Q1: What were the exact circumstances that led you to be arrested in the square of the Church of the Nativity?

I decided to go to Palestine about a week before I flew out because I’d read so many e mails desperately asking for international observers to go out and travel with ambulances and medical teams, stay in refugee camps, just meet people and hear their stories. Ambulances were being stopped from getting to injured people and medical teams were being arrested or shot at and when foreigners travelled with them they more often got to where they were needed. I believed I could make a difference, save lives, just by being a foreigner, having my skin and my passport, and that wasn’t something I could refuse.

Four of us went out from Bristol, posing as tourists to get into the country. We met a bloke who’d been there a while doing the same sort of thing. He’d been in Jenin and seen snipers shooting at people digging in the rubble for relatives and in Hebron, where the hospital had been surrounded and fired on by the Israeli army. He asked if we wanted to go on a demonstration in Bethlehem the next day.

The plan was to try and get through the siege, which was a month old that day, May 2nd, and get food and a small group of international observers into the church to act as a human shield, discouraging the Israelis from the constant attacks on the people inside. They’d been firing indiscriminately at the church for days, since 26 people had left. The night before they set fire to two bits of the church and someone had been shot by the soldiers that morning. A lot of people were worried the army was planning to storm the church and put a violent end to the siege and that wasn’t going to happen with international observers inside.

We travelled into Bethlehem via backroads to avoid the checkpoints and met up in a car park, ducking our heads when we heard tanks coming. We were briefed on where the tanks, snipers and barbed wire barricades were before going in small groups through the alleyways to the Square. The streets were deserted. The Orthodox Christians had been allowed out to celebrate Easter as a PR exercise but most people were still confined to their homes under curfew. There were burnt out and flattened cars everywhere, splintered doors and windows, bulletholes in the woodwork and broken glass crunching underfoot. Rubbish was piled up in the passageways and graffiti was scrawled in Hebrew across the buildings.

We had our ears plugged with toilet paper for whatever protection it could give us against sound bombs and stun grenades, scarves soaked in anything we could find in case of gas, a bag of food each. We were told if we were shot at, they’d probably be firing over our heads, at the ground or in front of us so under no circumstances should we run or get on the ground. The fear went as we walked into the open square and focussed on the church door and just kept walking as fast as we could.

There were shouts from soldiers but no shots. I was scared I’d get caught on the barbed wire, but momentum carried me straight through it and up to the door. We all clustered round it so the army couldn’t fire into the church and hands reached out from the dark as we passed the food in. The door closed and we all turned away, holding our hands up, heading back out of the square. We were blocked by soldiers so we linked arms and tried to just push our way out but they shoved us all into a cammo-netted corner and kept us there at gunpoint. When they tried to push us into the peace centre we all sat down and they had to carry us in there.

Q2: Is this the first time you have been involved in this sort of activity (human rights work etc.)

I went to Iraq last August to meet people and find out what was going on and to break the sanctions, by taking humanitarian supplies without applying for an export licence from this country. It was a bit different in that it was this country’s laws we were challenging on that occasion, and it was the British and US military who were dropping bombs.

Q3: What did you expect to happen? Were you aware that you may be arrested?

I don’t think I thought we were going to do it. I was really up for it but I couldn’t believe we were going to get away with it, actually get through the siege and right up to the church door and get the food in before they grabbed us. I was aware that we could be arrested and deported, but also that there was a chance we’d be shot at, gassed, or have stun grenades and smoke bombs thrown at us, with a risk of getting hit by shrapnel, and some internationals have been beaten by Israeli soldiers, so I knew there was a physical danger as well as the risk of being arrested.

Having said that, I wasn’t being a big hero, striding in there and risking my life. A group had got right up to the doors of the church a few days earlier but hadn’t managed to get food in, partly because they’d never expected to get that close, so they hadn’t co-ordinated with the people inside to have the doors opened and to shield the door to prevent the soldiers shooting in. They weren’t arrested, so there was a chance we wouldn’t be, but when we succeeded they were pretty cross so they weren’t letting us get away.

Beyond that I just took everything as it came. I escaped from the peace centre where they detained us, by climbing out of the window onto a balcony and swinging myself up on the rafters onto the roof, and sat looking at the stars for a while.

