The SOAS 2 are university students facing prosecution for their principled solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. One has been charged under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act (which carries a potential 14-year sentence); the other is ‘under investigation’. For what? The ‘crime’ of giving speeches in solidarity with the Palestinians – for telling the truth. The SOAS 2 Defence Campaign aims to build solidarity and support for the SOAS 2 and all protesters against the genocide in Gaza who face criminalisation and repression by the British state. Many have suffered gross injustices: physically attacked by police; arrested; lives put on hold under protracted investigation; once charged they have long waits for a trial date; face harsh bail conditions or are imprisoned on remand for long periods and under harsh prison regimes.
Never before, and in such harrowing detail, has a genocide been witnessed by the world. Day by day, week by week, the world has seen the bitter reality in Gaza for 21 agonising months. At the time of writing, the death toll officially stands at 57, 523 with 14,000 missing and 136,617 wounded. (In reality both direct and indirect deaths will amount to hundreds of thousands). We know the names and have heard the voices of some of those murdered such as poet Refaat Alareer whose poem predicting his own death ‘If I must die’ moved millions. He was murdered in December 2023 along with members of his family in a targeted Zionist air strike.
We have seen appalling war crimes committed by the Israeli state: Palestinian prisoners tortured and killed, targeted assassinations, the destruction of the entire healthcare system in Gaza and the detention and murders (1,580 )of health care workers; 227 journalists murdered; 92 percent of all housing units destroyed or damaged; all cultural and educational facilities destroyed along with mosques, churches and essential infrastructure such as provision of clean water; Gaza reduced to dust and rubble in relentless Israeli bombardments. With UNWRA banned and food and medical supplies cut off since 2 March 2025, Gaza now faces starvation in an Israeli-made famine. The fraudulent Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, financed by Israel and the US gives out meagre amounts of food at only four locations. The IDF and mercenaries shoot into crowds of starving people killing over 800 and wounding thousands of Palestinians. In the occupied West Bank, Israel and its settler auxiliaries have escalated their violent efforts to displace Palestinians and steal their land. 1,000 Palestinians have been murdered.
There is now a plan, with US encouragement, to imprison Palestinians in a concentration camp in the wasteland of Rafah to proceed with wholesale ethnic cleansing of Gaza and forcible displacement to other countries. It is a crime of monstrous proportions, the logic of a genocide armed, funded, excused, protected and encouraged by Western powers. They will occasionally tut tut at Israel for PR purposes but they will wink and do nothing. They are fiercely loyal to the Zionist state. After all, they assisted in its creation as their proxy and attack dog in the Middle East. And gave it the monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region.
Mass Opposition
In opposition to this, countless millions of people in the world have risen in angry protest. They have challenged governments and their lying narratives delivered by the mass media. Western rulers were particularly anxious about young people and their building of student camps. They and universities made concentrated efforts to disrupt and ban them. The movement delivered a strong enough message to ensure that a recent poll shows that 57% of the UK population would back a full arms embargo on Israel, 53% want Israel expelled from the UN and 50% thought supermarkets should boycott all Israeli products. That is not reflected in any part of government and barely in the UK Parliament.
In Britain, Europe and the US, the protest movement has met with the increasing criminalisation of protest: raids, bans, charges, surveillance, censorship, meetings attacked, imprisonment, coercion and violent police repression culminating here in the use of Terrorism laws against non-violent, peaceful protesters. Hundreds have been arrested. Independent journalists who tell the truth about Israeli crimes – and the role of western governments in genocide – have also been targeted and harassed: detained and questioned at airports, raided, had their electronic devices seized and threatened with charges under Terrorism laws. High profile cases include Sarah Wilkinson, Asa Winstanley, Richard Medhurst and Craig Murray. The Labour government has decreed that the passionate voice of truth must be silenced, gagged, rendered impotent. This must be resisted and a solidarity movement built for all those targeted, arrested and those in prison.
The Belly of the Beast
To say that Western powers are ‘complicit’ in the genocide in Gaza is a misleading understatement. The genocide would not be possible without the leading and commanding role of US, European and UK imperialism. They are wholeheartedly participating in it with money, military and intelligence cooperation, arms sales and diplomatic cover. That is consistent with their colonial past where whole lands were passed around in treaties and agreements, with each imperialist nation vying for the spoils. As the anti-imperialist journalist John Pilger wrote in 2010:
‘The Middle East is the cockpit and product of western power. The United States, with Britain at its side, has two strategic goals: to maintain the supply of oil from the Gulf states and to shore up, at any cost, its proxy in the region, Israel. That is the unerring policy; human rights are not an issue.’
