How, perhaps, might we be eloquent
when we have no platform
no voice that you might hear?
Let us resort to metaphor
daubing red paint and
releasing red smoke
as symbolic as last supper bread and wine
Are you conveniently deaf
when we question you?
Can you not answer with other than meaningless polemic?
“we are doing what we can”
while doing nothing
Or is it too hard to admit
as some might do,
in unguarded moments, that
“Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”?[i]
We have not yet begun to beat your swords into ploughshares
your spears into pruning hooks
yet placing paint upon your war machines
is more offensive to you
than a 500lb bomb dropped on Al-Baqa Café
As Zarah speaks
“to equate a spray can of paint with a suicide bomb is not just absurd;
It is grotesque”[ii]
as is the equation to democracy
of the banning of protest,
against genocide
and the supply of weapons to the perpetrators of slaughter,
absurd and grotesque
When Dan Jarvis proclaims that we
“do not share ‘their’ values”[iii]
who is the group of whom he speaks?
and what are their values?
They are the values of “legitimate business activities”[iv]
those who manufacture death
parliamentarians who do not represent us[v]
whose response to the crimes of their allies
is to “criminalise solidarity and to continue to export lethal jets that are decimating Gaza”[vi]
Why are those who disrupt the manufacture of arms terrorists?
While those who create and control the “killing fields”[vii]
those who give orders to deliberately shoot at unarmed Gazans waiting for food
those who do so
those who supply the weapons
the billionaires, the bureaucrats and military chiefs
are blameless, canonized?
Doublethink and doublespeak have brought us here, to where
war is peace
freedom is slavery, and
ignorance is strength
[i] German Chancellor Friedrich Merz
[ii] Zarah Sultana in Common’s debate regarding the proscription of Palestine Action 2 July 2025, a vote in favour of proscription of 385 for to 26 against
[iii] Same debate referring to Palestine Action as not sharing “our” values
[iv] House of Commons 23 June 2025
[v] Do not swallow the lie that “Sir” Keir Starmer received a high vote. Starmer’s Labour received 2 million LESS votes than Corbyn’s Labour, whilst Corbyn lost to Johnson. The English first past the post voting system and the Reform party achieved Starmer’s majority by splitting the non-Labour vote and allowing Labour MPs with modest votes to be elected. See, for example, The Spectator 6 July 2024 “Labour’s Potemkin landslide”,
[vi] ibid
[vii] Haaretz 27 June 2025. If such statements are printed in the Israeli press, can the questioning of such statements be denied or questioned?
