Ella Taylor woke up on the morning of April 8th feeling sick with worry. She knew that she was about to vandalise a major political party’s headquarters. That meant she would probably spend the next 24 hours in police custody, if not longer. “It’s quite difficult to eat breakfast,” the 20-year-old student says. “You know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Taylor is one of the dozens of young people – many in their early 20s, several still in the middle of college – who are part of Youth Demand, a new British protest group that combines climate activism with pro-Palestine direct action. Their demands are simple: they want the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel and end the licences for North Sea gas and oil expansion. So far they have spray painted the Ministry of Defence, blocked some of London’s busiest roads and bridges and staged a sit-in outside Labour leader Keir Starmer’s house, arranging kids’ shoes outside his door to represent the 13,800 children killed (up to that point) in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. An attempt to disrupt the state opening of Parliament in July was thwarted when Metropolitan Police officers pre-emptively arrested over 40 members before they could march on the House of Commons. One group were literally dragged out of a nearby cafe while they were getting breakfast.
Back on that particular day in April, though, Youth Demand was very much an unknown quantity. Its founding members had emerged from the student wing of the Just Stop Oil direct action group, but other than a press release in March revealing their two core demands, nobody knew very much about them – or what they were willing to do for their cause. That was all about to change. As 70 supporters took off towards Parliament Square, waving banners saying “Never Again is Now” and “Labour and Tory: Genocide Enablers,” Taylor and four compatriots peeled off to the Labour Party headquarters. They splattered the whole building with blood-red paint – the dramatic opening salvo in their war against the government’s lacklustre response to the crisis in Gaza, which Israel has flattened with an estimated 75 tonnes of explosives – more than the World War II bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and London combined. In a searing report from March, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese accused Israel of committing acts of genocide against the Palestinian people – an analysis also reached by international law experts at Boston University, Yale, Cornell and the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Earlier this year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demonstrated that it shared those same concerns when it instructed Israel to take immediate steps to prevent genocide in Gaza, including allowing access to humanitarian aid – an order that Israel has defied by repeatedly blocking access routes into Gaza.
In the days leading up to Youth Demand’s debut, nervous thoughts swarmed Taylor’s mind: “Are we actually going to be able to do this? Are people going to think we’re crazy?” The moment of the action came “almost as a relief,” she says. “I’m here with this wonderful group of people, we’re all shit scared, but we know that we’re doing it for the right reasons – and there is nowhere else in that moment that you would rather be.” The price tag on the physical damage? Around £10,000. Peanuts compared to the £574 million worth of arms that the UK government has licenced to Israel since 2008.
Taylor and the rest of her group now face criminal damage charges and up to four years in prison. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. On an afternoon in late September, Youth Demand have called a public meeting to launch their plan for autumn. A kindly Baptist congregation in East London has loaned a conference room across the way from the pulpit and people are helping themselves to coffee, tea and biscuits as we settle in for the meeting. There are at least 50 people here, a mix of Youth Demand diehards and curious newcomers. Mullets are in heavy attendance. A person with a philtrum piercing pulls up their crochet top and proudly shows off a homemade T-shirt with the Youth Demand logo: two black-and-white exclamation points, one upside down and one right-side up, like a yin-yang sign. A Spotify playlist titled “the youth demand a boogie” has been created for the post-launch dinner and includes Charli XCX, Azealia Banks and “Like a G6” by Far East Movement (“a classic,” I’m confidently told). I could be at an unpretentious freshman mixer at a trendy New York art school, but that impression quickly dissipates once the Youth Demand activists start talking.
First up is Hala Sabbah, a Palestinian mutual aid organiser who founded The Sameer Project to provide emergency shelter and aid to displaced families in Gaza. “The reality is,” she tells the crowd with matter-of-fact urgency, long black hair scraped away from her face, “people [in Gaza] are worn out.” Sabbah goes on to describe the dire conditions in her homeland: the lack of proper food, the lack of sanitation that only speeds the spread of disease, the lack of decent medical supplies and healthcare. “Every single day, we have a child dying because there are barely any evacuations,” she says. That’s before you even get to Gaza itself – now an obliterated wasteland of rubble, enough to bury Central Park 25 feet deep. The room is quiet after she speaks. There are a few more speeches from Just Stop Oil campaigners turned Youth Demand activists (miraculously, I don’t catch a single audience member fidgeting even once) but Sabbah’s words are the ones that linger in the room.
