebrating the suffragettes, who planted bombs, burned down private homes and smashed up art galleries. They then voted to classify a movement which positions itself as opposing violence against people as a terrorist organisation.”
Scriptwriter and novelist Ronan Bennett, himself a victim of repressive terrorist legislation during the Irish Troubles, wasted no time on prime minister Keir Starmer, “who can see red paint sprayed on warplanes and government buildings, but apparently not the blood gushing from tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
Standing up for peace and opposing repression kind of goes with the territory
What we all have in common is the observation that last week we could support Palestine Action in principle, but this week we would be committing a criminal offence in doing so. Consequently, an 83-year-old retired priest, Rev Sue Parfitt, was arrested for sitting in a garden chair holding a cardboard placard in support of Palestine Action.
Lord Toby Young’s Free Speech Union remains strangely silent on this, Young himself preferring to pen a piece about how he was unusually sober at The Spectator summer party because he’s on weight-loss drug Mounjaro. Lightweight this certainly is.
To be clear, Palestine Action faces criminal damage charges after spraying red paint over military planes in what they say was a protest against Britain’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. We’ll see how those charges pan out.
Unequally yoked
But it’s far from prejudicial to observe that Palestine Action’s demonstration has led to its proscription in law alongside terrorist organisations such as Hamas, ISIS and al-Qaida, with their hideous histories of bombings and mass murder. We may wonder whether that is a proportionate response to some spray painting.
Being a fellow priest in the same Anglican tradition, it’s Rev Parfitt who catches my attention. We used to be good – and welcome – at peaceful and peaceable anti-war demonstrations. I’m thinking of the late Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, on the ban-the-bomb Aldermaston marches in the early 60s, and more recent episcopal opposition to the war in Iraq.
Standing up for peace and opposing repression kind of goes with the territory. Or so it should. It’s right there in the Christian foundational story, which is a peaceful, though radical, insurgency into the political powerhouse of Jerusalem. If you like, the troublesome Jesus movement became a proscribed organisation at that moment, though it would be similarly a stretch to call it terrorist.
Palestine Action’s proscription places it alongside Hamas, ISIS and al-Qaida, with their hideous histories of mass murder
As a consequence, we’re obliged to stand (or sit) between oppressors and the oppressed. I firmly believe that’s what Rev Parfitt was doing in Parliament Square. It’s to show spiritual solidarity with the weak against the strong. It is emphatically not to show solidarity with Hamas against Israel, far less the Jewish people as some kind of whole, which would undoubtedly be a crime of antisemitism.
We must be extremely careful about being a vehicle for the latter. Or unconsciously to displace it with hideous historical comparisons. But it is legitimate to say that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians of Gaza is Roman in its scale of cruelty and violence. It is using terror to subjugate a civilian population.
Truth and power
The still, small Christian voice of calm that has spoken down the centuries must oppose that. So long as it is so doing, it is doing its job. This is not to claim Palestine Action for the Christ. To call the Nazarene a Palestinian is a piece of sophistry and anachronism attached to geographical coincidence. But it is to say we stand with the displaced and oppressed of that region.
When an itinerant Galilean, bedraggled and chained, stood before local Roman governor Pontius Pilate, he spoke this truth to power. We’ll do well to remember that when our own political panjandrums tell us which subjected peoples we can defend and which we can’t because we’re suddenly breaking their laws.
Pilate, in the form of our legislators today, asks us once again: What is truth? We’d better be ready with an answer.
To read more about Rev Sue Parfitt’s life and ministry, read her interview with Woman Alive magazine
