By Will Jones
Labour Party-run Camden Council tried to ban a book launch and censor support for the Palestinian resistance – so we brought the book launch to the Town Hall.
On the evening of February 26, the attempt by Camden Council, London, to shut down a Palestine book launch backfired spectacularly when protesters led by the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) and supporters of our newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! marched into Camden Town Hall, occupied the building’s lobby for over an hour, and delivered speeches expressing support for the Palestinian resistance.
This followed a decision by the council-funded charity King’s Cross Brunswick Neighbourhood Association (KCBNA) to cancel our booking for a public launch of the book Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings, which was due to take place that evening at the Chadswell Healthy Living Centre, a community venue run by KCBNA.
The Labour Party-run Camden Council, the local borough of Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is the freeholder of Chadswell and one of KCBNA’s key funders.
On the day of the meeting, we received a call from Labour Councillor and KCBNA Executive Director Nasim Ali, who warned that he had been under pressure from Camden Council to cancel the booking due to concerns over the advertised guest speakers at the event: Dr. Louis Brehony, one of the book’s editors, and Charlotte Kates, coordinator of Samidoun, the Palestine Prisoner Solidarity Network.
Online trolls, including the notorious Zionist X/Twitter account @Habibi_UK, had demanded that the police and Camden Council intervene to stop the event, falsely claiming that “Samidoun is a front for the PFLP terrorist group.”
If rejected, rage. Camden Council did the right thing here (thank you). It cancelled a terror groupie booking of a council venue for a meeting promoting Samidoun, a front for the PFLP terrorist group. The police were on the case too. So the louts made a scene in Camden Town Hall. https://t.co/GtDUk5Nnrn pic.twitter.com/gUzEEC4Mop
— habibi (@habibi_uk) March 1, 2025
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), of which Ghassan Kanafani was a member, is not a proscribed terrorist organization in Britain.
This was only the latest attempt to censor us. On February 10, a Newcastle Coalition for Palestine meeting, which the RCG was part of organizing, at which Brehony and Kates were due to speak, had its booking canceled by the Venerable Bede Church, at the behest of the same Zionist online trolls.
Another venue for our London book launch meeting in Islington also canceled our booking after a visit from the police, who warned they would post officers “outside the book launch to monitor the situation.”
Collaboration between the police and Zionist groups is part of the broader criminalization of Palestine solidarity in Britain, which has escalated under the Labour government.
An email seen by the RCG, from Camden’s Director of Equalities and Community Strength Hanad Mohamed to Nasim Ali, threatened to pull the plug on KCBNA’s funding:
“We have been made aware of an event being planned for this evening with guest speakers Louis Brehony and Charlotte Kates.
“We are writing to you to request that this event does not go ahead this evening. As a Council, we have a statutory obligation to ensure good relations between our ethnic and religious groups. Based on research, we believe there is a significant risk that speakers this evening may say something that will be contrary to our statutory obligations and our values. We look for the organizations that we fund to share these values with us.”
The insinuation that the book launch would endanger “good relations between our ethnic and religious groups” amounts to a defense of the racist Zionist state concealed behind a supposed concern to combat anti-Semitism.
We have been here before: Nasim Ali was also pressured by Camden Council over an RCG meeting at the same venue in 2018 about Labour’s adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which has been used to shut down free speech on Palestine. We defeated the Council then, and we were not about to take their latest assault lying down.
After Ali informed us he had canceled our booking (in his words, “we can’t risk our grant”), we gathered the book launch attendees at the KCBNA venue and marched with banners and Palestine flags to Camden Town Hall, chanting pro-Palestine slogans. We entered the Town Hall lobby and noisily occupied it for over an hour in protest, disrupting a scheduled Camden Council Cabinet meeting.
The crowd of around 40 protesters was addressed by Louis Brehony and Charlotte Kates over video link on a PA system hooked up to a laptop. As Brehony noted in his address, “Ghassan Kanafani was murdered 52 and a half years ago, but still it’s remarkable that [his] message continues to be an object of erasure and silence.”
Kates spoke against censorship: “They want to divide us by listing Palestinian resistance organizations as so-called ‘terrorist organizations’…in Britain today, the Terrorism Act is being used to impose state terror on the population so people will be silenced and frightened of speaking in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
The crowd cheered as Kates announced that 620 Palestinian prisoners were being released on the same night as the book launch in a prisoner exchange deal between the Israeli state and the Palestinian resistance.
Camden Council’s censorship comes in the context of deepening state repression against the Palestine solidarity movement.
The subject matter of the book, the political thought of a key historical Palestinian resistance figure, as well as Samidoun’s work, which legitimizes the struggle of Palestinian prisoners against the Zionist occupation, is deeply threatening to the interests of the British ruling class and the imperialist Labour Party, which unconditionally supports the genocidal Zionist state.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy has refused to call the slaughter of at least 50,000 Palestinians “genocide.”
We sent a message to all who attempt to censor support for the Palestinian resistance and take away our right to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech: if you try to silence us, we will bring the voices of resistance right to your doorstep. In the face of repression, supporters of Palestinian liberation must escalate and fight back.
(Will Jones is a writer for Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! newspaper.)