“We’re all shit scared, but we know that we’re doing it for the right reasons”
Ella Taylor
At time of writing, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 42,000, a number that now includes nearly 17,000 children, in an area no larger than Detroit or Philadelphia, although researchers believe that this is a conservative figure considering the amount of missing persons and difficulty in accurately recording deaths and indirect deaths (such as medical complications or starvation) from the onslaught. We’re over a year into the massacre, but the UK government is still supplying Israel with millions of pounds worth of arms. It seems futile to recount everything that’s happened since – all those photos and videos of fathers holding their dead babies, children weeping for their dead parents, bombed-out and shot-up hospitals and ambulances and cars – but futility feels like a form of death, too. In this church room, at least, there’s a group of people trying to resist death. “We’re going to swarm the [UK] in the name of Palestine,” Youth Demand campaigner Arthur Clifton tells the crowd. “You don’t have to sit on the sidelines, watching shit go up in flames. We fight for Palestine because it’s happening now.”
The autumn plan takes shape: a national campaign of peaceful sit-ins to cause maximum anarchy. The idea is to become the equivalent of activist whack-a-mole: “Get into a road in your local city, cause real material disruption, disperse before arrests and repeat at least three times a day,” Clifton explains smoothly, like a doctor dispensing a prescription, before winking, “and add some rizz to them.” Flares, music, dancing – that’s all on the table, just as long as the group is able to run off before PC Plod descends.
Looking around at the few dozen or so people in the room, it’s hard to imagine this group could effectively shut down the whole of London – let alone Birmingham, Manchester or any other big city. But Youth Demand say they’ve got outposts in 17 universities and up to 10,000 willing participants on their mailing list. More importantly, they’ve got the conviction to fuel hundreds more. As the group splits up into discussion circles to figure out how to best execute their strategy, I grab Clifton for a quick chat. “Repression is always one of them,” the 23-year-old says when I ask about the biggest threats to the group. “People got two-year sentences yesterday for throwing soup! But repression is always a roll of the dice – it will either scare people away, as can happen, or it will just show people that what they’re doing is working. It’s getting the government scared.”
“You don’t have to sit on the sidelines, watching shit go up in flames. We fight for Palestine because it’s happening now.”
Arthur Clifton
Clifton has been arrested five times (“they can get pretty rough”, they shrug) at Just Stop Oil and Youth Demand protests – at one point they were hauled out of a Leon by officers before they could even unfurl a Palestine flag. Are they scared of getting a police record? “I’m far more scared about what the government’s doing to my future,” Clifton replies. “All the people going to their nine to fives, worn down… you speak to so many people and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, shit isn’t it, but we can’t do anything about it.’ It’s this immense opportunity to actually do something about it.”
The stakes are high. For every sneery right-wing columnist dismissing Youth Demand as middle-class intellectuals playing at freedom fighters – a charge that has dogged every youth movement in the last century, from the Parisian barricades of May ‘68 to the Vietnam antiwar protests all the way up to Occupy Wall Street and the Gaza encampments that spread across American campuses earlier this year – there’s a politician or judge waiting to hammer them with the most draconian legislation possible. That soup stunt that Clifton referenced landed two Just Stop Oil protesters with longer sentences than far-right rioters – all for chucking a bit of Heinz on an otherwise unharmed Van Gogh. Not that this deterred Youth Demand: two supporters recently pasted a photo of a Palestinian mother and child over Picasso’s painting Motherhood (La Maternité) at the National Gallery, and threw red paint on the ground for good measure. As I speak to Clifton and Taylor, I’m hit with the realisation that they mean it – all of it. They are more than willing to go to jail for this cause; in fact, they’d be happy to.
How many times have I looked at the devastation in Gaza and all I could muster was a donation, a retweet, a repost? How many circuitous conversations have I had with my friends about how heartbreaking this all is, how the world is in crisis – and how many lives did our own blowhard extemporising save, exactly? None. At least Youth Demand are doing something – and they have more optimism in their little fingers than anybody hand wringing from the sidelines. In order to win, you have to play the game, and this ragtag group of young people have hurled themselves in to win.
Now it’s time for dinner, which comes out of the church kitchen in huge communal pots – bean stew, couscous, piles of flatbreads with huge dollops of hummus. “TALK TO SOMEONE YOU HAVEN’T SPOKEN TO!” one of the organisers bellows. The Spotify playlist kicks in over the speakers with the appropriate – if somewhat on-the-nose – choice of Blur’s “To The End.” It’s a song that came out in 1994, several years before many of Youth Demand’s founding members were born. Not that it matters; a good song is a good song, in the same way a good cause is a good cause. The only difference is a good song accrues nostalgia as it ages; a cause only becomes more desperate, more in need of its champions. I’m reminded of Sabbah’s final words to the group: “It is crucial,” she said, “for future generations to say there was a group trying to stop this.” As of now, Youth Demand are among the few stepping up to that plate.
Credits
Text: Zing Tsjeng
Photography: Youth Demand