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It was 6am. London. A few days before Christmas. My four-year-old is singing at the top of her lungs and charging around my parents’ house on a hunt for the perfect crayon. There is nothing particularly unusual about this scene except for the fact that the crayon in question was for Greta Thunberg. The world’s most well-known activist needed a writing tool and my daughter, O, was on the case. (Remember this crayon: it’s going to be important later on.)
O, I should note, had absolutely no idea who Greta was. We’re not longtime chums or anything like that. Rather Greta was in London to support the Palestine Action-linked hunger strikers. She needed somewhere to stay and my dad, who is a Palestinian refugee, and appreciative of anyone speaking up about the place where he was born but can’t return to live in, keeps an open house for activists who need a bed or a meal. When the visit had been hastily arranged by a friend of a friend of my sister a couple days earlier, we’d tried to explain to O that Greta was a famous activist who tried to help people and the environment.
“Does famous mean beautiful?” my princess-obsessed child asked. Oh dear, I thought, I have failed as a parent and a feminist.
“No, it doesn’t. And remember being beautiful is not important – what’s important is being kind,” I said, trying to redeem some feminist points.
“How dare you!” O replied. This has been her favourite catchphrase for a while now. I have no idea where she picked it up; probably from a kid’s show. I had thought nothing of it until the surprise Greta visit.
“Please don’t say that while Greta is here,” I told O. I didn’t want her to think we were making fun of her memorable rebuke. But once again, I failed at parenting: everyone knows that the best way to get a kid to keep doing something is to suggest they stop doing it.
While Greta may be famous, the hunger strikers she was coming to support are definitely not; they have had very little mainstream media attention. Indeed, if you are reading this in the US, you may not have heard about them at all. So, in brief, eight activists awaiting trials for alleged offences relating to Palestine Action have been on hunger strike since 2 November, the anniversary of the Balfour declaration.
This is where things get tricky: I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say about Palestine Action in this column without getting chucked in jail myself. Last July, you see, the British government took the extraordinary, and hugely criticized, step of terming the group a terrorist organization on the same level as the Islamic State militant group. This is despite the fact that Palestine Action has killed nobody; its efforts are focused on trying to shut down weapons manufacturers enabling the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Even the government’s own intelligence assessment, a declassified version of which was obtained by the New York Times, undercut its condemnations of the group, finding that most of their activities “would not be classified as terrorism” under Britain’s legal definition. Still, the British government has been very busy arresting thousands – many of whom are elderly activists – for the “crime” of peacefully holding up a sign saying: “I support Palestine Action.”
I’m also not sure what I am allowed to say about the Palestine Action activists who are in jail – many of whom are being held on remand over alleged criminal damage at an arms factory. Last time I tried to write about the Palestine Action prisoners, in a column about how the UK has a free speech problem, a lot of detail was edited out because of legal sensitivities.
I think the British government will allow me to say that the hunger strikers are now on the brink of irreversible damage and death. And I think I can safely say that they are striking, in part, because of the excessively punitive conditions in which they are being held and to bring attention to Elbit Systems, the Israel-based weapons manufacturer with several UK factories.
Back to my famous houseguest now. I’d vaguely thought that Greta might turn up with some sort of security person in tow. She is, after all, a small woman who inspires extraordinary amounts of anger from some powerful people. Donald Trump has called her “crazy”; Dave Portnoy, the influential founder of Barstool Sports, has called for her to be bombed. US Senator Lindsey Graham similarly suggested Israel should destroy the flotilla that Greta was on. But despite being highly recognizable and irrationally hated by many, Greta takes public transport everywhere with seemingly little regard for her safety. She took the train to my parents’ house carrying a backpack bigger than her body. Though it seems she hadn’t found space in the bag for a crayon.
Once O had offered a selection of crayons and a piece of paper, Greta went off to make a sign. But not before my daughter had decided to scream “HOW DARE YOU!” at the top of her lungs. Luckily, Greta found this amusing.
If you’ve been reading the news lately, you may have an inkling of what happened next. Greta wrote a sign saying “I support Palestine Action prisoners” and got arrested. My daughter ended up seeing the video of this arrest and, let me tell you, trying to explain government overreach and the weaponization of anti-terror laws to a four-year-old is not the easiest task.
“The thing is,” I told O, “the police didn’t like the words that Greta had written on the sign.” My daughter couldn’t quite get her head around this. She’s watched a lot of Paw Patrol, which is basically copaganda: a cutesy canine glorification of the police state. In her eyes, the police are always the good guys and only bad people go to jail. Now, however, the police were arresting the young woman who had been eating crumpets with her earlier that morning and she was very confused. As the video clearly shows, Greta was sitting very quietly doing absolutely nothing except holding a sign.
“Did the police not like the crayon she used?” O asked. “Oh, of course not, sweetie,” we reassured her. “The crayon was perfect. And you can’t get in trouble for using a crayon.” Although as soon as I said that, I wasn’t sure if that bit was actually accurate. Was supplying a crayon to someone writing a sign in support of hunger strikers associated with Palestine Action an offence in the UK now?
There are an awful lot of people in the UK looking at horror as the US marches towards authoritarianism. And that horror is entirely justified; but Britons must pay closer attention to the horrors unfurling at home.
I’m back in the US now and I can’t quite fathom what Britain, under the leadership of a former human rights lawyer, has become. A place where you can get arrested simply for holding a sign supporting an organization whose main purpose is targeting weapons companies. A place where freedom of speech and the right to peacefully protest is under sustained attack. A place where the government has done nothing meaningful to respond to sustained warnings of complicity in genocide but works overtime to lock up people protesting that genocide. A place where it looks very likely that a protester might soon starve to death and it will make absolutely no difference to the ghouls in charge.
As Greta (and my daughter) might say, how dare you, Sir Keir Starmer. How dare you.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