When they said we were going to be deported I was gutted - we were banned for ten years from Israel. We were offered the choice of signing papers accepting deportation or being jailed. We refused to accept Israel’s right to deport us from Palestine, and particularly to deport us for taking humanitarian aid to Palestinians. The siege at the church was illegal under international law - for example, civilians can’t be starved as a means of warfare under the Geneva Conventions.

Q4: What happened when you were arrested and did your treatment differ at all because you were an EC national?

The soldiers were furious when we were detained, saying things like "We were really close to a final solution and you’ve ruined it." It was quite chilling to hear them use those words. We knew there were plans to storm the church and end the siege violently, which was why it was so urgent to get the international team in there. They’d been shooting indiscriminately at the church for days and set two parts on fire the night before and that stopped when the internationals went in. It’s not possible to measure the effect the action had or to quantify the role of the international group inside but there’s no reason to think the indiscriminate shooting would’ve stopped otherwise.

There’s no question our treatment was different because we were foreigners. We knew we would be and that was the reason for putting international observers into the church in the first place. They took two of the US lads away for a couple of hours of questioning but the rest of us were held in the Peace Centre, which ironically was the base for the Israeli occupation of Bethlehem. They tried to persuade us to phone the peace activists inside the church and tell them to come out, saying the Palestinians inside the church wanted them out. Supposedly the Palestinians in the church had asked the negotiators to ask the Israeli soldiers to ask us to ask the activists in the church to leave, which seemed a slightly convoluted way of communicating with someone in the same room as you.

From the ministry of the interior I was taken to a deportation centre near Tel Aviv with Huwaida, a Palestinian-American woman who’s been living in Ramallah for the last two years. We decided to go on hunger strike both in protest at the deportation and in solidarity with the Palestinians being starved at the church and across the West Bank by the curfews. We aimed to be too weak to fly by the time they tried to deport us in three days.

Within the jails our treatment was different. When we arrived at the second jail, shackled together by the ankles, barely able to walk because it was our fourth day of hunger and water strike, the prison authorities wanted to take our photographs. We refused to stand for our photographs and covered our faces. I was pulled off the bench onto the ground and four prison officers were kicking me and stamping on my feet and pulling my hair and poking fingers in my eyes to try and get my head up for the camera. In the end they gave up and left us both lying on the ground and we could hear a woman screaming in the next room. I’ve no idea who she was but it reminded me how lucky we were to be foreigners and gave me new strength.

In the deportation centre there was a Palestinian woman who’d been living in Chicago and she’d come back to visit her mother and sister and was refused entry to the country. People are exiled from the place they were born and from their families.

The Palestinian women in the jail got much harsher treatment than we did. Had we been Palestinians, our hunger strike wouldn’t have been any use whatsoever, which was one of the reasons why it was so important that we do it, because we had so much more leeway and opportunity than the Palestinian women had. Initially we were denied access to our lawyers. The authorities obstructed our consuls, initially refusing to let them into the Ministry of the Interior when we were held there. Our lawyer was locked outside throughout. After a couple of days of hunger and water strike we were allowed to phone the consul.

In jail the guards were always trying to oppress us in petty little ways, like telling me I couldn’t look out of the cell window into the cell opposite at the deportation centre when our mates were in there. Resistance makes you stronger and we knew there was nothing they could do to stop us looking out. In the end I felt really empowered in jail. Every time I refused to let them bully me their power diminished. It was really intense, but I’m glad I did it.

Q5: Do you see your actions in Israel and in other situations (Iraq) etc. as in any way political?

Yes, definitely. I think politics has been taken away from people to a massive extent, to the point that a lot of people say they have no interest in politics, because they feel they have no voice and no power. I think international solidarity work and direct action wherever you are is very much a political thing.

I don’t really separate the political from the human, in that I went to Palestine out of a humanitarian concern for the people there and a desire to do what I could to help, but their situations have been brought about by the political manoeuvrings of our government and British companies. The UN and the major mainstream political bodies either can’t or won’t help to create a solution so it’s left to individuals to work towards grassroots solutions.

Initially it was studying geography and then health science that made me think politically. I did a masters in Exercise and Health Science. A lot of the focus within health promotion is on individual lifestyle choices, but the more I looked into it, the more aware I became of the collective factors - the way town planning actively damages health and, for example, the irony of telling people in Bristol to give up smoking for the sake of their health when they live five or ten miles from a nuclear reactor whose chimney waste blows directly over Bristol one day in five.

