Grieving for Gaza, Taking back Power for Palestine and us all

In September 2025, Scotland parted company with the UK.

This has happened before. 

• It happened during the cruelty of the Thatcher years when we built up to regaining our Parliament
• It happened in the Blair years when we built up to electing an SNP minority government, as voters shifted from Labour to SNP mostly due to horror at Blair’s support for America’s invasion of Iraq. 
• It is happening now in the Starmer year, not just because of his kicking down at the poor and cosying up to the arms manufacturers, but specifically due to his dead-eyed support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

What Israel is undertaking in Gaza is so much worse than ‘state terrorism’, so much worse than ‘war’. It is deliberately annihilating civilians including children – trying to eradicate a whole people. Once medics arrive to provide help to civilians after an Israeli attack, they are deliberately targeted, just as journalists are. 

One Palestinian medic recently wrote to say:

“This video shows an attack happened 2 hours ago in my neighbourhood, I was born and raised in this area.  It shows my neighbour called XXXX, a father of 2 kids, was injured in his head with a shrapnel and bled to death as you see. A total of 8 innocent persons was killed in this attack”

A day later another health worker sent this message:

“I am deeply tired. Exhausted – not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually.

“I am overwhelmed by the silence of the world. It breaks me.

I have lost the feeling that we still have our humanity 

“My family has been forcibly displaced to the south, under the threat of bombings carried out by robotic machines. My mother recently underwent a complicated surgery to remove a tumor—under inhumane and impossible conditions. She now needs ongoing medical care… and we simply cannot provide it.

“I am tired of speaking about “staying alive”- because, really… what kind of life is this?”

In 2025, this Labour government is fully committed to enabling a terrifying genocide. 

It proscribes as a ‘terrorist organisation’ a civil society group – Palestine Action – that has successfully interrupted the flow of military support for that genocide. The definition of terrorism is “the use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals”. This describes what Israel is doing – and the UK Government enabling – in Gaza. Palestine Action harms no one. It simply tries to protect life.

On 9th August four of us sat outside the UK Government building – Queen Elizabeth House – in Edinburgh. We wrote signs saying ‘I oppose Genocide. I support Palestine Action’ – and sat for an hour with a large witness circle of a hundred or so folk gathering around us in silent powerful support of this ‘Defend our Juries’ action. The police did not intervene, in sharp contrast to the Met Police in London who arrested almost 500 people for doing the same there. You can be sentenced for up to 14 years for supporting a proscribed organisation. 

On 6th September, between 70 and 90 of us repeated that silent action for an hour in Edinburgh, with the same signs. Meanwhile, over 1,500 did the same in London, 800 of whom were arrested. In Edinburgh no-one was arrested at the vigil. It was a vigil where several thousand came in silent support or sang and mourned at the edge of the square. 

In Edinburgh, there was an alignment of movements, and even those understandably furious with the police as representatives of a state supporting genocide were able to respect the quiet determination of the ‘Defend our Juries’ vigil. 

Those organising and stewarding the protest in Edinburgh on 6th September did a brilliant job. They co-ordinated our diversity so it became a mutually supportive strength, rather than a divisive clash. 

• The ‘Stop Rosebank’ demo at QE house went ahead the hour before, 
• The ‘All Under One Banner’ march headed to Holyrood and vastly outnumbered the anti-asylum seeker protest, and many then came to QE house. 
• The Stop the War march came from the Mound to join the ‘Defend our Juries’ silent protest outside QE house. The marchers carried placards saying ‘Lift the ban, Defend the Right to protest’, and carried banners from Stop the War Scotland, the Scottish Trade Union Congress, Scottish CND, Glasgow Trades Council and many more. 

The fact no one was arrested in Edinburgh for holding such signs is mirrored in the political response in Scotland.

On August 2nd, John Swinney acknowledged that what is happening in Gaza is indisputably genocide. On September 3rd, the Scottish Parliament voted for a full boycott of the state of Israel and companies complicit in genocide, in a motion supported by the SNP and Greens and opposed by the LibDems and Tories (while Labour abstained). John Swinney has now paused the Scottish Government’s new funding of arms companies, while Westminster continues to actively support arms deals with Israel.

Scotland is moving in this direction because people on the streets are protesting and speaking up for society as a whole. This would not have happened without pressure, but it also would not have happened if we didn’t have our own Parliament, nor if we had our own Parliament but with a Labour Party in charge that obeys London. 

Are we moving into new territory with the Holyrood elections approaching in May?

Will this become one of the defining issues that separates out the SNP and Greens from the rest, one that demonstrates why it matters that we decide for ourselves how we respond to the world? 

If so, will we be voting for a positive alternative or simply against something worse? Labour down south seems to be relying on people’s revulsion for Reform in order to retain votes, while mimicking Reform so disturbingly that they are legitimising Reform’s rhetoric and opening the door for them.

In Scotland we are in a different dilemma, and maybe it is a deeper one.

• Do we vote for mainstream parties like the SNP who make some of the right noises, especially internationally, yet continue the same economics that increases poverty, and drives support, not just by the bigoted but by the desperate, for far right responses that at least promise change, even if that change makes matters way worse for everyone except those who have long lost their souls to power and greed.
• Or do we create something way more radical, something that can reach out to those made so desperate by this system of inequality? When locals protest at asylum seekers being housed near them in Falkirk, of course, the far right makes hatred the core part of the protest, but unless we address the poverty our system mercilessly creates, we leave the way open for the far right to reap their bitter reward.

