Award-winning poet Alice Oswald was arrested for supporting Palestine Action.
Alice Oswald, one of Britain’s most acclaimed poets, was arrested at a mass sit-down demonstration outside the houses of Parliament in London on Saturday for holding up a sign in support of direct action movement Palestine Action.
Oswald—a former Oxford Professor of Poetry who won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002 and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017—was arrested alongside 531 other peaceful demonstrators, half of whom were aged 60 or older, for holding placards that read, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
The demonstration—which was the largest of its kind since the British government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group last month—was organized by the activist group Defend Our Juries, whose goal is to use civil disobedience to make the draconian new law (which makes expressing support for Palestine Action punishable by up to 14 years in prison) unenforceable.
As reported by the Guardian yesterday, Oswald urged police who arrested her to write to the home secretary about the position they had been put in:
Clearly there were some police officers who were really struggling with what they had to do. You could see the slightly shifty look in their faces, too. When I was speaking to them in the police van I did say: “Write to Yvette Cooper and tell her that this is making your life impossible.”
Oswald is the latest high-profile writer to put her career (and perhaps even her freedom) on the line in order to publicly support Palestine Action. In June, Sally Rooney took to the pages of the Guardian to express her admiration for the group:
Palestine Action is not an armed group. It has never been responsible for any fatalities and does not pose any risk to the public. Its methods do involve property sabotage, which is, obviously, illegal. But if killing 23 civilians at an aid distribution site is not terrorism, how can we possibly be expected to accept that spray-painting a plane is? Law-abiding protest has so far failed to stop the genocide. More than 50,000 innocent children have been killed or injured. In what circumstances could civil disobedience ever be justified if not now?
I can only say that I admire and support Palestine Action wholeheartedly—and I will continue to, whether that becomes a terrorist offense or not.
The boldness, the moral courage, of Oswald’s action stands in stark contrast to the behavior of some of her peers across the Atlantic. In February, a handful of prominent American poets gathered at the 92nd Street Y—the storied New York cultural institution that fired an employee for refusing to remove a ceasefire poster from her workspace, canceled Pulitzer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s literary talk after he signed an open letter calling for Israel to halt its attacks on Gaza, and continued to fundraise for the IDF deep into 2024—to celebrate a century of poetry in The New Yorker.
Some poets get rounded up for protesting state violence. Some sip champagne with those who enable it.
Same as it ever was.
