Jewish anti-genocide protester puts cops in their place

Carolyn Gelenter is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She has been consistently protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and she decided to risk arrest on 6 September as part of the protest in London’s Parliament Square against the government’s ban on non-violent direct-action group Palestine Action. And after the arrest eventually came, she had the perfect response to a police officer who got snarky with her.

Gelenter was among the many hundreds of people who took part in “one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in British history“. The police arrested 890 people, the vast majority under the Terrorism Act for holding placards in support of Palestine Action.

Don’t get angry at anti-genocide protesters. Get angry at this government!

Speaking to the Canary this week, Gelenter said:

When I was being discharged, there was a new team on, or a couple of new detectives on, and I cracked a joke about, ‘it’s a good day to commit a crime’. And he said, ‘well, actually, it’s not because… you’re wasting our resources by doing this… we’re not out there on the streets where we should be.’

And I went, ‘now, hold on a minute… I didn’t take, and neither did anybody else take, this action lightly. We did it because we were compelled to do it, out of a sense of conscience… the right thing to do. And it’s not us you should be getting angry at. I feel for you, and it’s disgusting your conditions, but who you should be getting angry at is Yvette Cooper and Keir Starmer, not at me… It’s my right to protest, and I was exercising my democratic right in what I consider to be not a democracy anymore… I can’t exercise my democratic right because, actually, you arrested me. So it isn’t a democratic right anymore to protest around certain things. So don’t get angry at me.’

She also managed to ask one of the police officers involved in her arrest a question. She asked:

maybe you think this is okay or not, but what if you had to do something that was really against your conscience? You know, there must be things even you would say are against your conscience. Would you do it?

He answered, after thinking “long and hard”:

well, I would, because I have to obey orders.

Gelenter added:

Therein lies the banality of evil.

Here she was referring to Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt‘s description of a Nazi criminal who was ‘just following orders’. Many Nazis sought to use this cop-out defence after the Second World War. Arendt was also incredibly prescient in many ways about what the state of Israel looked likely to become, arguing herself for peaceful coexistence in Palestine.

It may indeed be easier to do evil if someone has ordered you to do it. But that, of course, doesn’t make it any less evil.

Dignity in non-violence

The Metropolitan Police has itself admitted that the authoritarian ban on Palestine Action will “overwhelm the justice system”, taking “officers out of neighbourhoods to the detriment of the Londoners who rely on them”.

Defend Our Juries organised the action on 6 September, and noted that officers had:

violently assault[ed] peaceful protesters including the elderly, in order to try and arrest over a thousand people for holding cardboard signs.

The group added that the ban was “a preposterous waste of resources”. The police, however, tried to smear protesters as aggressive and violent. Speaking about the people who actually took the action to risk arrest, Gelenter said:

Most people were sitting down or lying down.

And, she insisted:

it was a real testament to all of those who took the action to get arrested that they were very calm. And even the police made a comment about ‘it’s so nice to have people who are really polite and kind’.

Some protesters in the area not taking the action tried to shame the police officers as they arrested people, but Gelenter made it clear that:

the people on the actual action were incredibly dignified and very non-violent.

Making her own stance clear, she asserted:

I don’t want just the Gaza stuff to end. I want a world where love means something, and gratitude and kindness and compassion. Is that so wrong, to want a world like that?