Weaponising Morality and the Zone of Interest

The idea that Palestine Action – people taking NVDA against the weapons of genocide – should be proscribed as a ‘terrorist group’ is a pitiful indictment of our current government’s complicity in atrocities in Gaza and of the absurdity of our current predicament.

Palestine Action’s response was clear:

“Today we exposed Britain’s direct involvement in the genocide, and how ordinary people can act to stop it. In response, the political establishment rush to call us “terrorists”, whilst they enact the worst crimes against humanity. No amount of smears or intimidation tactics will waver our solidarity with Palestine. We will break every link in the genocidal supply chain.”

They deserve all of our immediate solidarity.

The basis of the ‘outrage’ is that moral authority rests with the state, with the military, and not with citizens, ordinary people: you and I. That is an absurdist claim to make given both the history of the British state and what we have been watching unfold before our eyes for many years, grotesquely intensified since October 7, 2023.

The shocking level of state violence by Israel is now spooling outwards having legislative effects on its own backers as the level of internal repression in the West amplifies. Just as the ‘conflict’ is spreading throughout the region, the violence is coming home.

A History of Authoritarianism

The roots of this descent into authoritarianism and the criminalisation of legitimate protest go back decades. When to date it from? The idea that at least 139 undercover officers spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and 2010? The idea floated, amidst her chaotic regime of ‘domestic extremists’ that was put out by Prime Minister Theresa May, including that people advocating a Scottish democracy should be equated with ISIS? (see On Separatists and Extremists – if you don’t believe me).

We know from the Spycops Scandal that this has a deep history. We now know that a body called the SPL (Subversion in Public Life) was established in the 1980s comprising senior civil servants, MI5 and Special Branch. This sought to control and blacklist trade unionists. Whenever you put your mark in Britain’s long descent into authoritarianism, cheered-on by the rabid tabloids, we are where we are, and it is a Labour Government enacting this.

The absurdity of it all would make your head swivel. As the writer Ben Wray has said: “Britain is a country where those wanted by the ICC for war crimes write columns in The Times and those resisting genocide get proscribed as ‘terrorists’. A deeply malevolent, authoritarian country.”

If you can be proscribed as a terrorist organisation for vandalism and breaking and entering then the UK is in a very dangerous place indeed, one where categories of behaviour, and real threat and criminality elide into a confusion, a mess of unfocused outrage. Except there is no outrage for what is being done on our behalf by a political elite divorced from reality, detached from the people, and wholly captured by powers they don’t disclose.

This is a travesty of contemporary Britain, but sadly, not a surprise.

What is required of you is your silence, your obedience. What is required of you is a sullen compliance: do nothing at all, look away. Yet Palestine Action say simply:

“Ordinary people can take military planes out of service, destroy weapons inside arms factories and pressure companies to end their complicity. We are not powerless. Through direct action, we can break the global genocidal supply chain.”

Isn’t it funny how, if people stand up to tyranny elsewhere, far away, or long ago, we celebrate it: the crowd starting the boos against Nicolae Ceaușescu; the man standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square; the civil rights leaders opposing brutality in the south of America, the ANC fighting apartheid. Yet here we are, encouraged to criminalise protest against genocide and quietly being drawn into the condemnation. It’s insidious how this happens, and how susceptible to believing that genocide is justified, that dehumanising people is acceptable, that war crimes should be ignored, that ethnic cleansing is a … solution.

Never again.

But the brutal reality is that what is going-on has been foreshadowed and everyone knows it.

As I wrote a year ago: “The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill has effectively ushered in a Police State. Even as the undercover policing inquiry continues to reveal appalling abuses by police spying on peaceful campaigners – the police are being given new unprecedented powers of arrest and surveillance.”

As George Monbiot has pointed out: “These are the state-of-emergency laws you would expect in the aftermath of a coup. But there is no public order emergency, just an emergency of another kind, that the protesters targeted by this legislation are trying to stop: the collapse of Earth systems. We are being compelled by law to accept the destruction of the living world.”

And so the much derided “Omnicause” – a fantasy coined by the gammon right and its adjacent dullards pontificating from their blogs, or their Times columns, or the pulpits of outrage in various Scottish comics triggers them all. The Omnicause is Capitalism and no doubt you will be celebrating the latest ‘crackdown’ as you celebrated the last. A generation is waking up to the links between imperialism, settler colonialism, extractivism and the doomsday cult currently arguing in favour of ‘re-opening the coal mines’ and Drill Baby Drill. This awakening is terrifying and the scribes and sycophants who man the newsbeat are springing into action to act-out their duties.

One of the things that is terrifying about people making common cause across struggles and causes is that, for far too long, the Left has been hidebound by single-issue politics played out in isolation. Solidarity is terrifying to the ruling class. Consciousness, more so.

Everyone who speaks out will be smeared. We know the playbook from the meakest mildest questioner to the more militant protestor, they will all be dragged into the dirt. The targets are as varied as makes the point, from Labour leaders such as Harold Wilson, Neil Kinnock, Tony Benn, Michael Foot or Jeremy Corbyn, to activists such as Greta Thunberg, Smári McCarthy, Julian Assange or protest movements from Greenham Common through to the Pollok Free State. You don’t have to agree with these individuals or causes (or indeed give them a free pass on their individual behaviours) to see the connection between ‘threat’ and ‘response’, which is incompatible with living in a functioning democracy.

Knowledge is Not Power

Unlike previous atrocities and genocide, we know everything. Despite the media bias and the ceaseless Israeli propaganda, despite the front-loading of Western democracies with vast sums of dark money, despite the continual framing and curation of ‘narrative’, we still know everything.

