the way of rivers with the sea

    For the second time in a month, I’m spending the day in court tomorrow. But this time, it’s the Big Boys Court: yes, I will be tried at a Crown Court in front of a jury of my peers. No more petty Magistrates bullshit. This is the real deal.

    But to be totally honest, I find it hard to care. I’ve looked at the convictions tables, read the prison briefings, sought legal advice, and I’ve realised that I really, really don’t give a shit. I’ve totally divorced myself from the outcome of this trial. It was never about raising awareness for a cause or having my time in court and seeing if justice will prevail (spoiler: it won’t). Courts are designed to make you feel small and irrelevant to your own case while your fate is being decided by strangers. You’re never seen on time yet you have to stay put in case they call you. The seats and benches are made to be uncomfortable in whatever position you’re in. The prosecution never sends the evidence. You’re told when to rise and when to sit. Good girl. They make you sit behind thick glass, a spectator to your own trial, barely able to hear while a bunch of wigs talk a language you don’t understand, completely alienated. 

    Whereas I want to talk about Palestine. About how (allegedly) chucking a bunch of paint on a government building on the 75th anniversary of the Nakba is nothing in comparison to the now 78+ years of occupation and systematic murder and imprisonment of a population. The UK government has blood on its hands. It’s only fair it gets a bit of paint on its offices.

    I want to talk about J. I want to tell the story of how we met that day, of how I had no idea who my comrade was going to be and when I saw him that morning, very early, at the deserted Tube station, and obviously we had come out opposite exits, but when I saw this very tall, lanky masked up guy walk towards me assuredly, I felt relief. I wasn’t going to do this alone although, as it turned out, I now am.

    I want to talk about carrying that suitcase (well, J. carried it) of fire extinguishers filled with paint across the Tube network and up and down the escalators, and it was going clonk clonk clonk clonk with each step and I was shitting myself thinking someone was going to hear and find it dodgy, or worse, that we’d look like masked up terrorists about to bomb the Underground, but nothing actually happened and no one tried to stop us because all the commuters were focused on their journey to their shitty City jobs and all the tourists were too busy taking photos of absolutely everything else. 

    I want to talk about how, as we sat down in the splattered red paint and held up our flag and we were waiting and waiting for the cops to turn up,  J. leaned over and told me I could run away if I wanted to, but he was going to be accountable and stay. So I stayed too. I want to talk about only finding out each other’s actual names once we got to the custody desk, and that’s also when I found out how young he was. I want to talk about the police interview and them trying to pit us against each other, all like “it was his idea, right?” and “you were just tagging along, yeah?” and not having a single doubt that neither of us would take the bait, even though we only had known each other for a few hours. I want to talk about being released from custody at 5pm, after barely eight hours in there when we thought we were going to be there for the night, and heading straight to the pub around the corner to celebrate, only to find out hours later when we came out that there were people outside the cop shop waiting for our release. I want to talk about the crazy mission we went on afterwards, riding inside a cargo bike across London, to get our phones back because we had given them to this random person who had vaguely told us where they would be that evening for us to collect them. 

    
    I want to talk about how weird it is to be standing trial alone when there should be another defendant by my side. I want to talk about how the State is guilty of a crime – not me. The State is guilty of signing off the murder of countless Palestinian lives.

    But I know how it’s going to go. I’ve been in and out of courts for some years now, and although this will be my first Crown Court case, I doubt it’d be much different. The stakes might be higher, but the illusion of justice remains the same. I will be stripped of my legal defences by a judge who’s been stripped of any moral anchors. The jury will be instructed to stick to the facts, to stick to the question of whether or not this £50,000 criminal damage happened, and they will also be told to ignore the very concept of jury equity, if they had ever heard of it.

A prison sentence won’t deter me, just like an acquittal won’t bring my friend back. So why play by their rules when the whole game is rigged?

Listen for the stream
that tells you one thing.

Die on this bank.
Begin in me
the way of rivers with the sea.

      Rumi