Is the UK trying to stifle Palestinian voices?

Hours before the launch of Nathan Thrall’s book A day in the life of Abed Salama in London on Thursday, the organisers announced that the event will no longer go ahead.

“Tonight's book launch will not go ahead after the Metropolitan Police contacted the host organisation and asked that it be cancelled "due to security concerns”,” the Palestine Festival of Literature, which promotes anti-colonial works of art, announced on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Thrall’s book about the inequality Palestinians faced in the occupied West Bank had already been reviewed in leading newspapers. What security concerns could it possibly entail?

But since hostilities broke out between Palestine and Israel on October 7, the UK has taken some drastic steps in how it handles Palestinian-related matters.

Police on Wednesday arrested three people from a Manchester vigil, which was being held for the Israeli killed in the Hamas attack, for breaching peace and not because they supported Palestine.

“Despite seeming confusion from the Greater Manchester Police around the arrests, video evidence strongly suggests that four protesters were arrested for displaying the Palestinian flag,” says Richard McNeil-Willson, a Research Fellow in Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.

“This comes days after the UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman specifically cited the Palestinian national flag and liberation chants as being linked to terrorism.”

Braverman is facing pushback after telling police chiefs to crackdown against people who wave Palestinian flags.

“Such acts and statements from the Home Secretary are a deliberate attempt to conflate support for the Palestinian cause with terrorism, done to demonise and dehumanise those most impacted by on-going violence,” McNeil-Willson tells TRT World.

Passions are running high on all sides as Israeli jets bombarded Gaza. More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed and over 6,600 injured in the Israeli bombings while at least 1,300 Israelis were killed in the Hamas attack.

The UN says that more than 420,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced. Their homes have been destroyed and people are forced to take shelter in UN-run schools.

In a letter published on Tuesday to heads of the Police of England and Wales, Braverman outlined actions she argued potentially constitute public order offences - from the targeting of Jewish communities, waving Palestinian or Hamas symbols and chants potentially regarded as anti-Israeli.

She also called on authorities to use the "full force of the law" against those demonstrating or displaying support for Hamas.

“Looking at this entire debate from a broader perspective, we can see how it’s based on a continuation of policing and security practices that have criminalised Palestinian activism and solidarity for quite some time,” says Rizwaan Sabir, an Associate Professor at Liverpool John Moores University.

The UK government uses such activism to determine whether a person is more likely to support or engage with terrorism in the future, he tells TRT World.

“What the British authorities are specifically doing in this case, very overtly now, is to conflate the Palestinian flag and questions around Palestinian statehood and solidarity with the armed group Hamas specifically and terrorism more broadly,” adds Sabir.

Western news organisations are promoting a similar narrative in which ordinary Palestinians voicing concern against Israeli brutality are being labelled as Hamas supporters.

Hamas, an armed Palestinian group, is considered as a banned outfit in the UK, US and several other countries. But the Palestinian resistance group aims its armed struggle primarily against the Israeli occupation.

But in the past few days, leaders from the US and UK have equated Hamas with Daesh, a terrorist organisation that harbours a broader goal of enforcing its ideology onto others by means of violence.

A disturbing connection

While reaffirming the UK's support to Israel, Braverman on October 12, decried Hamas’s " barbaric attacks against the people of Israel."

"In their methods, Hamas is revealed to be the equal of ISIS. And as with ISIS, we must ensure this evil is vanquished,” she said in a statement.

However, experts view that the UK is conflating two very distinct groups, consequently impacting Palestinian causes.

“ISIS (Daesh) are ideologically and politically opposed to Hamas,” says Sabir.

“But they’re being constructed as one and the same because it's a way of criminalising Palestinian identity and solidarity in the same way that the concept of an ‘Islamic state’ or ‘Caliphate’ was criminalised during the Syrian civil war by associating it only with ISIS.”

‘War-crimes in Gaza’

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to utilise all of Israel’s strength to destroy Hamas’ capabilities and to enact "revenge."

Israeli authorities have also ordered hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza to leave their homes as Tel Aviv prepares for a ground offence. UN and other aid groups are pleading for a safe passage for civilians and a route for much-needed aid including medicines to reach hospitals.

Amid such a heightened situation, the UK government’s decision to censure Palestinian symbols constitutes “a chilling indication of how far the Government is willing to go in its attempts to control and repress legitimate protest, despite significant support throughout the UK for Palestinians,”says McNeil-Willson.

He believes the UK Government has already repeatedly clamped down on legitimate protest, in what he describes as a bid “to shore-up” declining support for its policies, with such action targeting left-wing, environmental, pro-European and pro-Palestinian activism, among others.

UK’s action “represents the highest hypocrisy at a time when Israel is conducting war-crimes in Gaza,” says McNeil-Willson.

In recent years critics have pointed to what they say is the UK’s previous attempts to silence Palestinian voices and supporters.

In October 2020, UK Education Secretary sent a letter to Vice-Chancellors asking universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) ‘working definition’ of antisemitism, appearing to threaten those who did not comply with financial cuts.

The IHRA was implemented across the US, Canada, Australia and across the EU, receiving some pushback from academics and students who largely viewed it as a controversial definition of antisemitism.

A report by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and the European Legal Support Center suggested that "the definition is not fit for purpose and is infringing on academic freedom and freedom of speech, while also harming the mental health, reputation and career prospects of students and staff.’

Sabir says the UK government's official position has always been claimed to be one of a neutral broker but argues its action over the years and “its unyielding support for Israel categorically show this is not the case.”

He says that the UK-Israel alignment overshadows the situation Palestinians face on the ground in Gaza.

“We have a very right-wing government in power that is perhaps more ideologically connected to the Israeli-vision of the world and for that reason are doing lots of things you could say are overtly pro-Israel and totally unresponsive to the suffering and plight of the Palestinians,” says Sabir.