Quite a lot of the activists of my generation were politicised by the road protest and environmental direct action movement because it was very real. Something tangible was being destroyed - great tracts of woodland - and we resisted that by putting our bodies in the way, in trees and down tunnels and on bulldozers and in doing so we prevented some road schemes and hugely increased the cost of others, directly hitting the profit motivation for environmental destruction.

Once you get involved, you start to see the links between what appeared to be separate issues: that the reason we have nuclear weapons is essentially the same reason that we have rainforest destruction and private-finance road schemes and prisons and massively wealthy arms dealers and wars. Politics is at the core of everything in our lives - even shopping is political, so while the driving force behind something might be intensely personal, like the decisions to go to Iraq and Palestine, to study law, to be vegan, whatever, the action is still political. Mainstream political bodies can’t bring justice, so it’s up to the people.



Q6: There has been a lot of talk in Europe about apathy amongst voters. Apathetic is not a term I would attach to you. Do you vote regularly or do you see empowerment and change as only coming from the hands-on activity you are engaged in?

I voted Nobody at the last election. Vote Nobody was a campaign we did in Bristol leading up to the general election, the idea being that if Nobody got more votes than the candidate who won, we’d declare Nobody the winner and the people would run Bristol, or Easton - the people couldn’t be worse than the council. One of the councillors for Lawrence Hill ward was living in Ireland while on Bristol City Council and the rest of them may as well be. Very few of them show any real commitment to the people of Bristol.

People got really into the campaign because the point was that it wasn’t voter apathy that stopped people voting, it was antipathy. None of the candidates were worth voting for. There was a lot of humour in it as well, which was unlike everything else on the political scene at the time - the campaign posters said things like "Nobody does it better", "Nobody keeps election promises", "Nobody will save the NHS", "Nobody cares". The opportunities were endless. Nobody did quite well actually. Maybe next time round…

There is always the argument that suffragettes died for my right to vote and people all over the world are still dying for the right to vote, but it’s become an empty gesture. No party in this country is going to make any real steps towards social justice: prisons, hospitals, public transport, infrastructure all now belong to private companies whose priority is profit, not public service and meanwhile the country’s wealth is squandered on subsidising the arms trade and fighting innocent people in other countries. We spend a fortune bombing Iraq and Afghanistan. Every job in the UK arms trade costs the British taxpayer thousands every year in subsidy through the Export Credit Guarantee system, so lives and bodies can be destroyed in other countries while our own kids are denied a decent education.

I think what the suffragettes and others fought for has been stripped of meaning by the politicians and the multinational companies which deny people a say, much more than by people not going through the motions.

Q7: You work internationally. If asked "What right do you have to interfere with the internal activities of a particular country?", what would your reply be?

I think it’s less a right and more a responsibility. The UN, US, UK and so on refused to defend the rights of people in apartheid South Africa, the people of Indonesian-occupied East Timor, the people of West Papua, the list goes on. When NATO stepped in to "help" in the Balkans they poisoned vast tracts of the land with depleted uranium and secured the capitalist interests in the region.

A lot of the problems in Israel and Palestine today might have been avoided if the US and European countries hadn’t refused to help the Jews earlier this century. In Denmark, all the people wore the Star of David to shield the Jews and the Danish Jews were helped to safety in Sweden. The rest of Europe, with the exception of individuals, did little to help. The British rulers of Palestine turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees. Human solidarity is the only solution.

Western politicians and companies and bodies like the World Bank, WTO and IMF consistently interfere in the affairs of other countries, aggressively promoting loans and giving military and other tied aid. The Structural Adjustment Policies imposed on countries to force them to allow aggressive privatisation and free trade globalisation have destroyed the social infrastructure of countries around the world. In the Balkans, those policies stoked the rise in nationalism which led to the fighting which NATO then chose to escalate.

I think we are all part of one another, we are all responsible for each other. I don’t recognise the legitimacy of borders when they’re used to create barriers between people.

Q8: Where do you see the idea of human rights taking us in the next ten years?

I hope for the establishment of the world court, which the US has so vehemently blocked. We have so much international law and it’s more or less meaningless without bodies capable of enforcing it. The US and UK and their allies have committed war crimes in Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan and continue to do so and there’s nothing that can be done to bring them to justice. Powerful countries breach human rights and international law with impunity.

