It was never about him, but about denouncing what boiled his blood. That is why Paul Laverty (Calcutta, 68 years old) the screenwriter and filmmaker who has contributed as no one, through three decades of collaboration with director Ken Loach, to keep alive in the United Kingdom and worldwide a rebel left awareness in the face of injustice, resists focusing the conversation on his police arrest for denouncing the genocide in Gaza.
It was on August 25, when he went to a protest in Edinburgh with a shirt he said Genocide in PALESTINE. Time to Take ACTION (Genocide in Palestine. Time to go to action). The game with the typography led the police to conclude that Laverty publicly supported the Palestinian Action organization, to which the Keir Starmer government has decided to qualify as a terrorist. Those who support their sabotage acts can be sentenced up to 14 years in jail. Public figures such as Laverty or the Sally Rooney writer have expressed their rebellion to that decision, along with thousands of anonymous citizens. Police arrested more than 700 people on August 9, and new protests of support to Palestine Action are already announced.
Laverty, who knows Spain well and has long been a couple of the director Icíar Bollaín, talks with El País by telephone, from Edinburgh. And he asks not to start the interview talking about his shirt, but of the statements of one of the ultras ministers of the current government of Israel.
Answer. Every morning my ears burn when I think of Bezalel Smotrich’s phrase, the Minister of Finance of the Benjamín Netanyahu government. ‘We will leave gaza with mountains of debris and total destruction. The world will not be able to stop. ‘ Not only is it absolutely chilling something. Not only is he showing a clear genocidal intention. It is that it mocks the international community.
Ask. And do you see a awakening of citizens’ consciousness?
R. I think there are many people around the world who, like me, are waking up and seeing how the population of Gaza) is submitted to a famine situation. It is happening before our eyes, and there is a sense of disbelief. It is a point of no return in our lives. A genocide had never occurred with such impunity and complicity. Citizens feel helpless, seeing their governments conspired by the Israeli government.
P. But not all countries have shown the same degree of complicity.
R. The worst countries in Europe have been the United Kingdom and Germany. Others have had a tougher rhetoric against Israel, such as Spain, but the devil is in details. The same thing happens with Ireland. Base movements, people on the street are against genocide and against complicity with that genocide, both in Ireland and in Spain and in the United Kingdom. But then there are these contracts of companies (of arms) that contribute to maintaining that state of apartheid That is Israel.
P. Has he missed such a Proisraelí position in the new Starmer Labor Government?
R. No, it doesn’t surprise me at all. There is nothing more to remember what happened to Jeremy Corbyn (the previous party leader), to which the right wing of Labor crucified and accused of anti -Semitism. Starmer, as I understand, has always been a Zionist. And he will always drag the shame of that interview he gave, then the terrible events of October 7, when he justified Israel’s right to cut water, electricity, food in Gaza as a form of collective punishment. Nothing earned him later trying to explain that he had been misunderstood.
P. I remember the battle of Starmer against the alleged internal anti -Semitism in the party. And the most conservative media applauded it.
R. Everything has finally demonstrated as a great lie. But they managed to terrorize many. For example, Ken Loach, with whom I have worked 30 years. He was accused of anti -Semitic for the right wing of the Labor Party and for Israel for decades. I know Ken very well, there is not a molecule of anti -Semitism throughout his body. He has been accused of contributing to the creation of an atmosphere in which the denialism of the Holocaust is possible. That is an absolute patraña.
P. Don’t you think there has been some evolution, when the Starmer government seized the sale of certain weapons to Israel, or when it announces now that it will recognize the Palestinian state?
R. Here, where I live, in Edinburgh, the Leonardo UK factory continues to contribute weapons to a pool of which Israel is a member. That fund ends in the hands of NATO, and the Labor Government intends to convince us that they cannot do anything to get Israel out of the consortium, because it would put national security at risk.
Everything is a fucking lie. Leonardo UK continues to supply Israel components for F-35 fighters, which bombard Gaza. What happens is that more and more people are accusing the government of complicity with a genocidal state, according to articles 1 and 3 of the 1951 genocide convention. That is why they want to appear to be moving.
What is that recognizing the Palestinian state? If you threaten international legality, the Palestinian people have the right to self -determination. It is not something that depends on the recognition of the United Kingdom. It is something implicit, not a favor we do to them. Especially for the historical responsibility that this country has with the Balfour Declaration, which undermined the rights of the Palestinians. The Starmer government also holds that recognition of certain conditions, and makes it a smoke curtain.
P. Do you fear a cut of freedoms in the United Kingdom, with decisions such as illegalization and designation as a terrorist organization of Palestinian Action?
R. A friend of mine, who is today a professor of a United Kingdom Medicine Faculty, wanted to go to a demonstration and went to a print store to commission some shirts. On the front I wanted to write “I oppose the genocide”, and in the back “I oppose the illegalization of Palestinian action.” In the first store they refused to do so. In the second, the same. In the third they told him they were very afraid. Is there anything illegal in a teacher publicly expressing her opinion? This is how civil freedoms are cutting before our own eyes. People are scared, at work, in institutions, in the legal profession, at the university.
P. But there are voices, even within the moderate right, which have expressed their disgust before the arrests of peaceful protesters …
R. Although there is no closed definition of terrorism, all jurists have linked it with murders, injuries, mutilations, hostage … in other words, real terror. That a group of people who throw painting on a bomber, in this time of genocide, is a shame, are assimilated with terrorism. They just accused me, according to section 15 of the 2000 terrorism law, and I must appear before a court on September 18. All for wearing a shirt that said “genocide in Palestine. Time to go to action.” I will continue to justify each of those seven words (in the original in English), and defend each of them ”.
P. Have you felt supported?
R. It is obvious that I move in a circle of many political friends, but it is normal people, in a supermarket conversation, which tells me that it is completely disgusted with the situation and what has happened to me. ‘We cannot believe that this is happening before our eyes,’ they tell me. The truth is that I have felt overcome with so much support. Here and in Spain, where the San Sebastian Festival made an express statement.