Our response is on a spectrum from: internalizing rage; reflective impotence; turning away; taking part in sometimes meaningless activities (clicktivism, petitions, letter writing); to marches and protests (also sadly, and brutally often meaningless); through to more direct actions. At another end (sort of) of the spectrum is switching off, turning off, turning away, masking, or hyper-consumerism. But the chant of “while you were shopping the bombs were dropping” as an ‘J’Accuse‘ of the hyper consumer is darkly poignant but also pointless.

In this context, Palestine Action, like climate activists have taken a stand against the modern horrors, and been criminalised for it. From spray-painting buildings of those corporations most invested in fossil fuels through to spray-painting ‘two military planes with red paint’. Our response to the Home Secretary proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist action must be one of solidarity. This can be expressed by condemnation, financial support, or amplifying their voice. The alternative is giving up and giving in, remaining silent as our rights are stripped away. This is yet another Niemöller Moment.

The Zone of Interest

Our response to protest has been conditioned by the media’s shaping of climate action protests which we have learned to snear at and condemn. As the climate catastrophe accelerates, the relationship between ‘reality’ and the imagined world closes. Hot right now? When you realise that this will be the coolest summer you’ll ever remember, that might hit home. Equally, as the level of state violence intensifies and the efforts to mask, hide or propagandise the horrors fails, the ‘actionists’, as they call themselves, must be criminalized and demonised.

Systems breakdown and failure can only be responded to with violence and repression, it seems. It’s not clear what course correction or event might change this feeling of inevitable descent. Nothing exemplifies this more than the idea of people resenting being able to ‘go about their business’ as if daily life can just trundle on amidst the horror. And it can, no doubt.

As Paul Kearns writes in the Irish Times (‘As Palestinians starve an hour’s drive away in Gaza, here in Israel, everyone went to the beach‘):

“June is here. Summer has arrived. And the beaches in Tel Aviv are full. Just an hour’s drive away, two million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation. The incongruity of those few words and the bizarre contrast of imagery – the busy beach in Tel Aviv, the dystopia in Gaza – are hard to digest, I imagine, for many in Ireland. They are perhaps shocking, incomprehensible, and sickening even. This, however, is the reality of life, and of course death, here in Israel and nearby Gaza.”

For Ireland, read Scotland.

This is the ambience of atrocity and its mirror, the ‘fascist feeling’.

It is, and this is deeply uncomfortable to say, the land depicted in Zone of Interest, the Academy Award-winning film by Jonathan Glazer which is a study in complicity, banality and the human ability to zone-out and turn away from atrocity in pursuit of self-interest.

The film is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife Hedwig, and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp. Glazer has described his characters not as monsters but as “non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors”, people who manage to turn profound evil into white noise.”

It sounds dismally familiar, though the class issue is a distinction worth noticing.

Palestine Action reject being drawn into the Zone of Interest, and urge us all to do the same. They may be imprisoned under a wave of collective indifference, but the issues aren’t going away. They can be put in jail but what they are objecting to can’t be so easily swept away.

In our silo culture different issues compete for our attention, the needle of our moral compass and our political energy. But in today’s meta-crisis these silos are collapsing before us. These issues pervade not just our coming Holyrood elections but our wider society and all of the interactions we are supported by: the modern ‘enslaved people’ who support western lifestyle; the colonial foundations of modern wealth; the reality of global south to north climate relations; and the witnessing of contemporary genocide in Palestine.

As Pankaj Mishra, wrote in “The Shoah after Gaza”, published in the London Review of Books (in 2024):

“Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children. Adding that, Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians is just one of the gruesome riddles presented to us by Western politicians and journalists.”

If we struggle to absorb these atrocities it’s hard not to buckle under the impression of helplessness, and turn away from the horror. That is the profound message from Palestine Action, and many others like them.

As Naomi Klein writes of the film the Zone of Interests haunting message: “It’s not that these people don’t know that an industrial-scale killing machine whirs just beyond their garden wall. They have simply learned to lead contented lives with ambient genocide.”

“Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities, but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw benefit from them.”

The situation on the ground is getting worse, if worse can be imagined. Israel’s attack on Iran, and America’s imminent ‘support’ (if that is the case) has given a cover of darkness and misdirection.

Amnesty International yesterday stated that: “With the world looking elsewhere, the militarization of aid adds another layer to Israel’s deliberate imposition of genocidal conditions against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed and injured at or near aid distribution points since Israel’s weaponized “humanitarian” aid distribution system was imposed at the end of May. Families are being forced into an impossible choice: die of hunger or die trying to get food. Seeking food should never be a death trap. Israel must end its genocide and lift the blockade now.”

Palestine Action have decreed that:  “We will break every link in the genocidal supply chain” but what’s becoming clear is that our silence, our indifference is part of that supply chain. They challenge the very idea that Israel is insatiable, unstoppable and omnipotent and we are powerless and our position hopeless. In that they are hugely important, both symbolically and actually. The moment demands we learn from their example.

And what next? The behaviour of Israel and our unconditional support seems to have no end, no threshold. The ‘war’ is escalating and we ‘Britain; are being dragged further into it, despite widespread public revulsion for it. The claim that Israel is “defending itself” in attacking Iran – promoted by France, Germany, Britain, the European Union, the G7 and the US – should be understood as a further assault on the foundational principles of international law.

As the journalist Jonathan Cook points out: “The assertion is premised on the idea that Israel’s attack was “pre-emptive” – potentially justified if Israel could show there was an imminent, credible and severe threat of an attack or invasion by Iran that could not be averted by other means.And yet, even assuming there is evidence to support Israel’s claim it was in imminent danger – there isn’t – the very fact that Iran was in the midst of talks with the US about its nuclear programme voided that justification.”

Image Credit: Amnesty International and Euan Sutherland