The International Court of Justice, the court of the UN, ruled in 1996 that it could not conceive of a situation in which nuclear weapons could be used lawfully, but it can only give advisory opinions - it has no power to enforce nuclear disarmament. And it doesn’t much matter if the US and Russia have five thousand warheads apiece, each capable of making huge areas uninhabitable, or five hundred. The agreements they’re reaching between themselves are meaningless.

The Milosevic trial illustrates the farce of international human rights protection. NATO is basically an occupying force in the Balkans now, having killed and poisoned far more people, innocent civilians, than the Serbs ever did, yet the tribunal refuses to even investigate NATO war crimes. If we’re going to condemn the violence of one side - as I think we have to - then we have to apply the same standards to the other side. If it’s not OK for people to kill innocent American citizens, it’s equally wrong for Americans to sit in the Pentagon killing innocent civilians elsewhere in the world. If it’s wrong for suicide bombers to blow up innocent Israelis it’s wrong as well for Israeli soldiers to kill innocent Palestinian civilians. The US and UK are no more to be trusted with nuclear weapons than any of the countries they deem "rogues".

So what I hope for is an end to the double standard, and that’s a matter of public consciousness, but it’s not going to come from the mass media with all its agendas. The internet is an important tool as is independent publishing and street theatre and conversation and any means of communication we have.

There were well over a thousand activists from all over the world in Palestine during the Israeli occupation of West Bank towns, and that’s been ongoing for a long time. People are being inspired by one another, realising that human rights are something we can all be involved with and not the exclusive preserve of governments and big NGOs. There are so many people who have inspired me through their actions and their belief in non-violent solutions and the power of people to act.

Partly for me it was a question of who I wanted to identify with. Would I have been a suffragette, demanding my rights as a citizen, or a straight-laced respectable woman, not daring to say, or even believe, that I was an equal human being? Would I be with Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins or would I be at home waiting for someone to sort it all out? It’s not a matter of being a hero or making a name, but it’s about delving into yourself, finding out what you can do, seeing how strong you can be, facing up to the fears rather than living by them.

I suppose this is where I’d like to see human rights going rather than the way I foresee it going, but if people refused to accept injustice, it couldn’t happen. Unfortunately there’s a lot of 1984-style newspeak about human rights: the Human Rights Act as passed in this country is largely placebo but people are often unaware of the human rights abuses that go on over here because the ones we see abroad are just more dramatic and visible.

Q9: There is a plethora of often conflicting information circulating - particularly on the web - about global conspiracy, violations of human rights, media fabrication etc. etc. In your experience, how do you know you are on the "right" side? Is there a "right" side? And where human rights are concerned, does it matter?

When we were in detention after the action at the church in Bethlehem we met a lot of Israelis - prison guards, soldiers, etc, and so many times I was asked "Why don’t you bring Israel humanitarian aid? Why do you bring it to the Palestinians?" I said if Israeli civilians needed aid which I was realistically able to give, I’d give it. I don’t think I’m on a side, beyond opposing injustice. Palestinian people face constant oppression from Israel - they’re forced to cross Israeli checkpoints to go from home to work and back and they’re detained and humiliated and searched and sometimes made to strip and often physically assaulted and beaten. People are prevented from getting medical treatment.

During the occupation of Nablus a good friend of mine was working with the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, travelling in ambulances and with medical teams. At a checkpoint, soldiers stopped her party of six Palestinian nurses and some international observers. They decided to allow the internationals to continue but to arrest the Palestinians. The group refused to allow the nurses to be taken, physically holding on to them. After a while, the non-violent resistance worked and the whole group was allowed to go.

I don’t support suicide bombers, but I know that violent invasions and the killing of innocent Palestinians isn’t going to stop suicide bombings. So Israel invades West Bank towns, so the bombings escalate, so the state violence escalates and so on: where does it end? IRA membership got a massive boost after Bloody Sunday. Bullying has never brought peace.

Likewise in Iraq, I don’t support the government but I do support the people. We met a doctor over there with his fourteen-year-old son. "One day," he said, "your children will have to explain this to ours." It’s true. We’re lining up a horrendous legacy of violence for our children and grandchildren and sooner or later, someone’s going to have to say enough and make peace.

I know it sounds a bit cheesy, but I’m not on the side of any national group or religion or political doctrine, I’m just for non-violence and peace and I believe that international solidarity and direct action are the only ways that’s going to be achieved.