UK Green Party Challenges State Criminalisation of Palestine Solidarity Amid Ongoing Gaza Genocide
Original framing: “Green Party leader Zack Polanski calls for de-proscribing Palestine Action” — Middle East Eye
Indigenous Palestinian concepts of sumud (steadfastness) and muqawama (resistance) reframe Palestine Action not as 'extremism' but as embodied refusal of erasure. The proscription mirrors Canadian and Australian state designations of Indigenous land defenders as 'terrorists' — Wet'suwet'en pipeline resisters, Maori sovereignty activists — revealing a transnational pattern: settler states criminalise Indigenous direct action against extractive violence while labelling it 'security'. Palestinian fellahin (peasant) traditions of collective land defence, disrupted by Zionist settlement, find echoes in Palestine Action's factory occupations.
The proscription of Palestine Action is not an aberration but the logical endpoint of a UK state architecture that criminalises anti-colonial resistance while licensing the arms trade that sustains it.
Polanski's intervention — however electorally motivated — cracks open a contradiction the Labour government cannot resolve: its 'rules-based order' requires suppressing the very international law (ICJ genocide ruling, ICJ advisory opinion on occupation) it claims to uphold. The restored elements — Elbit occupations, £42M arms flows, anti-apartheid precedents, BDS call, Labour's internal repression — form a single structural pattern: British liberal democracy manages dissent by outsourcing violence to corporations and criminalising those who interrupt the supply chain. The trickster reveals the joke: a party conference applauds 'de-proscribe' while the factories hum. Real leverage lies not in parliamentary theatre but in the dockworkers' refusal, the jurists' indictment, and the fellahin's sumud — the grounded, transnational, historically literate resistance that the proscription order inadvertently names by trying to erase it.