Under the British Mandate (1920-48) in Palestine the Zionists were shown the tools of occupation and repression that were second nature to British imperialism – massacres, torture, emergency powers, censorship, counter-insurgency, and the night squads raiding villages and murdering people. When waves of Arab resistance arose in 1936 the British reacted by unleashing the RAF to drop powerful bombs on villages. The Air Commodore was the notorious Arthur Harris who believed “one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn” would satisfactorily solve the problem. Bombing attacks were carried out leaving some villages destroyed. They used Arab detainees as human shields. They were loaded in trucks at the front of convoys to run over landmines and be blown to pieces. They pioneered torture methods like the Hoist and waterboarding subsequently refined and used in secret CIA sites during the 2001 so-called ‘War on Terror’. One detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was first tortured at a secret CIA site in Thailand in 2002 and moved around the world to other CIA sites. He was waterboarded 83 times, shut in a coffin-like boxes for days, hosed with freezing water, deprived of sleep and threatened with rape. Transferred to Guantanamo in 2006 he still remains there uncharged. This torture programme was authorised at the highest levels of US government.
Having gained the Mandate for Iraq in 1920 the British were eager to subdue any sign of rebellion. They bombed Iraqi and Kurdish people and used poison gas. RAF Wing Commander Chamier said “All available aircraft must be collected, the attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle”. Nothing changes. In the 2003 Iraq war it is estimated that up to a million people died. That war was sold to the public by the former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair on the basis that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction including missiles that could reach London in 45 minutes. All of it – as he knew – was fiction. Afterwards Blair was richly rewarded and is now a multi-millionaire.
Direct colonisation gradually, for the most part, gave way to other means of controlling key areas of the world, such as installing compliant rulers and using economic might to dominate oppressed nations. This was usually accompanied by threats of force and coups d’etats. Mark Curtis of Declassified UK has counted 83 British military interventions in 47 countries since 1945. ‘The episodes range from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest.’ In addition, Britain has planned or executed 42 attempts to remove foreign governments in 27 countries since 1945 .‘This has involved the intelligence agencies, covert and overt military interventions and assassinations’.
The Mask is Off
We are ruled by lawless gangsters in suits. They have never cared about international law and increasingly national law. A regime that commits endless war crimes abroad cannot be a democracy at home.
In a telling example in April 2024, David Cameron, the then Foreign Secretary (and former Prime Minister) phoned Karim Khan, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, berated and threatened him for preparing to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. He told the Prosecutor that applying for arrest warrants for Israeli officials would be like ‘dropping a hydrogen bomb.’ Cameron has not suffered any repercussions for this illegal obstruction of justice. But Prosecutor Khan was sanctioned by the US having his US visa revoked, his family banned from travelling to the US and his UK bank accounts frozen. Four ICC judges have also been sanctioned. Recently, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, an indefatigable advocate for Palestinian rights, produced a report ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide’. It names large corporations who enable the genocide in Gaza. Albanese has now been sanctioned. So much for international law.
Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor, rather let the cat out of the bag when he defended Israel’s wholly illegal attacks on Iran, saying it was ‘dirty work Israel is doing for all of us’. A new redivision of the world between imperialist looters also explains why Western governments are increasingly beating the drums of regional and world war to keep and expand their spheres of influence, economic interests and power in the world. Britain identifies its immediate enemies as Russia and Iran with China as a longer-term prize. The government is planning to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027 reaching 3% in the next parliament. The recent NATO summit decided to raise military spending in all NATO countries to a massive 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. This will require a level of austerity in Britain of which the current welfare cuts are merely a prelude.
When the bellicose Prime Minister Keir Starmer launched the National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British People in a Dangerous World, he reiterated his deep commitment to NATO, adding:
‘The front line, if you like, is here’
The Strategy stated: “For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario.”
The ’civilized’ masks have been ripped off. The British state’s naked, unconcealed support for the genocide in Gaza is a sign of the West’s plans for the Middle East and new and devastating wars to come. These war plans will increase authoritarian government and repression by the organs of state. An organised, durable anti-imperialist movement must be built to fight this effectively. The courage shown by those protestors resisting lawfare and Terror laws, like the SOAS 2 and many others, will be needed in the years ahead.
Under attack, We Fight Back!
An Injury to One is an Injury to All!