A Holocaust survivor’s daughter has just protested against the government’s ban of non-violent anti-genocide group Palestine Action. The police didn’t just arrest her, they also had to let her go again due to a rookie mistake. As she said:

If my de-arrest does anything, it shows up the ridiculousness of this law, and may it be one tiny contribution towards the downfall of this nasty Starmer Labour government!

Carolyn Gelenter has taken action against the ban previously. She has also regularly marched in solidarity with Palestine during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, criticising the increasingly hostile behaviour of the police. And on Saturday 22 November, she decided to risk arrest again at the Defend Our Juries ‘Lift the Ban’ protest in Tavistock Square, London.

If the context wasn’t so serious, what happened next might actually be funny.

Palestine Action—Police are in a right state

Explaining her second arrest, Gelenter said:

This time, the arresting officers were much younger and clearly didn’t know how to lift and even dropped people, myself included (I had so many layers of clothing on that I landed softly!). I was also determined to make sure I had my backpack on my back (as last time they left the pack and I had no glasses, book or keys to get into my flat!).

But the arresting officer managed to forget my stool (which thankfully one of my friends picked up for me) and, even worse and more to the point, he was having such trouble managing to state why I was being arrested and to figure out how to lift me that he also left my incriminating sign where I had been sitting!

After a 40-minute drive to the mobile processing unit, police officers took her into a “very long marquee”. And she said:

There was a senior detective who was checking all the arrests and who approached the officer who had arrested me and asked where my sign was. The officer said he had left it because it was too difficult to carry me and pick up the sign at the same time (I think we really need to train our police officers better!).

The detective then said: ‘well, what was on the sign?’ The arresting officer said ‘it definitely said the words’, to which the detective replied ‘which words?’ Unfortunately, the arresting officer couldn’t remember the exact wording but he said ‘it’s all on my camera’. ‘Not good enough!’ said the detective, and ‘you need to de-arrest her’.

At this point, I had to intervene and say ‘I definitely had a sign saying I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action’. But the detective replied that ‘it wasn’t good enough evidence coming from the arrestee’!

She wonders if the importance of the physical evidence might “be helpful for others’ defence.”

She added:

I do wonder whether the police in their own way are trying to sabotage the law that many of them find as much of a waste of time and resources as those being arrested and the wider public do.

The importance of ‘testing a ridiculous law’

Gelenter told the Canary:

The whole point of the Lift the Ban actions was to test this ridiculous law that has created terrorists out of a dedicated, passionate and fed up group of young people who felt so strongly about the genocide in Gaza, and our government’s complicity, that they put their futures on the line.

They didn’t of course know at the time that the government would proscribe their group ‘Palestine Action’, hence elevating the smashing of arms factories and splashing paint on an RAF fighter jet causing £1,000,000 damage to a crime of terrorism rather than criminal damage.

She added:

This week the government, under the guise of freeing up the backlog of court cases for the most serious of crimes, is discussing legislation that will restrict jury trials.

Given too that the government replaced a sympathetic judge at the Judicial Review of the ruling that proscribed ‘Palestine Action’ with 3 judges — 2 of whom have known links to the Israel lobby; we can only guess the fate of the ‘Palestine Action’ activists.

This context has encouraged her to keep ‘testing this ridiculous law’ as a historic duty.

As she explained:

These actions, I am certain, will be part of our history (like the poll tax riots) and are absolutely key in fighting for the future of our democracy (or for a better one than we have been experiencing under Starmer’s leadership).

Whether we are able to get the ban lifted and the young people in prison without bail a lighter sentence, who knows? But I for one decided, having been arrested once, I was going to get arrested again when the numbers are becoming crucial.

She also asserted that people throughout the country can see through the government’s wasteful political repression, saying:

Every single person I have spoken to, no matter what their political leanings, has thought arresting people for holding a sign was a waste of police resourcing and taxpayers’ money.

As a Holocaust survivor’s descendant, ‘I cannot be a bystander to genocide and authoritarianism’

Gelenter also insisted:

It is difficult to be a bystander when one’s own father had been a survivor of the Holocaust. I cannot be a bystander to the genocide in Gaza, to the escalating violence perpetrated by the IDF in the West Bank and this phoney peace agreement that has not even given lip service to the desires or needs of the Gazans whose lives have been destroyed by our government just as much as by the Israeli state.

But I also cannot be a bystander to the deliberate dismantling of our democratic institutions. I am not naive and am aware that what is happening now is an acceleration of a process that really began many decades ago.

Britain under a Starmer government has seen a continuation of austerity disproportionately impacting on poor people, a culture of resentment and blame of immigrants and refugees for the lack of services and cost of living, and now a dismantling of a legal system that at least on paper write everyone as equal, even if not in practice.

Regardless of her personal story or reasons, of course, Gelenter has been taking an incredibly important stand for democracy and freedom. As have many other brave people around the country.

History will remember them as heroes.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

This post was originally published on Canary.