Quite a few of the attendees of the recent FiLiA conference in Brighton have been asking this question. Women I know and have great respect for have asked this question, their tone suggesting we were being unsisterly imposing our concerns on this, our annual, internationalist conference.

I was told waving flags and chanting wasn’t the way to convince people so please, if you are one of the women feeling that way, give me some time and read our story as I see it.

Hastings and District PSC (Palestine Solidarity Campaign) has been an active part of Hastings politics and Hastings community for some years now. They regularly run campaigns on behalf of Palestinians illegally held in Israeli jails. This is nothing to do with the current iteration of ‘the conflict’ in Gaza. As an expansionist, settler-colonialist state, Israel has never been clear how much is ‘enough’, what it considers its rightful borders to be, and has always given itself the right to police others’ lands, and apply ‘administrative detention’, an idea picked up from the old British colonialist practice.

It’s quite hard to understand how this has been normalised in our own news reports and politics. Imagine sending your troops into someone else’s territory and arresting one of their people, without charge, without making any statement of where they are to be held and how long for. Imagine if it happened here. What if a sortie of French soldiers turned up in Hastings, arrested half a dozen locals, and shipped them off back to France. Would the BBC just shrug, and say they expect they were probably terrorists?

The Troubles

If you’re as old as me, you might remember how the news about the ‘Irish Troubles’ sounded when we were kids. The BBC then seemed to me to suggest that the Irish were just really wild people, and that unimaginably horrible things would happen if our soldiers weren’t on their streets, arresting and interning people who … who what? Was everyone they arrested a terrorist, a bomber? A potential bomber? Who decided?

I think most people would recognise nowadays that The Troubles and the mainstream attitude to the Irish were a hangover from British Empire days, and that ‘administrative detention’ was a tool of colonialism but in Israel, a state many of our own politicians treat as a modern democracy, there are currently around 3 000 Palestinians, some of them women and children, locked up without charge, without trial, because Israel says so.

Free Hana

One of them is Hana Al Bidaq, a woman who helped with the thobe show at Hastings Palestine on the Pier event in 2022, quite a feat considering she didn’t get a visa in time to attend the event. Local organisers remember her as a woman whose “capacity to organise and to make things work despite all the obstacles we faced (and there were many) was incredible.” She came to Hastings in 2023 and gave a talk about life under Israeli occupation.

She’s a computer engineer from Ramallah, mother of four children, and a civil rights campaigner. It’s a well-known fact that regimes find it harder to mistreat and ‘disappear’ prisoners if people elsewhere are conscious of them and care about them – that’s why FiLiA continues to give conference updates on the Kakuma women we’ve been campaigning for, and that’s why the PSC are now publicising what has happened to Hana.

Hastings PSC Twinning Officer Grace Lally told me Hana’s not affiliated to Hamas or Fatah, she is a grassroots campaigner against Israeli repression, who concerns herself with the kinds of issues I saw on the stalls at FiLiA – human rights, helping people unjustly imprisoned, ecology, and access to the countryside. Nevertheless, she told Grace she’s been aware all along that she might hear the IDF at her door one night. It’s a risk West Bank residents have had to live with for years, and now it has happened to her.

Katy Colley, Chair of Hastings PSC

When Hana came to Hastings, she stayed with Katy and her family and the two women found they had a lot in common – both vegetarians, both interested in local food production and our relationship to the land. Katy has been in contact with Hana’s family, trying to get news updates and found out today that Hana’s eldest has now had to postpone going to college. Their mother has been taken away without warning and they don’t know for how long so now, someone has to stay at home to look out for his younger brothers.

It’s hard to over-state how much hearts are aching for Hana, and other Palestinians who had become friends of Hastings, and whom we’ve now lost track of. Some, we know, have died in Gaza or the West Bank – but what will happen to Hana? Sometimes, those arrested in the night by the IDF turn up a few weeks later – bruised, terrified but otherwise okay. Other times, they’re released months or years later, half starved and bearing undeniable marks of torture. Sometimes, they just disappear and are never heard of again.

The personal is political

The left have long campaigned for an end to the illegal occupation of Palestine, believing that the modern world should not tolerate settler-colonialism but, since October 7^th, because of the endless, horrific videos and reports coming out of Gaza, millions have taken up the campaign and many have, like us, made personal contact with Palestinian campaigners like Hana – not politicians, not terrorists, but citizens of Palestine who’ve been reaching out, seeking help from the world.

In the months leading up to this year’s FiLiA conference, I was one of many who contacted the organisers, saying that many of our women are deeply and passionately involved in this campaign, and we need to see Palestine on the conference agenda. We were directed to individual sessions, here and there, that covered anti-war work, or anti-colonialist campaigns, we were reminded that the Women in Black would be around, that the Women in Hebron would have a stall, but it just all felt too peripheral. I got involved with a group of women who were planning a fringe event, and found that every single one of them was doing it because they were deeply upset that Palestine wasn’t more central on the conference agenda. I know for a fact that some at least of the conference organisers agreed with us, but the idea just didn’t carry the day.

So we took matters into our own hands and, each in her own way, planned to make Palestine more visible. Some wore keffiyahs to conference, two women dressed up as genocide, and glided around conference in silent protest. Others added leaflets to stalls, or gathered outside to chant and show the flag. A couple took a flag to the Saturday night party, and one went off script on the main stage and spoke our hearts out loud.

Were we wrong?

Well, some women said we were. They said that’s not the sisterly way. They said we were ‘obsessed with Palestine’. Some of those women I know and respect, so I listened, and thought about it a lot. What did we do wrong? What could we have done differently? But then, walking round the exhibition area, reading about the great feminist campaigns of the past, I saw the tee-shirts that said ‘don’t hush and be nice’, and the posters that said ‘well behaved women rarely make history’ and ‘the personal is political’ and I just don’t know how we could conscionably have done any less for Hana and for other women like her, who desperately need sisters to shout out loud on their behalf anywhere and anyhow we can think of.

I’m sorry you didn’t like the way we did it, but I can’t be sorry we did it, and I hope that, for the sake of women in Hana’s situation, you’ll take the time to find out more about what has been happening to the people of Palestine, not just in the last two years but for the whole of the last 75 years.

Click here for more about FiLiA for those not familiar with it.

Click here to read about our fringe event, Palestine Liberation is a Feminist Issue

Click here to read about Jewish not Zionist, the story of Marilyn Garson’s journey away from Zionism, and her battle with the IHRA.

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