Wide blue yonder: police cells and Tesco dates

The walls and ceiling are a pleasant sky blue, this police cell in Bridgend reminds me a bit of Azmi’s house in the refugee camp. Lebanon, 1956. Azmi was a Palestinian student, we worked together on an earthquake reconstruction site, he took us back to his home in the camp and his mother made a meal for us. Later Azmi gave me a book called ‘Palestine is our business,’ but that took some years to sink in.

It was nearly half a century later that I went to the West Bank as an observer for British Quakers (although I’m not one). I saw enough there to convince me that the business was seriously unfinished. Then early this year, a few days after the assault on Gaza, I got an email from an Israeli peace group, the text of a boycott-Israel call from a Palestinian committee in Ramalla.

Prompted by this, I went down to the nearest big Tesco store in Swansea and confiscated some ‘West Bank’ dates. ‘King Solomon’ dates, nine to a see-through container, each soft date in its own little crib of frilly white paper. I auctioned them, one by one, in aid of Gaza appeals from Oxfam and Islamic Relief. I wrote to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy telling him what I was doing and offered to refund the price of the dates if he could assure me that they were not the product of illegal settlements. In the correspondence that followed, Tesco stressed its commitment to ethics, legality and local sourcing but said nothing about settlements. They did not take up my refund offer, or prosecute.

To bring things to a head, this time with a group in support, I wheeled a trolley- load of dates out of theTesco store and into a little battery of press and TV cameras. A woman companion, D Murphy,followed with a trolley full of other West Bank and Israeli goods. We marked the goods in red emulsion and ketchup as ‘unfit for sale’ and D made a speech to people crowding round. In posters and leaflets we explained what we were doing and we also wrote to Tesco staff to apologise for any inconvenience.

D and I were arrested, charged and held for seven or eight hours at Swansea police station. I was amazed how quickly I lost track of time, stripped of watch, with nothing happening, nothing much to focus on, no daylight through the glass-tile window. At midnight, I was told the charge against me would be dropped for ‘lack of evidence.’ What more did they need? Embarassingly for me, my companion was formally charged.(She has since pleaded not guilty to theft at Magistrate’s Court and bailed to Swansea Crown Court on April 1st.)

In defence, we argue that sale of settlement goods in these stores is unlawful because the UK government is signatory to Geneva Conventions and Security Council resolutions that make both occupation and settlements illegal. Our removal of these goods is no more theft than a citizen’s arrest is assault; we are simply upholding the law in the absence of its professional guardians. As for other Israeli goods, they should not be on sale because the European trade agreement that governs their import is subject to a human rights and democracy clause.

Meanwhile we and other boycott activists have been picketing other Swansea stores. On a rainy vigil outside the Swansea branch of Sainsbury’s, police were called. There were only two of us there at the time, myself and a friend called Maggie. After a friendly discussion we agreed to leave at one pm, the time we’d planned on anyway.

Last Wednesday (March 11th) morning, as my wife Ada and I were finishing breakfast, the police came banging at the door, one vanload, then another with a plainclothes car or two. They brought a warrant to arrest me and search the house ‘on suspicion of conspiracy to commit racially aggravated criminal damage.’ What damage now? Not in Swansea, it turned out, but in Bridgend, where – unknown to us - another Sainsbury’s store had been visited with red paint. A hit and run job, not our style! And the racial aggravation? This, we were told, referred to the word ‘Israeli’ in the slogan ‘Boycott Israeli goods’ – as stencilled on the floor of the Bridgend store. D Murphy, my partner in the Tesco stunt, was not in when her snatch-squad knocked at the door, so her lot came on to join the others in our house, or chatting and laughing in the street outside - the Bridgend policemen and women having nothing better to do in Swansea that morning. My wife was still able to slip out with the mobile phone, while I was asked some questions and the searchers rummaged around indoors. I was then driven off to Bridgend, a place I’d often passed but never visited. My wife got back to find our visitors working through bank statements and underclothes, secure in their blue latex gloves.The other person arrested was poor Maggie, who had just dropped in to hand out leaflets in the rain. She too was whisked away to Bridgend. I didn’t know who else they’d got, but she guessed I was there from the shoes outside my cell.