If we need something way more radical then is it a return to Corbyn in the form of his and Sultana’s Your Party? Last Friday’s oversubscribed (and unauthorised?) gathering of Your Party supporters in Glasgow sounds as if it was a creative ferment, bringing the left together in a way Saturday’s protest organisers also did.

If we need something way more radical, might that include:

1. A Scottish Green Party echoing their sister party down south in communicating the level of change needed. A left party like Corbyn and Sultana’s getting its act together swiftly enough in Scotland to contest May’s election. And an alliance between the two.
2. A way more radical constitutional offering than independence. One that moves beyond the binary of either claiming to stand together with our neighbours down south or claiming Scotland can somehow alone break free of the institutions of Empire it played a major role in constructing, while those institutions stay in place and block any legal route to self-determination.

• Simply shouting louder will not get us self-determination, and why should it if it means a continuation of the same economics that enriches a few while impoverishing and imperilling people and planet?
• Simply hoping that a radical UK government will come to power will not enable such a change to happen. Unless we model here in Scotland the change that needs to happen, we can’t expect there to be enough momentum for it to happen ‘there’ in the UK. Meanwhile they have all the power to stop such radical economic and constitutional change from happening, even if we vote in those parties that promise such change.

In the light of such a desperate situation, and in the light of the success of the pro-Palestine movement in Scotland that speaks for wider civil society and against complicity in genocide, could we take a leaf out of the ‘Defend our Juries’ book?

Not only has the Starmer government continued with the Tories anti-protest legislation, continued with punching down against the poor, and continued with its Reform-echoing approach to who belongs, it has also continued the attempt to stop juries from being able to make their decisions in light of the full truth about climate change, and now labels as ’terrorists’ those trying to peacefully oppose the terror this Labour government supports.

In essence:

1. We need to show that when we say ‘change’ we mean utter change from a system that has – until recently – largely worked well for one class and not for another. 
2. We need to dispense with politicians and political parties, not through some right wing ‘strong man’ destroying democracy, but through a deeper democracy where power is in the hands of ordinary people. 

What if people not politicians, media moguls or money men were in charge?

What if political decisions were made by a 100 citizens selected at random – like a jury – but as a representative sample of the population by gender, age, class, ethnicity, etc? 

What if they had that role for a year or two before being replaced (maybe 50 of the 100 each year) by another random representative sample of the population to take their place? 

They would be accountable to no shareholders or media tycoon or political party (who threaten to withdraw support if you try to make radical change). They would have no interest beyond making sure that when they return to being ordinary citizens after a year or two, they are returning to a society they have helped make better for everyone. 

One thing about such citizens’ assemblies is that members know they’ve been randomly selected, they know they don’t have expertise, and very few already have their minds made up in such a way that they can’t change their minds when presented with evidence. 

Such citizens assemblies need to be advised by experts from across the spectrum (including the spectrum of politics, culture and economics) and be supported and facilitated to deeply consider and discuss the evidence and then make up their own minds on how we reshape our political and economic and social system to enable the wellbeing of all. Critically, they need to not be facilitated by experts in assembly processes who are in hoc with existing governments, with their eye on future government contracts, but by assembly experts who have gained their expertise on the streets and in the struggle for social justice. 

If one or two of the political parties standing in the Holyrood election in May 2026 agreed to hand power to a decision-making citizens assembly, they could then vote in the chamber for the decisions proposed by such an assembly.

If such an electoral slate was successful, the powers that be might well try to close it down. 

But there would be nothing illegal about such a move – and on the surface no change to our political system. There would simply be the demonstration that the more you cut out the middleman, the more you enable ordinary citizens to reclaim rights and responsibility, and the more that real democracy and meaningful change becomes possible.

It would be ironic if the Tory then Labour attempt to crush juries and the right of ordinary citizens to hear the evidence and make up their own minds, led to a form of government where juries not politicians make the decisions. 

Is that any more of an outlandish dream than peace in Palestine is an outlandish dream? 

Or is it a way to not acquiesce to the nightmare, and instead move towards a world where tiny children play rather than have their brains blown out by technology we have subsidised and politicians we have acquiesced to?

In November the Courts in London may overturn the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, or they may not. In October, there will be another ‘Defend our Juries’ action. 

Now, and ongoing, there is murder in Palestine. 

It is not apartheid; it is ethnic cleansing. 

It is not war; it is genocide. 

To stop the genocide we have to dismantle the systems put in place by those in thrall to the war machine.

Can we not only defend Juries from being closed down by politicians, but advance juries so they replace politicians captured by a system driving us all over the precipice?

Postscript:

From mid-September to early October some of us will be walking from Skye to Glasgow, remembering how communities were cleared from their lands here and then used by Empire to clear other communities from their lands elsewhere in the world. What is happening in Gaza is a continuation of the same vicious clearances. We’ll be asking:

“In the hills and the cities, in the global north and global south, how do we reclaim lands and buildings that were stolen and are now used to make some extremely wealthy and others to struggle? How do we reclaim our past and future, through our actions in the present? How do we build trust and solidarity across our differences, so that we can finally end the system of domination?”