In the Scottish countryside, not far from Edinburgh, there lives a 52-year-old woman named Claire who has never thought of herself as one of history’s actors. She describes her work as “low-level administration”. She keeps no social media accounts. Her days, as Al Jazeera’s Laura O’Connor reports, are ordered around a dog, books, and baking — the small, defensible pleasures of a quiet life. Until three years ago, she did not consider herself political.
Three years ago. Count backward from this October and the arithmetic tells its own story: a war came through distant screens into a house in the Scottish hills, and would not leave.
Across the bridge
The date with which the reporting fixes the scale of what followed is November 11, 2023. On that day in London, a march in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza carried the crowd over Vauxhall Bridge, above the Thames — one of those images in which a movement suddenly becomes visible to itself, no longer a list of grievances but a body of people filling a street.
In the years since, by Al Jazeera’s account, hundreds of thousands of Britons have taken to the streets, protesting what the outlet calls Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and — here lies the harder edge of the movement — what those marchers see as their own government’s role in the conflict. The protesters are drawn from across the country’s working population: from the arts, from the railways, from financial services, from administration. People, that is, with salaries and supervisors, with reference checks and livelihoods to lose.
And lose they have risked. The reporting describes Britons who have accepted professional and legal repercussions for the sake of standing with the Palestinians — freedom and reputation placed on the table, as O’Connor puts it, alongside the placards.
The state’s reply
Every government confronted by such a crowd must choose its instrument. Britain has reached for laws as well as concessions. The movement’s answers have been met in part with prohibition: Palestine Action, the direct-action group, has been proscribed, and supporting it has become an arrestable offence — one for which police recently detained a 94-year-old human rights barrister who told reporters she had spent months trying to be arrested. Even so, the pressure has moved the palace, if only by inches: at Labour’s conference, Britain’s foreign minister declared Israel’s conduct a stain on the world and told the party its critics on Palestine had been right.
What strikes one in this account is the inversion. Governments imagine a protest movement as a rabble, professional agitators swollen by fools. Then they look closer and find bookkeepers. Railwaymen. A woman near Edinburgh who bakes.
It is easy to make a crowd march when the television brings war into every parlour. It is harder to make the crowd go home — harder still when the crowd is made of citizens who had arranged their whole lives to stay out of the way of power, only to conclude that power had found them anyway.
Claire still lives in the countryside, still keeps the dog, still reads, still bakes. The quiet life has not been abolished. It has simply acquired a second meaning: no longer a retirement from the world, but a thing to be defended against it — and, at the price of repressions she never imagined signing up for, against the state that claims to act in her name.