I was angry about the racist slur. I told the CID men who questioned me that Israel was a state, not a race, and that lots of Jews, including some Israeli Jews, were supporting the boycott. I forgot to mention that it was an email from an Israeli anti-occupation group that prompted me to take the dates.The arresting officer’s notebook has me saying ‘I have many friends in the Jewish community.’

The men who questioned me showed a great interest in red paint.They picked up a sample-pot of red emulsion from our house, and some cardboard posters I’d made saying ‘Don’t buy Israeli goods’, ‘Israeli goods are bads’ and ‘Stolen goods from stolen land.’ Why red, they asked, and I really didn’t know, but was relieve when they showed me pictures of the Bridgend Sainsburys incident. The Israeli peppers and stencil on the floor were clearly done in spraypaint, not emulsion. Later I learned they’d take my wife’s craftknifes and cutting mat, in case we’d been making stencils with them. I asked why it needed a conspiracy for such a simple task, when the Swansea show with theTesco dates had been all over the local press and round the world on Youtube.

Back in my cell, I tried and failed to eat a microwave shepherds pie. It was kind of the Group 4 guards to think of it, but much too hot and horrible. I’m not usually fussy, but the potato-pulp topping was submerged in brown gunge, like dirty snow in a puddle. A ‘COMPLEAT’ meal, best before 2010 but already uneatable. Bring back Azmi’s mum, bless her sould, with her lamb with rice: we didn’t know at the time we were eating the family’s meat ration for two weeks. And Azmi, who hated to be thanked – brothers share, you said – are you still alive? On this other pale blue wall, in my South Wales cell, there’s a brown splashmark high up on the wall, just below the eye of the surveillance camera. Someone else’s shepherds pie? I used the box from mine to begin this writing on, with a paper and pen brought in at my request – after reading the card about my rights.

The desk sergeant had told me I would be allowed to ring Ada, my wife. But when I asked I was told they were too busy. On my way to and from questioning, I could see all the pairs of shoes outside cell doors, like an old-fashioned hotel corridor, but mostly trainers (mine were brown leather, which is what Maggie recognised) If the police had told me my solicitor had rung, alerted by Ada, I wouldn’t have said ‘No’ when they asked me if I wanted one for my recorded interview. I was worried about Ada and eager to get home; I felt I had nothing to hide and didn’t want to bring him all the way from Cardiff to Bridgend.

About five hours after the raid began, Maggie and I were released – though still not allowed to see or speak to each other – and driven home. She and Ada were more upset than I was by the invasion of our homes. I was more upset by the loss of my computer, with so much writing and other business unbacked up. On reflection, I’ve got angrier. We know they’ve taken a lot of papers about Israel and Palestine, but will only gradually discover what else is missing. Now I feel the Bridgend desk-sergeant was out of order with his crack about Viagra: he’d asked me about medical conditions and drugs, and I mentioned a muscular complaint. At the time I said ‘Not that localised,’ but on reflection it’s more like insult upon injury. What the hell were all those public servants doing? There must have been at least 20 on the day, in the cars and vans and back at the station. And then the paperwork, and fishing through hard-drives and emails. All over a bit of red on some fruit and veg, a harmless slogan on a floor! At what point does prudent policing become disproportionate, intimidation? What will they do with all the other addresses they pick up? Are we hearing, or imagining, new clicks and echoes on our phones? If the racially aggravated conspiracy doesn’t stick – and I got the feeling the detectives were beginning to have their doubts – will the claw back something else to charge me with?

If not undue force, can the police be prosecuted for wasting their own police time, and our public money? And when will I get my computer back, the tool of such trade as I have at my age? But who am I to moan? At least our houses were left intact and more or less tidy, not like some I’ve seen after raids in Palestine. None of us has been hit in the head, skull smashed open by a souped-up teargas shell.* Maybe that’s why I chose red paint: red for solidarity, real blood and bloody ridiculous.



*As happened to an ‘international’ last week, near the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
Every Friday for a couple of years now, villagers have been joined by foreign volunteers and Israeli anti-occupation groups in a demonstration against the separation Wall that divides the village from much of its land.