A year of the Palestine movement in Manchester
John Nicholson •Longtime Palestine activist John Nicholson reflects on the year of organising in Manchester since October 7th 2023, offers thoughts on the Zionist escalations, and considers the next steps. This was originally a talk at rs21’s All Member Assembly in September 2024.
Very early on in our rallies, we realised that a rally in itself wasn’t enough. We don’t stop a bullet or a bomb by marching politely around the streets of sunny Manchester. We agreed that what was important was to use these marches to ensure there were other actions taking place: all the time and all around the county. This is why we continue to organise locally through Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine, Manchester Palestine Action, and especially the Youth Front for Palestine.
Around 400 actions have taken place in the last 10 months and that includes us doing local street protests, local consumer boycott stuff where people go into supermarkets and pile off the Israeli goods and do a spook consumer announcement to all customers saying ‘don’t buy this stuff’, right through to occupying and taking action outside and inside of such places as IO associates (IO) and Fisher German, who as a result of those actions cut their links with Israeli arms firm Elbit. Puma are no longer a problem for Manchester City fans as they cut their links with the Israeli Football Association. We’re still working on Barclays and BNY Mellon. We take a regular coach down to Shenstone in the Midlands where the main Elbit factory still remains, and every last Tuesday of the month that’s a national mobilisation, so anybody here is welcome to join in and make that a big closure.
We’ve done 30 consecutive months outside Elbit, that’s good for activism but the bad news is they’re still there. They closed down Elbit in Oldham and crucially that is thanks to the direct action of Palestine Action as well as the community protests on the ground. It is absolutely right in my opinion that we do continue to give support to those Palestine Action activists who are increasingly facing the sort of repression which the new government has wheeled out. There are 10 more arrested and detained on counter-terrorism charges. This is quite cynical because it means you can detain people for longer but you don’t charge them on counter-terrorism, you just charge them criminal damage after that, but the deterrent effect is obviously massive when it starts getting escalated to that level.
As I say we realised we needed to escalate from marches, but at the same time the marches have been important because we’ve been able to promote the voices of Palestinians. That’s included having women-led marches with Hands Off Palestinian Women banners, it’s included having Palestinian children who speak regularly on the microphone – the Youth Front for Palestine has been essential in that respect. Whatever else we do, we must continue to put the voices of the Palestinians at the centre of everything that we do. It isn’t just about an escalation of a wider war.
Biden’s saying well, now we must have a ceasefire because the war is getting wider, it’s now going to be a real war. The same thing happened throughout history many times. The Cubans beat the Apartheid South Africans in Angola and the Namibians got independence, but nobody talked to the Namibians – the peace negotiations were done over their heads entirely. In World War 1, a lot of the history after that was about the world powers carving up the world. When it all got closer to home they thought about the Balkans, but actually the Balkans were fighting their own wars in 1911 and 1912 – there is an agency to the Serbs in there which can be missed if you simply focus on the wider war.
So I say the same thing equally to us and to some of the other organisations around rs21, to anyone who has looked at this conflict over the last year and said right we must have a meeting on which way forward for the Palestine movement. That is denying the agency of the Palestinians both here and worldwide, so I have a corrective to this in that respect. Palestine may only be a single issue but it is a very important single issue and for most of us in this room it’s an important issue because of the role of Israel, because of the role of that rogue state and what it has done not just in the last year but for 100 years of British complicity in that state in the formation and onwards and so both of these things I think need to be addressed at the same time.
Yes we march, but we escalate our marches. Yes we support direct action and oppose all of those arms export licences and all of the links to Israel and support the people who are taking that direct action, but the same time also let’s support the Palestinians, let’s support their resilience, let’s support their resistance and let’s make sure that we’re always promoting those Palestinian voices on all of the platforms that we can.
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