From Brighton with love: 25 years of grassroots solidarity toward the Palestinian cause

If you happened to be passing Churchill Square on a Saturday afternoon in Brighton, you probably saw a group of people near the Clock Tower with Palestinian flags handing out leaflets.

If you were curious enough to stop for a moment to take a flyer, you would read: "It's official. Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people is Apartheid."

The "official" part has been a recent addition to the flyers after three international human rights organisations - Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem and Amnesty International - each declared Israel to be engaging in Apartheid.

"I have a personal responsibility to play a part in the liberation of the Palestinian people"

The stall at Churchill square has been going every Saturday since 1997, with their only major interlude during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was also the same year that the Brighton and Hove Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (BHPSC) was established; one of the first of the 70 branches now in the UK.

BHPSC campaigns for the rights of the Palestinian people, including their right to self-determination and the right of return for refugees. They support “the struggle to achieve these rights against the dispossession and apartheid policies of the Israeli state and its military occupation of Palestinian lands” as they identify themselves on their official online website.

Attending the stall many times in the last months and chatting with many members makes you realise how this event has become part of the members’ lives.

Most of them are white middle-class and middle-aged people who have been committed to weekly solidarity activism for Palestine for years. This commitment raises questions about the reasons for being involved. What makes British activists consider the Palestinian cause as their cause? 

Commitment to Palestine

Ben Steele, the secretary of BHPSC, has been involved since 1999. He grew up in a Jewish family with parents who were pro-Zionist and supportive of Israel. As he tells The New Arab, “I have a personal responsibility to play in the liberation of the Palestinian people because I feel a kind of responsibility for what's happened.”

Ben adds, “I've travelled on my journey, which is a very long, complicated one. It started very gradually as a student when I first learned about the truth and Israel after the six-day war in 1967. I'm not alone in that; there are many Jewish people who feel very strongly that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people should not be done in our name."

Caroline O’Reilly, an activist at BHPSC, started to know about Palestine from her father and after she went on a visit to Israel and was shocked by what she saw there.

She then decided to do some volunteering work teaching English at An-Najah University in Nablus. In an interview with The New Arab, she told us that it “allowed me to see things on the ground and the daily life that Palestinians live under the occupation, and to see the apartheid wall, and the checkpoints."

These visits made committed her to activism in the UK. After she moved from London to Brighton in 2000, she joined BHPSC.

Caroline is at the Clock Tower every week, holding the megaphone encouraging people to sign a petition to support the Palestinian people, “I think because I’m a teacher, that’s why I like to use the megaphone,” Caroline says and laughs about it.

Working with the local community

The stall is not the only activity that BHPSC organises, there are many other activities aimed to engage with the local people of Brighton and Hove. These include public meetings, film screenings, music events, online talks and demonstrations.

Some of the activities have been with local schools, universities, churches, mosques and synagogues. As Ben tells The New Arab: “We have stopped some Israeli artistic groups from coming to Brighton because they knew that their event would be disrupted.

"We have also persuaded groups at Brighton University and Sussex University to stop collaborating with Israeli universities, and we have persuaded some local stores to stop stocking Israeli goods, particularly goods from Israeli settlements.”

"There is a gradual change happening towards ending the apartheid system in Palestine. I may not see it in my lifetime, which is horrible, but I think I'll see it in my children's lifetime"

Adopting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) strategy is one of the tools that BHPSC focuses on. Calling to boycott does not only target Israeli institutions but also any company involved in illegal Israeli settlements. 

One of these campaigns is Boycott Puma. Its aim is to end Puma's sponsorship of the Israeli Football Association because “the IFA operates in illegal Israeli settlements on land stolen from Palestinians.”

Last February, dozens of activists protested in front of two sports stores in Brighton that sell Puma products asking people to boycott Puma and handing the managers of these shops a letter about why they should boycott Puma.

EcoStream out of Brighton

One of the biggest successes for BHPSC members was kicking EcoStream out of Brighton.

In the summer of 2012, EcoStream opened a store on Western Road in Brighton, which became an area of conflict between the BHPSC and Sussex Friends of Israel.

The BHPSC group started their ethical-consuming protest every week outside the new store because “the shop’s partner SodaStream’s main factory is located on an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, where Palestinian villages have been destroyed and the population removed to make room for Israeli colonists and businesses.”

At the same time, the Sussex Friends of Israel group started to protest in support of the store and against BHPSC.

Palestinian and Israeli flags could be seen every Saturday for almost two years in front of the store, where dozens of people protested.

This caused a lot of tension, and some people even got arrested.

Caroline was one of them. “I had a megaphone, and Nelson Mandela had just died that day. I said, 'he was a hero and pro-Palestinian,' and then a policewoman came over and warned me if I continued using the megaphone, I would be arrested,” Caroline says.

“I asked her why are the pro-Israeli group allowed to play music. I continued to use the megaphone, and then they came and arrested me.” In 2014, EcoStream decided to close the store in the city. This was a big victory for the BHPSC.

Challenging Future

Even though there is a strong presence of BHPSC in the city, there are a few other serious challenges the movement might face in the future.

One of these challenges is the attempts by the UK government to outlaw the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israel and stop it from using the same tactics that helped liberate South Africa.

These attempts have already succeeded in other places through the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism by many UK universities.

The IHRA definition includes a clause that says that: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” is anti-Semitism.

Many Palestinian and Arab academics, journalists and intellectuals expressed their concerns about the IHRA, saying that “The IHRA (…) have been deployed mostly against left-wing and human rights groups supporting Palestinian rights and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign.”

Even Jewish groups oppose IHRA saying that “it involves shielding the state of Israel from accountability.”

Ben agrees that it’s a big problem considering it a “challenging environment to work where legislation has been proposed to make it almost illegal for us to campaign for Palestine because of the mythology around anti-Semitism."

"As a Jew myself, it's tough for me to believe that I am anti-Semitic; I'm certainly anti-Zionist, which is not the same, but of course, what Israel and pro-Israel activists in the UK are trying to achieve is an absolute equation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. They succeeded in Germany in the past, and now they are trying in the UK,” Ben told The New Arab.

Another challenge for the group is the age of the activists, most of them are aged over 50.

This raises the question about the continuity of the group as some of the key members have since passed away. There are no young people in the core group, though you can see a lot of young people in the big protests for Palestine in the city. 

Russell Craddock, a decades-long BHPSC member, told The New Arab that this issue has been discussed in internal meetings but thinks that “young activist people usually tend to do more radical actions, that’s why you see more young people in big protests or being active with radical movements like Palestine Action."

"Also, the Palestinian cause is not the only important one; there are other causes like climate change, gender politics, Black Lives Matter or Kill the Bill where people are being active. If you look at these movements, you can see the same age issue. People who are aged 30 or 40 are busier with building a career and family, and they have less time for committed activism,” Russell concluded.

Many members hope to see a change in the situation in Palestine, but they know it’s not easy and not going to happen soon. As Caroline tells us, “There is a gradual change happening towards ending the apartheid system in Palestine. I may not see it in my lifetime, which is horrible, but I think I'll see it in my children's lifetime.”

Rabeea Eid is a Palestinian journalist currently finishing his master's in Journalism and Documentary at the University of Sussex.